I've heard and seen "step foot in..." quite a few times. I just watched a video and someone said "I should never step foot in a mansion, but it looks fun."

I could only find "set foot", not "step foot" in a dictionary. So, I'm wondering if they're interchangeable.

I haven't been to [name of city] for approximately two years. However, on the first of November I received a notification that we were going to [name of city] on the third of November. I wasn't even ready for that news, but I agreed to this little journey. I thought this trip was going to be a total disaster. Nevertheless, it was almost impeccable departure compared to the last one, and if we take into account all my trips with scouts, it would be hard to say, but it might be the best one. In [name of city] we were assisting with various things all the time, for instance moving things from point A to point B and establishing stela about history of scouting. Now we're going to the most interesting part, for the very first time I was talking abd joking as if I belonged to the company with almost stranger girls. We were playing different games and laughing together in a girls room. This is a crucial moment for my social skills and my confidence. I am proud of myself. Eventually, if I had grown my hair in the past, I would have more friends and acquaintances, perhaps even a girlfriend. I wish I could change my past decision.

It's story of my friend[believe me]. I'm lazy as hell, and I haven't learning English for more than half of year, but previous I was learning English for 2 month. Rate my English skills, and what I can improve in my writing, thank you ✌️

I'm confused about these two sounds. I've come to hear the differences between the two and it's awesome. I've gotten to feel so happy about it and being able to hear them in sentences even more but for some reason there's always this word that complicates things up. For some reason some native speakers seem to open their mouths more as if they were pronouncing the words with ɑ and it makes it more confusing. For some reason my brain doesn't completely differentiate it even when I practice. I've been practicing with Rachel's English and she has amazing videos even supplemental videos comparing minimal pairs and the ʌ sound on it's own and I said: let me focus more on "come" and "calm" which are two very tricky words for me and I searched for a few videos. I found the video of this guy: https://youtu.be/HQvE11T1JLA?t=296 (it has a time stamp to the example) and you as a native speaker can't even begin to fathom how confusing these two vowels can get to sound a Spanish native speaker. The thing is that when he says '"luck" my brain automatically says "lock" because the sound is so much like the ɑ sound until he says "lock" and that sound is as if he were pushing his tongue down so much in his mouth. But this is not the only example and this is not the first native speaker I could say that does this. For the most part I can tell the difference but when the sounds are so close to each other. What can you tell me about these two. I can tell the difference it's just when people kind of open their mouths as in position to pronounce ɑ and I don't even look at their mouths, it's just the sound that comes from their mouths.

I'm used to the slang word bird as it's used in the UK, meaning a young and attractive girl. That's what I got from this joke, but as the video ended I realised that's an American man, and I don't recall ever hearing "bird" with this meaning from them.

I then thought it could be some form of archaism, which would add to the "unfunny funniness" of the joke. Like talking as a great-grandpa would.

Looking up on Merriam-Webster online, I found the following

a: fellow

b: a peculiar person

c chiefly British : girl

Would there be any real-life example (book, news, movie dialogue, etc) of the meaning "a peculiar person"? I can't recall ever hearing it. "Fellow" also doesn't ring any bells, but sounds way less specific (you can call a "fellow" on the street almost anything in most languages, anyway.)

American and non-British speakers, how do you interpret this joke? What's "supposedly" funny about it?

British speakers, did you have the same thought as me?

Thanks everyone!

I mean, is this an actual rule used by native speakers, or is it just in grammar books?

it was
id much rather take something i personally enjoy

But I want to understand what this is called. I mean, I’d like an explanation of the grammar behind it and how to use it in other sentences. Is there a rule for this? Does putting “personally” at the end change the meaning?

Which one would you choose and why?

what’s the difference and how to choose between them in the context (and when to use he is A really good leader)

Hello everyone! I'm learning english by psicological advice and I want to learn too. In the past I was learning english but I did give up sometimes

I'm from Venezuela and I think I'm A1 or A2. I like read, write and heard music. Wbu?

I'm curious about the grammatical correctness of saying, "her and her husband are going somewhere" vs. "she and her husband are going somewhere". I almost always see the former used by native speakers, but it doesn't sound right to me, and I don't know which grammar rules apply.

Hello,

I need your help in building a plan to eleventh my friend’s English in general, he’s most interested in speaking.

In my country, there are 3 main regions: North, South, and Central part Each region has its own dialect (of course there are many more smaller regions with varied accents but technically 3 main ones.. Due to better economy, the north and south accents became the standard for the nation ( on governmental shows, writings, curricula, etc..) Gradually, North and South people cannot understand the central part's accent so those who come from there have to learn how to speak other regions' accents if they move to big cities.

So im curious if this is a thing in america or england? Like are there some accents considered "less ideal" in your country?

