A mouthful of English

Go is the most common verb of movement in English. Most of us spend the whole day going places – we go to school, we go to the cinema, and we go to other countries, for example. We can go home on foot , go to the shops by car , or go to work by bike . Instead of go , however, we often use other verbs that describe how the movement happens. So, I may walk home, drive to the shops, or cycle to work. Some of these verbs of movement can take an object – if I walk the children to school , I accompany them on foot. Similarly, I can walk my dog (when I take it out for a walk) or drive somebody to the airport (if I give them a lift to the airport in my car).

You might have seen some English words written differently in different contexts. English is spoken all over the world, which explains the existence of many varieties with their own characteristic features – like the differences in spelling found between British and American English. The u in words like colour, flavour, and neighbour , for example, disappears in American English – where we find color, flavor, and neighbor . The American spelling tends to be simpler, somehow closer to the way words are pronounced. This can be noticed if we compare British metre, programme, aesthetic, and travelling with American meter, program, esthetic, and traveling . It’s OK to spell either way, as both varieties are correct. However, it’s usually advisable to show consistency using one or the other in the same piece of writing.

The words up and down often indicate direction, usually following a verb of movement like go or come – the temperature goes up or down , and p rices usually go up . But up and down are used with many other verbs – you can look up or look down , for example. You can walk up a street , run up the stairs , or drive down a hill . And they say that Santa Claus climbs down chimneys on Christmas Eve. English often uses a verb expressing how somebody moves ( walk, run, drive ), and a word like up or down to show direction. A similar meaning is found in phrasal verbs like get up , stand up , sit down and lie down . Sometimes, the verb takes an object. You may put a poster up on the wall, or you may take it down . When getting dressed, you pull your socks up . If you can't hear the radio properly, you turn it up . If you want to write you can pick up a pencil, and when you finish you put it down .

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...

Get is a very common verb in English, and it is used in several structures that have different meanings. When followed by an adjective, get often means ‘become’, or ‘start to be’. If you get angry you become angry, and if you get sick you start to be sick. The same meaning is expressed when get is followed by a past participle like dressed or lost : when you put on clothes you get dressed ; if you travel without a map, you might get lost – or become lost. These adjectives and participles are also found after be . The difference is that get expresses a change, whereas be describes a state: They got married in 2005, but they got divorced in 2010. They were married for five years. It ’s getting dark. It is dark. This is also the difference between be used to and get used to : I live in Scotland, so I am used to the rain. When I moved to Britain, I got used to driving on the left. (I wasn’t used to it before; I became used to it in Britain...