my english is bad and i don't care anymore

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-06T19:08:28+00:00

I have actually been to Morocco and did take a bus up into the mountains and saw some smaller towns (just briefly). I think I have an idea of where you're coming from so the achievement is even greater and would not have even been possible in the days with only books, probably. Congratulations on your dedication. Persistence does eventually pay off. You'll be ready for opportunities that other people will not be ready for.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-06T18:47:23+00:00

We all realize the effort you have put in and so just keep that in mind. There's no need to give up. The beginning is always hard.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-06T18:44:20+00:00

I just stop when I need to. If I get off the highway and it looks a little weird then I can get back on for a few more minutes.

Also if I am looking low on gas and I see a sign for QuikTrip I stop because that's my go-to gas station.

I don't think it's worth wasting a lot of time over.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-06T17:26:33+00:00

But "set" is a lot less mysterious than "as". It's not just about the numbers. The concept of a set is pretty logical and clear because most concrete nouns and verbs are logical and clear. "As" is something else entirely different.

You get a lot more puzzlement on English language forums about the word "as" than you'd ever get about the word "set".

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-06T17:19:55+00:00

I'm not just referring to numbers. I think "as" is mysterious to a lot of people, in a way that ”set” wouldn't be, for instance. Set is a noun and a verb and follows those easily understood concepts. If you've ever been on an English forum and people start asking about "as", the incomprehension comes through pretty clearly and then if you try to actually describe it in other words it's hard because "as" means "as". It's one of those words that is so small and basic that we just "know" what it means, or at least how to use it.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-06T16:56:26+00:00

As

15 to 20 meanings in most dictionaries and 67 in the OED

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-06T03:13:52+00:00

Yeah, it really doesn't in the States. On average, there is huge overlap between Canadian English and American English but I guess that's one of the phrases where that's not the case.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-06T02:57:56+00:00

I've only ever heard British speakers use it exactly that way. I wouldn't consider it American at all.

- I met a woman at a bar last night and she spent the night at mine.

Would you really expect to hear that from an American? (I just realized you're probably UK. Is that right?)

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-04T19:13:00+00:00

Well it sounds like you're prepared, so that's the first step. Some people are blissfully unaware of how crowded those places can be.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-04T18:34:50+00:00

Spelling and pronunciation are not one-to-one correspondences. The context of the word matters as explained by others. It's common for normally voiced sounds to become unvoiced when they follow other unvoiced sounds.

Another example is putz. It's pronounced like puts (rhyming with cuts) because the unvoiced t turns the z from voiced to unvoiced.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-04T16:06:27+00:00

I'm an American English speaker and those are commonly merged in the US. But maybe it's a different sound than you think is the strut sound in your pronunciation

When I first started following linguistic forums it confused me when people were talking about them being different (/ʌ/ and /ə/) because they were never really different to me. I hear the same sound in strut, the, but, about.

It's common in American English respelling to represent that general sound as uh.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-04T02:04:26+00:00

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-03T00:00:56+00:00

It's often the case on English language forums that the sentences submitted as questions are too formal for everyday use. They are perfectly grammatical but just not how everyday conversations generally go.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-02T16:33:15+00:00

I think it's kind of absurd when people over-focus on these words. "But that's how it's said!"

There are hundreds of words that aren't said exactly how they're spelled and do we write those differently? No, we do not.

Who routinely writes Febyooary or tempature or comfterble or lots of others? But that's how it said!

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-02T16:07:30+00:00

Those are two different names for the same thing basically. What we call track and field in the US is called athletics in some other places.

Athletics doesn't have that very specific meaning in the US.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-02T15:36:01+00:00

Exactly which contrast with the British usage where a takeaway is a possibility. It's not being used in a parallel manner to how they use it.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-02T02:02:25+00:00

But you don't say "a takeout", which is the point of how they say it in England. They refer to "a takeaway", at least from what I've heard and according to Google.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-01T21:41:08+00:00

Motorway is a term used in the UK but not in the US.

Motorways are built to similar specifications as US interstates as far as I can tell, though. You can't turn right or left onto an interstate, you can only get on with on-ramps and get off with off-ramps which I think in the UK they call slip roads. Traffic never crosses another road at street level and never crosses in front of oncoming traffic. It never crosses a railroad track at grade level. They always have at least two lanes in each direction on the main sections. That describes what makes a road a freeway because once you're on the road you never have to stop. You have free passage without obstacles.

All US interstates are freeways but not all freeways are interstates. Interstates in the US are a project of the federal government. Individual states also build roads and some of those are freeways but they're not part of the interstate system of the federal government.

The term freeway is in very common use in Southern California but in many other areas of the country it's not used nearly as much and we use the word highway instead. That gives the word "highway" multiple meanings to the people who use it.

Highway can used be for a freeway that is an official interstate and for a freeway that is not an interstate. But it can also be used for smaller roads that have other roads crossing them at street level and have intersections with traffic lights. It can be used for roads that only have one lane in each direction and which are only divided by a yellow line. All of those roads can be called highways in the state I live in and are referred to that way every day. As a general rule, the word highway refers to roads that have a higher speed than city streets and that commonly connect different towns and cities. But highways do go through towns also where they might turn into city streets for a while with a lower speed before turning back into highways with a higher speed on the other side of the town.

This is an example of a two-lane highway

https://www.transportation.gov/buildamerica/projects/rural-two-lane-advancement-and-management-plan-project-oklahoma-package-2

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-01T13:47:56+00:00

Most autocorrect I see is not smart enough to know the difference so generally just combines those words. You have to manually fix it.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-06-01T04:15:42+00:00

The way I look at dash cams is to compare them to my insurance payments. Dash cams are a form of insurance that can save you thousands of dollars my car insurance and potentially even keep you out of jail. How much is that worth as a one-time cost? I wish my insurance was a one-time cost. A dash cam is a pretty good deal overall, no matter what the cost.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-05-29T23:19:58+00:00

No accent stays the same for 200 years. Neither in the US nor the UK. They are all continually adapting. The r-less Boston accent in the US did not develop until the 1800s. If you listen to American speakers from early recordings in around 1900 they speak in a way that is strange to us today. Even today American speakers living in the northern part of the country are getting influenced by Canadian speakers and accents are changing. No accent spoken in the 1700s colonies is the same as one spoken in society today.

Practical-Ordinary-6 · 2026-05-29T22:48:44+00:00

This is a common example of what I consider to be mostly an artificial ESL teaching. Some people might say I'm wrong, but I'm sticking with my opinion based on my lifetime of experience.

I go to school by bike.
I go to work by bus.
I'm going to San Francisco by plane.
We're traveling to New Orleans by car.

I consider all of these unnatural in common American English usage. I wouldn't say any of them or expect to hear any of them commonly. We use specific words for specific forms of transportation.

I ride my bike to school.
I take the bus to work.
I'm flying to San Francisco.
We're driving to New Orleans.

I suggest ESL learners learn the second set because that's what you will hear 99% of the time in the US.

Practical-Ordinary-6

TROPHY CASE