How to understand fast spoken English in the North West of England. Liverpool and Manchester are only 34 miles apart but the sound of the English spoken in these cities is very very different. Here is a listening exercise.

The grammatical function words in a sentence are usually unstressed and so sound different to how you might expect. Can you recognise the word - you - when it's pronounced in it's weak unstressed form?

The weak word of the week is the little word AND.

Helen’s Language Home is launching its own English soap opera,    The Birthday Surprise    tells the story of Julie and her husband Paul, who she has been married to for 15 years,  they have two wonderful children who take up a lot of their time and attention.   Julie would love...

Can you recognise the little grammatical function word - OF - in spoken English? OF is often hard to hear and sounds very different to how you might expect, especially when the word after _of_ begins with a vowel sound.

In everyday spoken English many words are pronounced in their weak form and don't sound the way you expect them to sound. The grammatical function words are usually unstressed and so are pronounced in a weak form and the vowel sounds are often replaced by the shwa sound.

The little grammatical function words are often very hard to hear. These words often sound different to how you might expect them to sound. This video is about the word CAN.