The greatest threat to the future of humankind has been revealed. It is quiche. Again. You remember  the social threats of quiche, don’t you? In the 1980s, “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” was a satirical book about masculinity and what makes a real man easily identifiable was that he didn’t eat girly foods like quiche. Manly men ate red meat. Most of those manly beef-eaters are now probably dead, but that is another story. “Real men don’t eat quiche” was a cultural truism at the time and it was easy to identify the wimpy, effeminate, maybe-gay men like actor Alan Alda and talk show host Phil Donahue, and any man who was sensitive and kind. They were the men who ate quiche. In the 2000s they were metrosexuals. Who knows where they are hiding today.

I have a handmade sign in my office that I picked up off the floor at a professional wrestling match  from the same time period. I was studying wrestling and the Wild Samoans were a fascinating team: big burly guys who were supposedly semi-primitive fellows from Samoa. Not under any circumstances were they guys you would want to cross. The discarded fan’s sign read, “Samoans  eat quiche.” It was the ultimate insult of the time  and I hope the guy ran after he waved that sign.

So, when I heard in the new movie 2012 that quiche was once again the threat that this time would cause the earth to upheave and humans to build new arks complete with giraffes and rich Middle Easterners, I should not have been surprised. But of all the wacky things that this wacky movie pronounces, it is the renewal of the fear of quiche (and bedwetting, but more on that later) that was the most disconcerting.

I am using pronounce literally here. In the beginning of the movie, a television journalist is reporting on the suicides that have just taken place at Tikal (pronounced, oddly, “tickle”), an ancient site of the Maya civilization. This mass suicide is due to the predictions of the end of the world that would take place on December 21, 2012. The source of the predictions is supposedly the “Mayan Quiche calendar.” The word Quiche is pronounced “keesh” like the egg pie. So for the next two hours and 30 minutes I am thinking about girly brunch food raining down on an unsuspecting world.

There has been plenty of debunking of the 2012 predictions and most of them do a good job of explaining that like all calendars the Maya one is cyclical and has beginnings and ending that are marked but not that result in the world melting into its core. So, I will tackle here instead the language used in 2012. First, I love disaster movies and it is hard to rile me while I am watching floods and earth fissures and ash storms devour human beings. But 2012 is not honest to its form. The best disaster movies are carefully researched “what if” scenarios and a big part of making “what if” worlds believable is getting the language right.

So quiche, that sort-of-French dish that is an egg and custard and cheese pie, is pronounced “keesh.” It is not a dish of the Maya, ancient or otherwise. The word the reporter in 2012 mispronounced and that the movie misunderstood is Quiché (with an accent) and pronouced keech-chay. The Quiché (or K’iché’) are one one of several Maya people who still live in Mexico and Central America. You will notice I said “Maya” and not “Mayan.” The people are called Maya, singular and plural. The civilization is called “Maya” and the calendar is a “Maya” calendar. The term “Mayan” is not a generic adjective. “Mayan” is generally restricted to the languages of these people: “Mayan” to refer collectively to the languages of all the Maya people, K’iché’ Mayan to refer to the specific language of the K’iché’ people. How hard would it have been to call up an expert on the ancient Maya culture to find this out?

Most people, of course, didn’t get annoyed by this and spent the rest of the movie watching people fall into abyss after abyss as the world fulfilled the ancient quiche’s prediction. I pictured a bubbling crusted pie opening a slit (like Harry Potter’s sorting hat) and proclaiming the end of the world, with male quiche-eaters the first to go. By the way, there was not one Maya person depicted in the film so clearly this prediction was not coming from the Maya people but from the brunch food that had apparently escaped from the 1980s.

Mayan Quiche.  Serve it at your next “girly-man” event.