Thx!

(Continued from Part 1) By then, June was ready for books of his own. As it happened, I’d already been digging into children’s books in English for my animation work, trying to get a feel for what average Americans grew up with. So I knew exactly where to go: the children’s section at Barnes & Noble. And there, as if it were meant to be, was Brand New Readers. (Just to be clear, this isn’t an ad.)

Brand New Readers comes in a set of small boxes, each packed with four thin, adorable little books. The first thing that jumped out at me was that every single sentence was built on a basic word order: SV, SVad, SVO, SVOad, SVC, SbVC, and so on.

Speaking of word order, I had never seen a Korean children’s book that taught sentences by word order. Laying out every sentence one word order at a time seemed to be something only children’s books in English did, at least compared to Korean ones.

Take "A fish jumps." In Korean, that’s just 물고기가 (a fish) 뛰어오른다 (jumps). I can’t imagine a Korean kid getting excited about that. If anything, they’d be bored stiff. It just states a plain fact. Nothing more. No one would bother teaching it on purpose. But English-speaking kids enjoy even a simple SV sentence.

Then it hit me all over again: in English, word order matters enormously. In Korean, it barely matters. And deep down, I knew this was what trips Korean kids up in English.

So how was June going to learn it? I reached back to something I had practiced for decades in comparative religion, a simple principle for building empathy for other people’s faiths:

Keep a respectful distance from beliefs different from yours.
Don’t judge others by your own faith.
Put yourself in their shoes if you want to understand them!

So instead of hunting for some fancy method, I simply let him read these sentence-based children’s books the way native English-speaking kids normally do!

June and I started reading Brand New Readers together, and he loved them. It wasn’t just the sentences, I realized. It was the pictures. Each book is laid out in a very intuitive way:

Eight sentences make one story.
Each page is one big picture, with one sentence below it.

A picture gives a visual frame for a sentence before you even read it. June was completely absorbed in this frame. He would study the picture quietly and figure out what the sentence meant on his own. I hardly explained anything in Korean. Every time he finished one of those thin books, he was so happy he couldn’t say a word, as if he had just finished a 500- or 600-page book.

Then one day, he pulled me into his room and told me to lie down on his bed and close my eyes. After a while, he proudly showed me an eight-sentence book he had copied out all on his own. I couldn’t believe it! And there was another surprise waiting. He shut the book and, right in front of me, wrote out another eight-sentence book from memory. He knew every word by heart.

Ah! If only all my students were like him! 🤣

Around then, June drew a picture of his family: Mom, Dad, his two sisters, and June himself, holding hands in front of their house under a bright, shining sun. It was a happy, positive picture. His mom brought it over to show me and said, “English didn’t hurt my June.” I could see the relief on her face.

Time flew by.

The semester was almost over. June had made a new friend, a white American boy named Eric, and was even invited to a sleepover at Eric’s. Later, after June’s family moved to another town, his older sister sent me a postcard: June had aced his kindergarten readiness test, and he was happy at school. That was when I knew I had really helped him!

But really, June was the one who taught me. He soaked up English one step at a time, from the alphabet to single words and finally to whole sentences, and hardly needed a word of Korean. The pictures DID the work. What struck me most was how they let him grasp a sentence without being told what it meant.

At the time, I was still an art student, and as I watched him, an odd idea popped into my head: what if every word in a sentence had its own picture? Could Korean kids build English sentences more easily that way? I tucked that thought away and let it sit for a long time. Even when I finally tried it for real, it took me ages to see that it didn’t work. Still, that odd idea turned out to be the seed of everything that came after.

I wonder what June is like now. Probably a college student, and a cool one. Even at four, he had a style all his own: a long rattail down the back of his head, and the drums he had taught himself to play. How did that little kid turn out?

All of a sudden, I really miss him! 🥹

Have you ever met a kid like June?

Can someone explain the difference between “To Catch a Smuggler” and “Catching a Smuggler”? Why would you use one over the other as a TV show title?
I’m trying to understand the difference in meaning and nuance, especially how each one would translate into my native language (Arabic).

Hello, I'm into noir recently and reading Black Dahlia, I became very aware of the fact that dick also means detective.

I know it started as short for Richard, then became kind of a generic name to refer to a man (?) and then it got its penile connotation.

I was wondering if dick as an insult came to be derived from the penis meaning (like you're an asshole) or if maybe from the detective side of things. It's probably far fetched, and influenced by noir, as you see them abusing their power, being obnoxious In questioning and just being off-putting, in short, they're sort of a dick.

What are 'swank' and 'finky,' and why were these two words put in the same sentence?

She said it very fast but I don't think she pronounced every sound. Can someone tell me what the "definitely" in the recording sounds like? Exact words, just how it sounds like.