grammar book I recommend

Paulo from Italy wrote and asked which grammar book I recommend. My favorite advanced book is "Understanding and Using English Grammar." by Azar. When I taught at Santa Monica College I often had students buy that book. I love it. I have never found a better grammar book in all my years of teaching.

Go through all of the exercises in it. Make sure you know all the rules. It's a good review for those of you who have been out of school for a while.

As I said in a previous post, people will sometimes think they hear an accent when you are making grammar mistakes. Something about your speech will sound foreign to them.

Pronunciation of "mirror"

Paolo asked:

hi, i'm italian and i have trouble pronouncing "mirror", any suggestion?
paolo

My answer:

There are some words that are hard to pronounce even by native speakers. "Mirror," "horror" and "murderer" are examples. In my opinion, "mirror" rhymes with the word "nearer," but you will hear variations of that in different parts of the US and also depending on whether someone is speaking carefully and clearly or just rushing through a sentence.

Take a look at the link below. A native speaker asked this same question and a lot of people commented on how they say this word. So you see, even Americans hear variations of this word and they wonder which one is correct.

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1044863

American Accent Video

My new American Accent instructional video will finally be available for sale in about a week. Students have been asking me to make one for years. They want to be able to see the mouth movements rather than just hear them on CD. Well, finally it's been done! I think you will like it.

You will be able to either download it or purchase the actual DVD and have it sent to you.
Please check the website: www.accurateenglish.com. It's coming soon.

held consonants (stops)

Alex asks another question:

You mention in the book that many of the final stops are not realeased. Are they "p", "b", "t", "d" and "g" only? Also are they still not released in the plural form of words that ends in "s" e.g. "stops"?

Hi Alex,

Yes, those are the primary ones you need to worry about.

It's particularly important not to release a stop sound when it's followed by another consonant, even if it's part of the same word, as the final S in the word "stops." If you release the P before the S, then the word will sound something like "stopus." A good example of that is the word "apartment." Don't release that middle T. Otherwise it will sound like "apartament." Pay attention to these consonant clusters. The opposite error would be to skip that middle T completely and say "aparment." This is actually a more common mistake and is often made by native speakers of Spanish, Portuguese and most Asian languages.