ESL Toronto

Mr. D wrote a new blog post: ESL Common Vowel Environments

When you memorize the system of eleven vowels, you are ready for the real question: how can anyone quickly pick the correct vowel for each and every syllable? The same way that native speakers master the fine points of any language: learning basic rules of thumb; learning basic lists of exceptions; and guessing, without having […]

Mr. D wrote a new blog post: What Makes English So Hard to Learn

For ESL Students or anyone who wants to learn English it’s one of the most mongrel languages on planet earth. That’s because over the course of time, English has taken up words from every other major language, and so its spelling and pronunciation rules are more complicated than many languages. But for those ESL students […]

Mr. D wrote a new blog post: ESL Pronunciation - The Pure Vowels

One of the harder steps for learning English pronunciation is to master all the vowel sounds common to English. Languages like Hawaiian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish have a basic five-vowel set, not counting diphthongs of two or more vowels in combination. Because of this, a simple way of learning English vowels is to group […]