Comments on Father, bother, cot, caught, stark and stork

Fork (2011-01-08T15:07:22Z)

I feel a bit bad about how I performed with your exercice (I could try to argue that it's tough to make up one's mind about a sound without actually saying the words)…
However, you're lucky you learned English with a quite uniformly-accented environment. I for myself have to cope with various french, north-american, english or irish influences, either from teachers or from movies. The resulting accent is a quite weird weighted-mix of all the above.

N (2011-01-08T14:23:40Z)

«I included this word as a kind of control: if you think "brother" rhymes with "bother", then either English is not your native language, or you are unaccustomed to noticing the differences between vowels, or your variety of English is unusual and I'd like to know more about it.»

Tu décries Wikipédia pour son ton pontifiant ? Ah ah.

nameornick (2011-01-07T21:48:59Z)

Ruxor (2011-01-07T13:25:54Z)

David → I would say both are correct (<URL: http://www.madore.org/~david/weblog/2010-12.html#d.2010-12-30.1830 > ;-). Without analyzing too much, I'd say “ear-training exercise” really emphasizes the fact that the consequence of the exercise is to train the ear, while an “ear training exercise” is one of various kinds of training exercises, this one being an ear exercise. However, I'd certainly write “ear-straining exercise”… but then, I'd also write “ear-deafening sound” using the same logic, and Google seems to show that most people write that without the hyphen, so I don't know.

But my English is now so bad anyway… I'm sure there were plenty of not-so-subtle mistakes in what I wrote.

David (2011-01-07T09:07:16Z)

Should it be "ear-training" rather than "ear training", in the last
sentence? (This is an actual question; I'm interested in knowing if
your opinion differs.)


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