Say the place name: choose the spoken form
Five sentences with a British place name in each; pick the respelling local speakers actually use.
Pronunciation
Pronunciation here is not about losing your accent. It is about the small differences that change meaning or make listeners work harder: endings that are written one way but spoken in several, and the way moving the stress inside a word can turn it into a different part of speech. Useful if people ask you to repeat yourself when your grammar was fine. The material sits at A2 and B1, and it is short - listen, then say it aloud.
Learned words whose spelling hides the way they are said
Ten educated words, most of them from Greek and French, that kept spellings the ordinary rules cannot read, each with a plain respelling.
British place names that are not said the way they are written
Ten British place names whose spelling is centuries out of date, with the local pronunciation and the three patterns that explain most of them.
Question tags: the tune decides whether you are asking or checking
The same question tag can check or genuinely ask, and only the tune of the voice tells the listener which.
Find the word that takes the beat when a sentence corrects an idea
Find the word that carries the strongest beat when a sentence rejects one idea and replaces it with another.
The beat of the sentence: which words carry it and which almost vanish
Content words carry the rhythm of spoken English; the grammar words between them shrink to fit.
Why you cannot hear where one word ends and the next begins
How fluent speech runs words together, and the patterns that let you hear the joins.
The word changes if you drop the last sound: complete each sentence
Two words that differ only in their final sound: say both and choose the one the sentence needs.
The consonant at the end of a word carries the grammar
Plural, past and third person all live in the final consonant, so dropping it drops the grammar.
Five written vowels, roughly twenty spoken ones: why spelling misleads
Five written vowels stand for roughly twenty spoken sounds; this chart shows which letter gives which.
Which syllable carries the beat, and what makes it move
Which syllable carries the beat in longer words, and the endings that make the beat move.
One sound apart: choosing the word the sentence needs
Each answer sits one consonant away from a rival word; pick the one that fits the sentence.
Two sounds from one spelling, and the wrong ones learners reach for
One pair of letters spells two different consonants, and every substitute learners reach for is already a real word.
The letters that are spelled but never spoken
The letters that are written but never spoken, grouped into the small number of patterns they follow.
Physically relaxed, or free from worry
One adjective with a physical sense and a mental sense, and a pronunciation that drops a syllable.
Pronunciation of the regular past ending: three sounds, one rule
The regular past tense ending is pronounced three ways in English. One question about the sound before it decides every verb, so there is nothing to memorise.
When the stress moves, the meaning changes
How moving the stress from one syllable to the other turns a thing into an action in dozens of common word pairs.
Which of the three ending sounds do you hear
Say each past verb aloud and identify which of the three ending sounds you hear.
Three different sounds for one written ending
One written past ending, three spoken sounds - and the simple rule your mouth already wants to follow.