The greatest threat to the future of humankind has been revealed. It is quiche. Again. You remember  the social threats of quiche, don’t you? In the 1980s, “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” was a satirical book about masculinity and what makes a real man easily identifiable was that he didn’t eat girly foods like quiche. Manly men ate red meat. Most of those manly beef-eaters are now probably dead, but that is another story. “Real men don’t eat quiche” was a cultural truism at the time and it was easy to identify the wimpy, effeminate, maybe-gay, men like actor Alan Alda and talk show host Phil Donahue, and any man who was sensitive and kind. They were the men who ate quiche. In the 2000s they were metrosexuals. Who knows where they are hiding today.

I have a handmade sign in my office that I picked up off the floor at a professional wrestling match  from the same time period. I was studying wrestling and the Wild Samoans were a fascinating team: big burly guys who were supposedly semi-primitive fellows from Samoa. Not under any circumstances were they guys you would want to cross. The discarded fan’s sign read, “Samoans  eat quiche.” It was the ultimate insult of the time  and I hope the guy ran after he waved that sign.

So, when I heard in the new movie 2012 that quiche was once again the threat that this time would cause the earth to upheave and humans to build new arks complete with giraffes and rich Middle Easterners, I should not have been surprised. But of all the wacky things that this wacky movie pronounces, it is the renewal of the fear of quiche (and bedwetting, but more on that later) that was the most disconcerting.

I am using pronounce literally here. In the beginning of the movie, a television journalist is reporting on the suicides that have just taken place at Tikal (pronounced, oddly, “tickle”), an ancient site of the Maya civilization. This mass suicide is due to the predictions of the end of the world that would take place on December 21, 2012. The source of the predictions is supposedly the “Mayan Quiche calendar.” The word Quiche is pronounced “keesh” like the egg pie. So for the next two hours and 30 minutes I am thinking about girly brunch food raining down on an unsuspecting world.

There has been plenty of debunking of the 2012 predictions and most of them do a good job of explaining that like all calendars the Maya one is cyclical and has beginnings and ending that are marked but not that result in the world melting into its core. So, I will tackle here instead the language used in 2012. First, I love disaster movies and it is hard to rile me while I am watching floods and earth fissures and ash storms devour human beings. But 2012 is not honest to its form. The best disaster movies are carefully researched “what if” scenarios and a big part of making “what if” worlds believable is getting the language right.

So quiche, that sort-of-French dish that is an egg and custard and cheese pie, is pronounced “keesh.” It is not a dish of the Maya, ancient or otherwise. The word the reporter in 2012 mispronounced and that the movie misunderstood is Quiché (with an accent) and pronouced keech-chay. The Quiché (or K’iché’) are one one of several Maya people who still live in Mexico and Central America. You will notice I said “Maya” and not “Mayan.” The people are called Maya, singular and plural. The civilization is called “Maya” and the calendar is a “Maya” calendar. The term “Mayan” is not a generic adjective. “Mayan” is generally restricted to the languages of these people: “Mayan” to refer collectively to the languages of all the Maya people, K’iché’ Mayan to refer to the specific language of the K’iché’ people. How hard would it have been to call up an expert on the ancient Maya culture to find this out.?

Most people, of course, didn’t get annoyed by this and spent the rest of the movie watching people fall into abyss after abyss as the world fulfilled the ancient quiche’s prediction. I pictured a bubbling crusted pie opening a slit (like Harry Potter’s sorting hat) and proclaiming the end of the world, with male quiche-eaters the first to go. By the way, there was not one Maya person depicted in the film so clearly this prediction was not coming from the Maya people but from the brunch food that had apparently escaped from the 1980s.

Mayan Quiche.  Serve it at your next “girly-man” event.

We wish we were wearing wet wellies while we were walking where wet-welly-wearers work.

Wellies

wellie = abbreviation of “Wellington boot”.

First, let’s deal with the pronunciation. The “i” in “sine” is like the “y” in “my”, “by”, and “sky”, while the following “e” is like the “i” in “pit”, “kit”, and “bit”. The “i” in “die” is pronounced like the “i” in “sine”. The following “e” is like the “ee” in “bee”, “see”, and “fee”.

The main stress is on the first syllable of “die”. This is one of the ways of pronouncing the word. “Sine die” is normally used in legal contexts and it means indefinitely, “without a date being fixed”.

