ALISON COURSES

Here is a link to ALISON, an Internet provider of free online courses.

If you are a first year student, this course might interest you:

BRITISH COUNCIL ONLINE SUITE PRE-INTERMEDIATE 1

You need to register (it is free) and you also have access to a wide variety of courses on different subjects, not only English Language Skills, but all of them are in English.

For other levels of English, you may access by clicking on English Language Skills from the main menu (see below). Attention to the display of the courses as it varies every time you access the main menu at http://alison.com/. This is what it looks like and if you click on the image below you will access the English Language Skills section directly:

Poco sushi foto choza, regla de pronunciación del pasado regular en inglés para hispanohablantes

Antes de explicar las reglas de pronunciación del pasado regular en inglés, aquí tenéis una regla mnemotécnica para hispanohablantes que ayuda a recordar cuáles son los fonemas (sonidos) sordos (no vibran las cuerdas vocales) en inglés, algo necesario para comprenderla:

¿Para qué sirve esto?

El pasado regular se forma añadiendo la terminación -ED al infinitivo del verbo (sin "to"):

Ejemplo:

Infinitivo: to watch (ver)

Presente: I watch TV everyday (Veo la tele todos los días)

Pasado: I watched TV yesterday (Ví la tele ayer)

Hasta aquí es muy fácil, teniendo en cuenta que ciertos verbos cambian un poquito al añadirle la terminación (STUDY-STUDIED / STOP-STOPPED) y que sólo hablamos de la forma escrita de ese pasado regular.

La mayor dificultad del pasado regular surge a la hora de pronunciar esa terminación -ED y la primera regla es que nunca se pronuncia /ed/ (tal como se lee en español).

Existen 3 posibilidades (la pronunciación es lo que aparece entre barras /--/):

1) Que se pronuncie como una /t/. Ejemplo, look /luk/ looked /lukt/

2) Que se pronuncie como una /d/. Ejemplo, live /lIv/ lived /lIvd/

3) Que se pronuncie /Id/. Ejemplo, decide /dIsaId/ decided /dIsaIdId/

¿Y de qué depende que se pronuncie de un modo u otro?

Pues del último sonido de la pronunciación del infinitivo (¡atención, he dicho sonido, no letra! No es una regla que pueda sacarse por la escritura, aunque en muchos casos pueda ayudar)

1) Se pronuncia como /t/ cuando el último sonido del infinitivo es sordo. Aquí necesitamos la ayuda que introdujimos al principio para recordar cuáles son los sonidos sordos del inglés: poco, sushi, foto, choza. Tenemos que excluir la /t/ para esta regla (o, como sugirió Cristina de 1ºA, cambiar la regla a "poco, sushi, choza, fea", :) )

Ejemplos: stopped, looked, dressed, finished, laughed, watched, (no hay verbos de uso frecuente terminados en el sonido español zeta), ...

2) Se pronuncia como /d/ cuando el último sonido del infinitivo es sonoro, es decir, cuando acaba en vocal o en cualquier sonido consonántico que no sea poco, sushi, foto choza, ni en /d/

Ejemplos: lived, travelled, remembered, perfectioned, studied, ...

3) Se pronuncia como /Id/ sólo si el último sonido del infinitivo es una /t/ o una /d/. Si nos fijamos, son los dos sonidos que utilizamos para las reglas anteriores.

Ejemplos: started, decided, ...

Pulsa en los siguientes enlaces para practicar la regla:

Escucha los ejemplos

Elige la pronunciación correcta

Simple past tense: Pronunciation of the -ed in regular verbs.

Here is a video to help you revise what we learnt in class about the pronunciation of the "ed" ending in regular verbs (past tense).

Remember the difference between unvoiced (sordos) and voiced (sonoros) sounds. This video gives more detail about this..

International Women's Day 2011: Statues.

We talked in class about statues of famous people and today is the International Women's Day, so here are three examples of what we did in class, all of them women:

The statue of Florence Nightingale in London.


Florence Nightingale was a British woman but she was born in Florence (Italy) in 1820.

She was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician.

She was the founder of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world.

The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.

The statue of Queen Boadicea on Wesminster Bridge.

Boadicea was born in Wales (United Kingdom) around AD 60 or 61. She was queen of the Iceni tribe (Wales) and was the leader of one of the most important rebellions against the Roman Empire during its occupation of the British Isles.

Her original Welsh name was Boudica and it means victory, but she was not lucky in this enterprise.

The last woman is Mary Wollstonecraft. She was born in 1759 in Spitafields (London, UK).

She was a very unusual woman for her age and was famous as a writer and philosopher. She was the authoress of A Vindication of the Rights of Women and defended the idea of sex equality at a time when it was normal to think that women were inferior to men.

Unfortunately, she has no statue and that is why this year, on the 100th International Women's Day, plans are getting underway to create the first statue anywhere in the world honouring her... Read more in The Guardian.

WAS/WERE

Adverbs of Frequency

For more information about the position of frequency adverbs in a sentence, click here.

And a Happy New Year!!