Survey week

Hello everyone.

I hope that things are going well for you.

First, I need to give you some homework for this week. Please take a survey about this course. Click here to take the survey. Thank you for your help and honesty.

In the last two days we took surveys about books and music. I found it quite interesting to hear about everyone’s interests. For me, it was good fun. We were able to learn many things about our classmates.

Today (Thursday) I asked if people like scary novels. Most people did not. My second question was if people knew who Steven King is. About half of the people knew him and a few people had just heard his name. I guess he might be most famous in Korea for his stories that became movies like The Shawshank Redemption(one of my favorites) and The Green Mile.

One problem that I heard today was confusion with two very similar words, read/read.
They are so similar that you cannot see any difference when you look at them. You need to use the context to know which pronunciation to use. The word that sounds like “reed” is the verb. The past tense and verb3 (PP) sounds like “red”.

So, in the question:
Have you ever read an English newspaper?
the read would sound like “red.”

but in the answer:
I read an English newspaper everyday.
The read would sound like “reed.”

OK? I hope this is easy to understand…because the next point is not sooo easy.

Today I heard a few questions like:
Have you ever been read a book in English?

Can you see the problem in this sentence?
(There are two PP verbs in a row.)

The sentence:
Have you ever read a book in English?
is perfect.

Have you (ever) + PP?

Have you ever been to China?
is perfect grammar, but
Have you ever been read an English book is not.

At the end of class today and yesterday we focused a bit on some pronunciation.
Some words that we practiced were:
strange (just one syllable)
rich (just one syllable)
question (sounds like kwestion– )
month
months

I wanted to show you a video that I think is funny. This video shows how important pronunciation can be. Please click here to see it. Enjoy!

Have a great weekend I will see you next week. Take care. Thanks again for your time on the survey.