*The meeting was adjourned sine die.

 The Hindu- ‘Know Your English’ Series, October 4, 2004

We invited a family of Icelanders to Thanksgiving dinner. The mother had spent a year in New Jersey as a nanny, so she’d had one before, but the others had only seen one on the screen. We’d been on a plane that touched down in Rekjavik on its way to or from Europe once, but that was uninformative. Over the course of dinner, we learned a lot more about Iceland than they learned about Thanksgiving.

 The apple pie and whipped cream went over well, but I’m not sure how much the children enjoyed the rest of dinner. The youngest mentioned how much she loves dried fish. All the kids learn English in school (Danish was formerly the second language); they know that no one outside Iceland is going to learn a language that is the native tongue of only 320,000 people.

The family lives on an island of five thousand people and a large volcano, south of the mainland. One of their big holidays celebrates the day in 1973 when, after six months of eruptions which covered a third of the island, the volcano quit spewing. Now the government pays young people, like the seventeen-year-old son, to dig out the houses (which of course have all been incinerated) to make the area a tourist attraction, as a modern Pompeii.

The island is a three-hour ferry trip from the mainland; one can rent a room with twin beds in it, and nap on the way over. The trip is so long not because the island is so far off shore—only twenty minutes—but because that side of the mainland is just sandy beaches, with no harbor.

Living on the island certainly doesn’t mean being cut off from the world. They’ve been to various countries in Europe, and took a car tour of south and east Africa. The seventeen-year-old’s tattoo, piercings, and taste in movies seemed quite up to date, and he and his younger sisters complained that the Internet in their house here is far slower than it was in Iceland. The mother mentioned that she hears the same songs being played in the stores here that she did there—and they’re the same I heard in the US.

They brought a bottle of a nice merlot from New Zealand’s oldest winery. The bottle had a cork. Most wines here come with screw tops, but we’d brought our Swiss army knives, so we had a corkscrew on hand. They also brought a New Zealand Christmas ornament—a Kiwi in a Santa hat and sunglasses, a beer in one hand and a barbecue flipper in the other—to get us in the holiday mood.

Icelandic Christmas is not just one or twelve days, but thirteen which one prepares for by leaving shoes out in hopes of gifts. In cases of misbehavior, a potato appears. The son put out boots rather than shoes once, but there was no increase in gifts.

Some of their names are easy to pronounce, and some are difficult. I’ve become quite conscious of how flat most American vowels are, and how speaking them so long has made it difficult for me to make more complex sounds. Icelandic surnames are still (as were the names of other Scandinavians in the past, such as my Norwegian forebears) the first name of the father with “son” or “dottir” tacked on the end. The father’s first name is challenging enough for English speakers that he just uses Kris, the first part of his last name, Kristjansson (which means his father’s name was Kristjan)—I looked up the spelling, because I doubted that I guessed right, just from hearing it, with Christianson.

Mea culpa–In my post on making Thanksgiving dinner, I said I couldn’t find corn syrup or anything else corny at the supermarket besides frozen ears. Today I noticed not only light corn syrup (which I didn’t recognize behind its Glucose label), but also canned corn–both regular and creamed. Old El Paso also offers tortilla shells in kits, and small oval things it labels as corn tortillas, but which I won’t be buying.

[tweet] attritive [uh-TRAHY-tiv] – used by Kerouac, as quoted in the Times [tahymz] http://bit.ly/917ofW NYT …

MW11 has no entry for attritive other than to say there is an entry in Merriam-Webster Unabridged.

Dictionary.com at least gives the pronunciation.

pronunciation respelling

The pronunciation respelling in tweets posted here closely follows the spelled pronunciation used by Dictionary.com. Differences: [dh] for [th], [uu] for [oo], [u] for [uh], [uh] for [uh], CAPS for bold.

Note: See tweets… page.

