Fallbrook was a small town that sat immediately east of the entrance to U.S. Marine Corps’ Base Camp Pendleton. With a population of just 30,000 people, most of the town was comprised of military families. Brittany lived at the La Galiana de Cortez apartments in a small upstairs apartment just a short walk from the entrance to the base. She had grown up in The Ozarks in Missouri, but her family had since moved to Pennsylvania. Once her divorce was finalized, she would have no reason to stay in the military town, so on that rainy afternoon she and her friend Channy Tal were packing boxes for her move to Pennsylvania.
American English words are not pronounced one by one. Usually, the end of one word attaches to the beginning of the next word. This is also true for initials, numbers, and spelling. Part of the glue that connects sentences is an underlying hum or drone that only breaks when you come to a period, and sometimes not even then. You have this underlying hum in your own language, and it helps a great deal toward making you sound like a native speaker.
That’s just a bunch gobbledeegook. Pure gibberish. He’s such an old rapscallion. Jeeminy Christmas, the shenanigans of that old fogey. Yackety schmackety, blah, blah, blah! Shucks, I wanted to find it on my own, and not be penalized for it—I’m just so darned tired of gimme’s and gotcha’s by a lotta has-been nosybones out hobnobbing with hoity toity wannabes. The real nitty gritty is that, young and old, they’re just a buncha happygo-lucky whippersnappers and cantankerous old fuddyduddies who don’t know diddly.
I was rooting willy-nilly through a buncha stuff, looking every whichway for the dinky little whatchamacallit to fix the goldong thingamajig, but good ol’ whatsizname had put it in the hooziwhatsit, as usual! Boy oh boy, what a load of hooey. Always the same old rigamarole with that cockamamie bozo. He’s such a pipsqueak! If I found it, ka-ching, I’d be rich, which would be just jim dandy! I’d be totally discombobulated. You-knowwho had done you-know-what with the goofy little gadget again, so whaddyaknow . . . there was something-orother wrong with it. What a snafu! I had a heck of a time
The wish to learn is diffuse and general. The will to learn is concentrated and specific. The wish to learn means that we repeat a thing again and again h0ping for something to happen. The will to learn means that we dig down and analyze, that we by to find out exactly what is wrong and exactly how to put it right. Let us take an analogy. A man may have a wish for 'better physical health and strength. His wish for health becomes a will to health only when he finds out what he must do to become more healthy, and then does it. So the will to learn means an intelligent and persistent search for the conditions of improvement and an intelligent and persistent concentration upon them.
“WHY IS MY ACCENT SO BAD?” Learners can be seriously hampered by a negative outlook, so I’ll address this very important point early. First, your accent is not bad; it is nonstandard to the American ear. There is a joke that goes: What do you call a person who can speak three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who can only speak one language? American.
WHAT IS ACCENT? Accent is a combination of four main components: voice quality, intonation (speech music), liaisons (word connections), and pronunciation (the spoken sounds of vowels, consonants, and combinations). As you go along, you’ll notice that you’re being asked to look at accent in a different way.
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