10 English words that are difficult to pronounce When you learn a foreign language, there are always certain sounds that are a challenge to get right and certain words that you must struggle to get your tongue around. With English, the erratic spelling system means that even if you have no trouble with the sounds themselves, you may often mispronounce words anyway. To help you out with some of the trickier and more readily-confused ones, here are 10 English words that are difficult to pronounce for learners and some tips for getting them right. (1) Vegetable /ˈvɛdʒ tə bəl/ and comfortable /ˈkʌmf tə bəl/. Neither of these words has anything do with tables. (2) Squirrel /ˈskwɪrəl/. (3) Says /sɛz/. (4) Leicester /ˈlɛstər/. (5) Rural /ˈrʊər(ə)l/. (6) Culture /ˈkʌltʃə/. The literature features a mixture of picture features on the nature of the nature-nurture venture.Manufactured dentures are a torture for this creature.When it comes to sculpture he’s a culture-vulture. (7) Law /lɔː/. (9) Recipe /ˈrɛsɪpi/ and receipt /rɪˈsiːt/.
Free English Test | Kaplan International Test your English by taking our professionally created free English test. The test only takes 20 minutes and will assess your level of English, from beginner to proficient. Finding your English level will help you choose which of our courses is best suited for your needs. You can also discover where you are strongest, and areas that you would like to focus on when you start studying. How the test breaks down: Grammar & Vocabulary 30 questions (about 9 minutes) Listening comprehension 15 questions (about 7 minutes) Reading comprehension 5 questions (about 4 minutes) Once you have finished the test, you will receive detailed results of how you did Take the test whenever you want, from your phone, tablet, or computer The test is designed by highly qualified language experts, and will give you a good idea of your current English level A separate test will be conducted when you arrive at your Kaplan school, which will help place you in a class with students of a similar ability
Welcome to the English for Uni Website! | English for Uni Welcome to the English for Uni website! This free website is for teachers and learners of English as an additional language, from intermediate levels upwards (i.e. approximately IELTS 6 and above). The site aims to make difficult grammar and academic writing concepts easier to understand. On this site you can learn more about: There is also information for speakers and learners of Japanese, Chinese, French and Indonesian. All the sections of this website have video stories, explanations and exercises. All the videos have captions that you can view on YouTube. You may also like to view the glossary of grammar terms and other useful websites for help.
Exam English - Free Practice for IELTS,the TOEFL® and TOEIC® tests and the Cambridge English exams 10 Best Grammar Resources for Teachers - Grammarly Blog Every day is a grammar day for teachers, but the whole world is invited to celebrate morphology and syntax on the fourth of March—National Grammar Day. Everyone loves a party, but how can you motivate students to embrace good grammar the other 364 days of the year? These ten grammar resources might be just what you need. 1 Visual Aids If students visualize how grammar works, they will be able to understand sentence structure. 2 Online Courses According to its website, the Grammar Challenger helps students “master fifty of the trickiest . . . grammar, punctuation, and word usage” concepts. 3 Interactive Whiteboard Activities Interactive whiteboards project your computer screen on a dry-erase whiteboard. 4 Games What if students could learn and play at the same time? 5 Lesson Plans If you are looking for an effective way to teach a grammar point, other teachers are happy to share what works for them. 6 Gap-Fill Activities Did you ever do Mad Libs? 10 Worksheets Practice makes perfect!
People Who Have the Worst Jobs Ever (42 pictures) | Memolition if( aicp_can_see_ads() ) { $adCode = ' '; return $adCode; } else { return ' Pictures People Who Have the Worst Jobs Ever (42 pictures) by memolition · There are days when we all feel like we have the worst job in the world. Watch this gallery to appreciate your own job. Photo Gallery Tags: funlifepeopleworld Videos Death Valley Dreamlapse How Shakespearean are you? The words of Shakespeare are still held, nearly 400 years after his death, to be some of the most poetic ever written and his influence on modern English is indisputable. Contributions such as pound of flesh (Merchant of Venice) and green-eyed monster (Othello) are fairly well-known, but did you know that he was the first person to use the adjectives misplaced (from King Lear) or neighbouring (Henry IV, Part 1); or the adverbs obscenely (Love’s Labour’s Lost) or out of work (Henry V)? These days we often hear accusations of the English language having been dumbed down, so it is interesting to compare English now to that used by Shakespeare. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are now more standardized than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but can English today hold a candle to the Bard of Avon’s work? Enter some English text in the box below and click the button. Shakespeare feature loading, please wait…
How Dylan Thomas got playful with English grammar Actor and artistic director Guy Masterson says the famous Welsh poet didn’t so much defy the rules of grammar as stretch them. Guy will be presenting at the next British Council seminar, live-streamed from London on 23 October 2014 as part of the Dylan Thomas Centenary Celebration. It is a joy for me as an actor to speak great words, be it a play, prose or poetry. More to the point, it is an intellectual and emotional challenge to get one’s interpretative jaws around great words and then bring them to life in an meaningful and memorable way. One has to believe, with great writers such as Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), that they intended their words to be spoken out loud and not merely read. But what makes Dylan Thomas so wonderful, a poet of some of the greatest wordplay in the English language and among the finest of the twentieth century? I should state here that I am not an expert in grammar. To Begin At The Beginning It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and Bible black.
Hip hop vocabulary compared between artists Matt Daniels compared rappers’ vocabularies to find out who knows the most words. Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake. As two points of reference, Daniels also counted the number of unique words in the first 5,000 used words from seven of Shakespeare’s works and the number of uniques from the first 35,000 words of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. I’m not sure how much stock I would put into these literary comparisons though, because this is purely a keyword count. That said, although there could be similar issues within the rapper comparisons, I bet the counts are more comparable.
Why is English so weirdly different from other langu... English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. More weirdness? Why is our language so eccentric? English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Crucially, their languages were quite unlike English. At this date there is no documented language on earth beyond Celtic and English that uses do in just this way.
Everyone Speaks Text Message Illustration by The Heads of State Illustration by The Heads of State How do you spell “N'Ko” in N'Ko? For years, the Web’s lingua franca was English. Speakers of French, Hindi and Urdu, Arabic, Chinese and Russian chafed at the advantage the Internet gave not only American pop culture but also its language. For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has become a lifeline. When Traore was born, N’Ko had already been in use for several years. And yet, N’Ko was invented to allow Mande speakers like Traore to read and write in the languages they spoke at home. At the time, Guinea had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, and Kante managed to have two typewriters made in Eastern Europe with N’Ko letters. Designed as a language for the common man, N’Ko seemed destined to remain a code used by an elite. Heritage languages like N’Ko are taking on new life thanks to technology.
Why Do Americans and Brits Have Different Accents? | When Did American and British Accents Diverge? | English Pronunciation In 1776, whether you were declaring America independent from the crown or swearing your loyalty to King George III, your pronunciation would have been much the same. At that time, American and British accents hadn't yet diverged. What's surprising, though, is that Hollywood costume dramas get it all wrong: The Patriots and the Redcoats spoke with accents that were much closer to the contemporary American accent than to the Queen's English. It is the standard British accent that has drastically changed in the past two centuries, while the typical American accent has changed only subtly. Traditional English, whether spoken in the British Isles or the American colonies, was largely "rhotic." Rhotic speakers pronounce the "R" sound in such words as "hard" and "winter," while non-rhotic speakers do not. It was around the time of the American Revolution that non-rhotic speech came into use among the upper class in southern England, in and around London.