jueves, 21 de marzo de 2013

Improve your listening Skills II


Watch the video again.





http://youtu.be/ssuiqtreiB

ghttp://youtu.be/ssuiqtreiBg




  1. What are minimal pairs and what makes them so difficult?
  2. What is recommended about: 
  • contractions?
  • weak forms?
  • phonetic links?


6 comentarios:

  1. 1.What are minimal pairs and what makes them so difficult?

    Minimal pairs are words that have same consonants but differents vowels. for example
    Mad-Mud
    Men-Main
    Hurt-Heart

    There are many words where the consonants are exactly the same and by changing the vowel sound the meaning changes and when this vowel sounds are very similar and specially if one or the other does not exist in your own language it can make quite a challange to understand a native speaker.

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  3. 2.3 What is recommended about phonetic links?
    The best way to familiarize yourself with the speech patterns is transcribing audio files.

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  4. It's reccomendable to use contractions as much as possible to make it easier to understand and get used to saying and hearing them. However you should not use them in formal writing.

    "I'll" sounds unforced, relaxed...
    "I will" sounds like i am trying to make a point

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  5. Summary of the video, there are several reasons that makes us hard to understand English. The video talks of several reasons and puts them in 3 categories: - understand what makes native speakers hard to understand. -Improve our own pronunciation. -Learn primarily with our ears rather than with our eyes.
    For the first case the video shows some reasons shorten and link sounds,contractions, weak words and phonetic links. In the second case the tips for improving the pronunciation are first to take care of words that have same spelling, same sound and to watch the word stress. Finally for the thirds case the best advice that they give us is that what we see is not what they say, this means that we have to listen rather than to learn by reading because if we just read, we just get an idea of how does a word should be spelled, but when we hear it we learn how a word is spelled correctly.

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