Interesting Websites:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English

Wikipedia is a good site to have an introduction about American English in the sense that it gives us informations about the history, the vocabulary, the morphology and phonology of the US. English. Moreover, it offers sources, notes and external links on the subject.

2. http://www.americannationalcorpus.org/

American National Corpus presents definitions and nice examples of the American English. Through this site you can observe words, phrases and constructs that are recurrent in the American English.

3.. http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/frameset.html

This page is about English phonetics and there is a list of the sounds of US English. The categories are divided in consonants (manner, place, voice) and vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs). It is interesting for users who want to learn about American English pronunciation.

4. http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/aesl/aesl

The site cointains pronunciations that were captured in individual audio files for more than 50.000 of the most common words in English. It is nice to mention that the words were extracted from newswire and telephone conversation and that each word was read by an adult female, native speaker of American English in a quiet recording studio. Really nice!

A Good Book online:

1. American English

The book American English by Zoltán Kovecses presents descriptions of the American variety of English and also provides British-American comparisons.

Interesting Websites

1. http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/jones/spelling.htm

This site provides an interesting contrastive analysis between American and British English showing their spelling differences, common words in both varieties and also links to Internet sites with information on British American English.

2. http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:175218

Through this weblink you can download the academic work Investigating British and American English: Dictionary research and corpus investigation written by Malcolm Golmann from the Stockholm University. Among other things, the author provides a large study of the lexical items of those varieties of English.

3. http://www.inglescurso.net.br/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1094

A handy PDF file for Brazilians who want to know the differences in the lexical choice of American and British English.

4. http://www.englishexperts.com.br/2006/10/31/british-and-american-english/

Check the transcription of a BBC radio program, about British people understanding movies with an American accent. there are written opinions on the subject also.

Interesting Books

The following books could be found at FLORESTAN FERNANDES LIBRARY at UNIVERSITY OF SÃO PAULO. For who it may concern their locations are indicated below:

1. TRUDGILL, P. & CHAMBERS, J.K. Dialects of English: studies in grammatical variation. Longman.

2. O DONNELL, W.R & LORETO, T.Variety in contemporary English. Routledge, London, 1991.

The following one could be found at any bookstore:

3. ALGEO, J. British or American English? A handbook of word and grammar patterns. Cambridge University Press, USA.
PREVIEW: http://books.google.com.br/books?id=TuWRnRJpO7YC&pg=RA8-PA270&lpg=RA8-PA270&dq=Algeo+British+or+American+English&source=bl&ots=MRX4U1E2kR&sig=gn9oiGFBa3h9yDN2Csec3qFnQwU&hl=pt-BR&ei=goIES6D3KcnbnAfb5YR1&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

These books present interesting information on the grammatical distinctions presented by the American and British varieties of English.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_8v8nIVD0Q&feature=related

The American Accent Course – 50 rules you must know is an interesting video that teaches you the most important rules of the American accent.

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIoD11Q8WQk&feature=related

Learn to pronounce “world” and other difficult words in English taking into account the Standard American Accent.

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN5nVmhYyZw&feature=related

See the difference between American and British varieties when the subject is the R sound.

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdOgNXwCUYE&feature=related

This video shows how to pronounce the T sound in American English.

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgEY2JJXV8&feature=related

Learn to pronounce difficult consonant sounds that are unique to American English. American T plus N combination.

6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbsS3MNofR4

In this video from BBC you can see different English accents.

7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoL4HhFjWOE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btY_PEaFXvc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5rysWFeo74&feature=related

Through these videos you will recognize the phonetic symbols and how to pronounce each sound of the English Language.

8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IowtkM2KHKw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4OIW7PfJ4g&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DogBOfgfR3E&feature=related

An excerpt from the BBC’s Emmy Award winning nine-part documentary series called “The Story of English”, hosted by Robert MacNeil.

9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn3_bYcAnWI

Here we have a World Tour of English Accent, Very nice video.

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We know this because We are told EVERYDAY how our accent course has changed the lives of our clients who made the choice to order the #1 American Accent English Pronunciation Video Course available.

