>> My goodness, British accents must be so different... and strange too! I heard some that seemed German or another language, not English! << Well, I think it's simply because there are so many of them, and they are very different, as

>> I think it IS restricted to those cases. I pronounce "beer" the same way I pronounce "here", "near"... the vowel as in "beet", not as in "bit". << Well, there is of course the tense-lax neutralization thing going on, but I would

>> Otherwise word pairs like fool and full or pool and pull would be pronounced virtually the same. << Full and fool are merged in parts of Pennsylvania and Indiana. >> In the case of the R's, the effect is not restricted to

No. In the dialect here, "when" is always pronounced as by most speakers. I'm not sure why, though, because we do not have the pin-pen merger. Even in careful speech, I would never say for "when", which sounds distinctly off to me. In other areas

>> For example, "I'll" can become /aɪl/ or /aəl/, instead of /ail/. Does that only happen when am L sould follows, << Yeah, it seems common to occasionally monophthongize the /aI/ in "I'll" and "while" in all dialects of North American

>> Thank you. So that only happens when an L sound (He'll, We'll) or R sound (We're) follows, right? That means "He's" is always "heez", "We'd" is always "weed"... right? << Indeed.

I lax the /i/ before /l/ in those words.

Um, it depends on the level of English being spoken, the subject matter, and a number of factors. If the film uses very poetic language, I doubt that Spaniards or Catalans at a pre-intermediate level would understand the film at all.

Go to http://books.google.com/ Search for TOEFL Test Strategies by Eli Hinkel Select Contents-> "Practice for Li..."

In North American English, "ought" is very rarely used. In fact, I myself have never used it. I use "should", or construct the sentence differently to avoid using "ought".