Me parece un video estupendo y un material muy interesante, aporte de Rebecca incluido.

La verdad, no entiendo la actitud de intentar ocultar las carencias de una persona en un idioma, ¿A santo de que?.

Anoche estuve viendo videos de Antonio Banderas, a proposito de un post tuyo anterior, y como decia el entrevistador. “I haven’t complain so far”.

En resumen, me ha parecido un post muy util el cual me ha dado buenas ideas para mejorar mi ingles.

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Hello

It’s seemed to me a wonderful video and very interesting stuff, even Rebecca’s post.

Truely, I can’t understand the behavior of try to hide failings of a person in an idiom. What’s the point?

Last night I was seeing Antonio Banderas’ videos, on purpose of a previous post yours, and such as the interviewer said. “No tengo queja alguna”.

In short, It’s seemed to me a very useful post which It gave me good ideas to improve my english.

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PD: No se si poner seemed o seems. Creo que seems sería mas correcto en este caso (verdad general?). :S

Actually–and this is in response to the other people who defended Torres in these comments as well–the point wasn’t so much to criticize him as it was to learn from mistakes. He probably speaks English exactly as well as he needs to in order to communicate with his team-mates, journalists, and the other people who he has to talk to. There’s really nothing wrong with speaking English badly if speaking it well isn’t something you are particularly interested in–sort of like how there’s nothing wrong with eating frozen pizzas and iceburg lettuce if you don’t particularly care about eating well.

I’m glad to know that you’re getting so much practice in Brussels! Talking with people with other accents might be a good way to imagine how you might sound to other people.

Anyway, I would strongly recommend the book “English Pronunciation in Use” by Mark Hancock (and the CDs, too) to you are to anyone else who wants to get more into English Pronunciation. It has the same format as “English Grammar in Use” and is also published by Cambridge. It should really be called “English Pronunciation and Listening Comprehension in Use” , because the exercises are just as useful for improving your comprehension as they are for improving your pronunciation, and the two really go hand in hand.

I have just had lunch with a German colleague and sometimes he didn’t understand me and the other way round, due to our differences in pronunciation. He speaks perfect English in terms of vocabulary and grammar and mine is only quite good (I’d say enough) and, even with easy sentences, messages don’t arrive to the other (Germans don’t pronounce vowels in the same way, they don’t open their mouths, their W are like V… just the opposite to Spanish speakers).

On the other hand, pronunciation is not a problem at all with my Latin colleagues (Portuguese, Italians and Greeks) which reinforces the idea that, in fact, it plays a key role.

I have also colleagues trying to improve their Spanish. Definitely the pronunciation + intonation is clearly key. Sometimes they split the words, they stop in the middle of a sentence to think or just to say words in a way that invites you to find in your brain something different.

I’m practising with Zac’s tips on “wordlinking” and I’m, now, much more understandable than before, especially for native speakers. But sometimes you don’t have enouh resources to take care of your grammar and, at the same time, to pronounce perfectly… so ofently a compromise is necessary.

In addition to enjoying this exchange with you, Zac, I hope my experience will be helpful to those who are working on improving their English.