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http://megashare.vn/download.php?uid=412&id=129021&bn=American_Accent_Video_Training_Program.part4.rar
http://megashare.vn/download.php?uid=412&id=129018&bn=American_Accent_Video_Training_Program.part5.rar

Download Ebook:
Ebooks_American_Accent_Video_Training_Program(Pronunciationworkshop).rar

source: UDS

Nếu có điều kiện bạn có thể mua sách và cd tại http://www.davibooks.vn/index.php?option=com_davi&act=chi_tiet&book=79&code=10718&Itemid=0
Mình cũng ko biết là nhà sách có bản quyền hay ko ^^

Đây là một số ý kiến trên UDS về bộ này:

Hiện nay, có 1 vấn đề mà đa phần những người học tiếng Anh đều gặp phải là phát âm không chuẩn. Cho dù bạn có giỏi ngữ pháp và từ vựng đến đâu đi nữa mà khi nói, phát âm không chính xác cũng có thể làm người nghe khó có thể hiểu được nội dung bạn đang phát biểu hay thậm chí hiểu hoàn toàn sai lệch.

Bộ giáo trình American Accent Video Training Program do Pronunciationworkshop xuất bản này là một cách luyện nói tiếng Anh theo giọng Mỹ rất tốt. Dưới sự chỉ dẫn nhiệt tình của Paul S. Gruber, bạn có thể biết được cách phát âm tiếng Anh tốt hơn bằng cách thay đổi khẩu hình miệng.

whao, cái topic này bây giờ nóng thât, nhờ bác giangvn, nhất là bác 4so7 mà chúng ta có được bộ sách quý này. Dân Việt mình nói kém một phần là do phát âm sai, có được bộ sách này coi như có một thậy xịn dạy rồi,
vì sự nghiệp chung cám ơn bác 4so7 một lần nữa.
Mong bác giải quyết nhanh trục trặc để anh em trên forum được xem toàn bộ training course này.

I found this video on youtube and I find it pretty funny but at the same time educational. The video quality was not that good but as the video runs you’ll know the differences on the pronunciation of words through British and American accents. I hope you’ll enjoy.

Pronunciation often gets ignored over grammar and vocabulary in ESL programs. However, it is just as important because with bad or garbled pronunciation, the spoken message gets lost. “I think” becomes “I sink,” to give a common example. With ESL learners across the world, each country and culture has its own verbal albatross. Here is how can you can begin to use pronunciation for your students’ needs.

Obtain phonetic charts that have symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). These charts are available from teaching supply companies and books such as those in the English File series. Hang this up in your class, and familiarize your students with the pronunciation symbols. You can use these charts to teach pronunciation by helping your students understand the sounds that they get wrong, as well as the correct sounds for a given word or similar words.

• Spanish Pronunciation
  (tags: Spanish/Grammar Spanish/pronunciation)
• Best Spanish Websites
  (tags: Spanish/Grammar Spanish/vocab Spanish/Beginner Spanish/Intermediate)

Sing, floss, stretch. But trust me on the sunscreen.

I wrote recently about the elective class that I am developing and teaching on popular music.  I’m covering a decade per week and a song per day.  Within each song, I highlight an interesting grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation point.

Developing this class has meant combing through many online resources including lists of Billboard number one hit songs on Wikipedia and best-of-the-decade lists such as AOL’s radio blog, which is a good place to start because you can listen to most of the songs on the list.  I’ve also found that the website sing365.com tends to have the least errors of all of the lyrics websites that are returned in Google searches.

I intend to post the list of songs I’ve used at the end of the quarter (I might even link to the Google Docs spreadsheet that I used to record all of the songs I considered for each decade) but for now I thought I would post the following music video, which I plan to use tomorrow, the last day before Thanksgiving break.

The song is actually a spoken word piece which has an interesting story.  While not a traditional pop music video, I think the message is inspirational without being cheesy.  Plus, there are lots and lots of examples of advice using the imperative.  It might not get you through the last two weeks of the quarter, but it doesn’t hurt.