Saturday, Nov 26, 2011 4:53 am
This contrast is between a short rounded vowel and an unrounded diphthong. The starting position of the tongue in the mouth is fairly close. Many languages (and indeed many accents of English other than RP) have no diphthong corresponding to /əʊ/ and will substitute a monophthong [o] which will be heard as /ɒ/ or /ɔ/, and the spelling is likely to encourage this. All this makes this a recognised problem for speakers of Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Swahili, and probably for many other learners too.
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Sunday, Nov 20, 2011 11:25 am
The 'oo' as in 'boo' vowel sound. To make this sound, the back part of the tongue stretches up towards the soft palate, oo, oo. The front part of the tongue remains down, lightly touching, or just behind, the bottom front teeth, oo. And I'm sure you can see the lips round, oo, into a very tight circle for this sound, oo, boo.
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Tuesday, Nov 15, 2011 11:04 am
One of the best ways to learn English is to get yourself out there, by throwing yourself in the deep end of a culture. Why not put your the new skills you've learned through our online English lessons to the test by traveling to an English speaking country, but before you do - check the latest travel news.
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Sunday, Nov 13, 2011 12:30 pm
The /i/ vowel is typically spelled with
, , (gene), (litre), or (piece, wield), and occurs in the letter names E and V. There are many other irregular spellings not found in this list such as (people). The /ɪ/ vowel is normally in a monosyllable or before a doubled consonant, and is often in an unstressed inflection (rushes, wanted) or .
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Saturday, Nov 12, 2011 1:00 pm
There are hardly any unusual spellings of the contrasted vowels in this list, with /æ/ always spelled with 'a' and /e/ with
except for in said and the letter names L, M, N and X. The sounds themselves are both short and fairly close in tongue position, setting problems for learners and even occasionally for native speakers.
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