Warm-up: You can't apply logic to the English language

Now that you know the sounds of English you may think that you're ready to go. Unfortunately, this is far from being true. You can't apply logic to the English language.

 

More often than not, ESL students tell us that understanding 'real' English is extremely hard for them while they find it pretty easy to get the meaning of the same sentence if it's written. There's an explanation for this, of course: when we read, we see the beginning and the end of every words but in spoken English, the discourse is a continuous stream of sounds and the borderlines between words are not so clear. In addition, some words are unstressed (you can barely hear them) and some sounds are assimilated together.

In the past, teaching pronunciation involved basically identifying and practising the sounds of which a language is composed but we know that there are other aspects, which may be more important in terms of overall intelligibility: connected speech, weak and strong forms.

So, have you been able to work out the meaning of the cartoon? If you haven't, watch the explanation by Hancock McDonald in following video:

Last modified: Tuesday, 17 April 2018, 8:13 PM