American-English was British-English, except that it was altered significantly by all of the various influences (immigrants/languages from other countries) that learned to speak it in America. Everyone in the UK knows how to communicate in English

Pter - the pronunciation of words depends heavily on a person's dialect. k in asked - variable pronunciation - I say - askt (some dialects say "axt") t in acts, ducts, students - I pronounce the "t", but very muted. l in

I noticed that this question is tagged as unanswered. Received pronunciation is so named because it was 'received by', i.e. taught to public school pupils and RADA pupils. ( RADA = Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts ). You can hear example in

I remember at school there was a combined volume of "Billy Liar" and "The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner" ubiquitous to the "English Rooms". I thought the latter to be the better story, better written; but

David schrieb: David schrieb: I find the last sentence incomprehensible, if ... could interpret for those of us who don't come Yorkshire. Well, even the trolling "blue sow" managed to pick out that I'd made a transposition error

Don Myers wrote on 20 Nov 2004: Teachers tell students to practice reading. Students then run across many words they've never heard pronounced. As they see the ... quickly pick out the word in a list be helpful even though there is no meaning

Some of it could be physiological though. I once knew a person who could not distinguish between the words pen and pin. This was an educated person who read quite a lot. Only one? Many of us have encountered the pen/pin merger. When I was in

Afrikaans only became an official language in the 1920s, and trek entered English long before that. Of course, but it didn't come from the Dutch spoken by academicians in the Netherlands; it came from the Dutch spoken by farmers in South

Are you near a large city? Look in the yellow pages of the phone book under "Speech therapy", "Public speaking" ... specialize in these things, working with folks who stutter, or who have speech impediments, or who have a

When people write to me addressing me as "Graham", I usually reply with "who?" That might work for the spoken name, too. Have you tried that on US speakers that call you "Gram"? Or is that pronunciation only used when