I've been away from this forum for a while, and meantime I've enrolled for a five-year (gulp!) degree in English (which includes grammar, literature, linguistics, and so on) at a distance university. Right now I'm starting to delve

1. Have you ever thought about retaining some aspects of your first language Generally speaking, no, because English is a separate language. Of course it's easy to make mistakes because of the influence of my native language, but as I said, I

hi Ben, Polish phonology is rather adventurous, that's right. But it does not make English any simplier. It is just that with some languages you have to be able to produce special sounds and train your hearing to understand them (e.g. Polish,

Two years too late, the correct way to use the idiom is "all of a sudden." American and British use of quotations is also different. Americans are taught for the most part that a period (full-stop) is used inside the quote, unless used

Hi Kooyeen I have never concentrated on learning any particular variety of English because it has always been my objective to acquire as good a command of the languagae as possible. Limiting my efforts to just one variety would constitute a

As per the dictionary, "before" is pronounced as / b -fôr/ and "behind" is pronounced as / b -h nd/ (in AmE and BrE). But couple of times, I've heard my European friends say "ba-fore" and "ba-hind". And

You are also right on me not being a native speaker. If I may ask, how did you find out? I cheated. I didn't hear it, I read it. Anyway, as I said, if I hadn't known that, I would not have thought you were a non-native speaker of English,

Language teachers, could you tell us about some ways in which you are providing "learners with the tools to cope with 'real-life' communication ..."? Here in my country, they don't. And I heard it's so in most other

I'm a high school junior, so i'll be talking from classroom experiences.  I'm in regular english and have completed 3 years of spanish. No English is not a phonetic language.  Languages like Italian and Spanish have only one way of