Thanks a lot for your suggestions. The whole text to which this sentence belongs is, in my opinion, written in a very poor style, but this sentence really takes the biscuit, to the point of making it almost unintelligible. However, I though it

Hi, I've found a difficult sentence in a text I must translate. Apparently, is is not a typo, but I cannot quite understand what it means. The text has just described how oxen could be used to measure the price of articles, and

If you have such major problems, then maybe you could start with an accent reduction course. I'll look it up. I'd never heard of them. I'm more interested in British English, so I'll google a bit. Thanks!

Instead of worrying about perceptions (auditory phonetics), try to produce variations (articulatory phonetics): how to produce a fronted /u:/ ? That seems a very good idea. I think I might try to change from one vowel to the other by

Thanks a lot. In my five-vowel world, just telling / Ʊ / from /u:/ would be a success, so I'm afraid I'm not quite prepared to perceive those differences yet .

Yes, I thought it might be so. But, as I said before, I haven't got a steady access to the internet, so for me it's difficult to spend time listening to all those clips, and I thought that the easiest way, at least to begin with, would be

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

Hi everybody, First, my apologies for not answering before (apologizing seems to be a habit with me the moment I write in this forum! Big Smile" src="http://www.englishforums.com/emoticons/emotion-2.gif"

I would like to know whether the chemical elements in formulas are read as syllables or letter by letter. I must write "SiO2 film" with the indefinite article, and I don't know whether it must be "a" (in case the formula is

But, probably the best of all...the Holy Bible of Modernism - Ulysses - James Joyce I've been thinking of reading this book for a long time. My mother loves it, and is always telling me I should read it, but I'm afraid it might be