A mouthful of English

Can you distinguish the words desert and dessert clearly when you say them? Which one is food? Which one refers to an area of land? Part of the secret is stressing the correct syllable. A de sert – stressed on the first syllable – is a desolate area of land with little or no vegetation. A de ssert – stressed on the second syllable – is a sweet course eaten at the end of a meal. To practise, use both words in the same sentence: Ice cream is the perfect dessert for the desert!

It may be difficult at first to hear the different vowel sounds in chip and cheap . As a result, some English learners may pronounce both words exactly in the same way. This and these – or it and eat – are often confused for the same reason. Although context usually helps the listener understand what we mean, getting these sounds right will make things a lot easier. When dealing with pronunciation, it's useful to use a specific symbol to identify each sound. The vowel in cheap , these and eat – represented by /i:/ – is a bit longer, and the lips are spread when pronouncing it – just like when you smile or when you say cheese . The sound in chip , this and it , represented by /ɪ/, is shorter and a bit closer to /e/. The longer vowel /i:/ is often spelt with a combination of two letters – as in please , meet , or key . But not always – you can find this sound in me and she , for example. Besides, /ɪ/ may also be spelt in various ways – busy , minute . So when learnin...

Can you say flower and flour correctly? Believe it or not, they both sound the same in English. But since they have different spellings, it may be difficult to believe their pronunciations are identical. That's why learners often mispronounce one of them. Flour and flower are homophones - words that look different but are pronounced in the same way. There are a lot of homophones in English, and many of them are very common words. Here are some examples. Do you think you can find a word that sounds exactly the same as each of the following? You'll find the answers below - you just have to match them in the correct order.

Some English verbs have irregular forms that many of us learn using irregular verbs lists. While this may be helpful sometimes, it often means we focus too much on the spelling instead of learning the right pronunciation. Speakers of some languages find it difficult to distinguish the different forms of verbs like drink, sing, and swim , for example. The simple past forms drank , sang , and swam are pronounced with the vowel sound /æ/. On the other hand, the past participles drunk , sung , and swum are pronounced with the sound / ᴧ /. Notice that the letters 'a' and 'u' often represent the sounds /æ/ and / ᴧ / respectively. The difference between words like cat and cut , or hat and hut , is the same we find in some irregular verbs where the past form is spelled with 'a' and the past participle is spelled with 'u'. Knowing this may also help us with other irregular verbs. The three forms of cut ( cut - cut - cut ) are all said /k ᴧ t/, and...

Many of the unstressed syllables in English words have the same vowel sound – the one called schwa . In a pple and com fortable , for instance, all syllables except the stressed ones (in bold) contain / ə /. This is true of isolated words, and also of many of the unstressed syllables people pronounce when speaking in English. In connected speech, words that carry important information (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) tend to be heard quite clearly. Other words, like articles, prepositions, or auxiliary verbs, are usually unstressed and pronounced with a reduced vowel – often a schwa. This makes them difficult to hear. The word of , for example, has a strong pronunciation, used when it is stressed in a sentence, and a weak pronunciation, which is the most common one because the word is normally unstressed. Both pronunciations appear in dictionaries. Sometimes we expect words to be pronounced in a certain way, and when they aren’t, we don’t understand. Not ever...

The stressed syllables in ta ble, pen cil, fa mous, and to day are pronounced correctly by most learners . When it comes to the unstressed syllables, however, some find it difficult to believe that they all contain the same vowel – represented by / ə / in the transcriptions /'te І b ə l/, /'pens ə l/, /'fe І m ə s/, and /t ə 'de І /. The most common vowel sound in English is called schwa , and knowing about it may help improve both pronunciation and understanding of spoken English. It is an unstressed central vowel, often described as weak, short, and neutral. We hear it all the time, although the spelling of English doesn’t help us know where it is. For example, not all the vowels in ba na na and pas ta sound the same – we say /b ə' n ɑ :n ə / and / ' p ɑ :st ə /. Schwa never occurs in stressed syllables, but it is very frequently found in unstressed ones, no matter what letters are used in writing. Many pronunciation mistakes we make...

In English it is easy to find words with different spellings that sound exactly the same, like son and sun or no and know . On the other hand, some words are pronounced differently although they share the same spelling. This is not so frequent, but it can be a bit more puzzling. Bow sounds /b əʊ / when you use it to play the violin, or when you shoot an arrow with it. Just like the bow in rainbow . If you bend your head as a sign of respect, however, you bow – but it sounds /ba ʊ /. Another example is the verb read , pronounced /ri:d/ in the infinitive and in the simple present, but /red/ in the simple past and in the past partic iple.     The more English you know, the easier it becomes to predict pronunciation when you see a new word written. But spelling doesn’t always help, so I prefer to trust a good dictionary instead.

Homophones are words that sound the same, even though they sometimes have different spellings. Both flower and flour are pronounced /fla ʊə r /. Sea and see both sound /si:/. I and eye don’t have a single letter in common, but we pronounce them in the same way exactly: /a ɪ /. And the list is not short – one/won , no/know , our/hour , son/sun , and blue/blew are just some everyday examples.   It seems that English spelling doesn’t always help us predict pronunciation. This means we should listen to words when we look them up, to make sure we learn how to say them properly. Fortunately, online dictionaries now make this a lot easier. It is also important to be careful when writing, as homophones may be the cause of spelling mistakes – there , their , and they’re might sound the same, but they have different meanings. On the bright side, homophones allow us to play with language. We make plenty of puns and jokes based on wordplay: ‘Why is six afraid of seven?...