The Queen's English

Our principal teacher and director is now in Chile. We have a brand new student who is learning Spanish through immersive tuition. We can do the same for English.

Didly squat - definition?

Well, context is everything.

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world

After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud, and we’ll be honest with you, we struggled with parts of it.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like co**se, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

You’ve been reading “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité, written nearly 100 years ago in 1922, designed to demonstrate the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6smi2wrGD40&feature=youtu.be

Sketch Grammar N**i - THAT MITCHELL AND WEBB LOOK David Mitchell en Robert Webb vormen een hilarisch duo in deze sketch-serie bekend van de BBC. That Mitchell and Webb Look werd bekroond met een BAFTA Award ...

King Richard III is being reburied today.

From Shakespeare's Richard III, 1594:

CATESBY:
Rescue, my Lord of Norfolk, rescue, rescue!
The king enacts more wonders than a man,
Daring an opposite to every danger:
His horse is slain, and all on foot he fights,
Seeking for Richmond in the throat of death.
Rescue, fair lord, or else the day is lost!

KING RICHARD III:
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

CATESBY:
Withdraw, my lord; I'll help you to a horse.

Happy New Year everyone.

How well do you know the origins of English words? - Medievalists.net Can you tell which word derives from the English of Anglo-Saxon times, and which word came from French?

http://www.iflscience.com/brain/new-study-reveals-most-influential-languages

New Study Reveals Most Influential Languages | IFLScience What makes a language important on a global scale? Is it the oldest? The one spoken by the most people? What about the one that has the greatest ability to reach other people by being translated? A multidisciplinary research team has examined the languages of the world and categorized them on how wi…

We are promoting this book, an anthology of cyberpunk and sci-fi stories by famous and not so famous authors. You can download it from Amazon here http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OECR7WO

"English does not borrow from other languages—it mugs them in an alley and goes through their pockets for loose vocabulary." - James Davis Nicholl

There are many phrasal verbs that use the verb "get." Check out this American English at State graphic to learn five of them. How many of these are new to you? What other phrasal verbs that use "get" do you know?

http://youtu.be/H3r9bOkYW9s

History of English (combined) Free learning from The Open University http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/english-language --- A look at the history of the English lan...

LOL jajaja

Videos are a good way of learning english.....

Meltdown America - Exclusive World Premiere Documentary Film The Harrowing Stories of Three People Who Survived Economic and Political Collapse in Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia, and Argentina…

Brit Humour: 30 Things British People Say Vs What They Actually Mean - Graphic Related

English Grammar in Use: Sample

http://britanniaenglishlanguagecentre.blogspot.com/2014/07/videos-about-learning-english.html

LearnEnglish@BritanniEnglishLanguageCenter: Videos about Learning English Business English * English for Specific Purposes * General English * Translations * Teacher Training * Asistencia con Tésis/monografias

Contractions. Everyone has messed up a contraction at one time or another (definitely more than once). Sometimes these errors are made because of lack of understanding, but most of the time they are typos. Whatever the reason for your mistakes, we’ve got you covered.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/

TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC Our monthly lesson for June focuses on the Fifa World Cup in Brazil and uses activities from the British Council's Premier Skills English website to combine the themes of football and motivation.

We hope to have premises in Santiago by December.

So you want to learn English? Maybe you just want to improve your English? Here's how...read out loud.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ElementaryPodcastSeriesAll

Elementary Podcast | All Series LearnEnglish Elementary Podcast site is a way for you to practise your English language listening skills.

http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=15123505

ESL Podcast 998 – Meeting a New Neighbor

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/audioconsole/?stream=live

BBC World Service - Multimedia

http://www.gutenberg.de/english/erfindu2.htm

Die Erfindung Gutenbergs - vor Gutenberg Soon the question of reproducing the characters also arose. Chinese abrasions and simple printing of stone inscriptions on paper are considered to be early forms of printing. They enabled a direct spreading of texts. In the 2nd century AD, at about the same time when in the western world the Roman e…

Do you feel like researching how printing came to be? Visit---->http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/printpress.htm

History of the Printing Press - Invention of the Printing Press Fascinating facts about the invention of the Printing Press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440.