Oral Communication

Introduction

I have often heard people saying that English is an easy language to learn. I have also heard that Chinese is the most difficult, and many speakers of languages are proud to say that their language is one of the hardest of all. But is this true? Are some languages harder than others? With English, I feel that it is an easy language to pick up at the start. Many students can start speaking it fairly quickly and progress rapidly through the early stages. This might be because it seems not to have the complexity and abundance of grammatical rules that many languages have. However, this is also one of its difficulties; having mastered the basics of English, I then find it hard to reach the high levels, because there are so many exceptions to everything and so many funny little rules. All in all, I'd say it is easy to begin with, but it gets a lot harder. It has an enormous vocabulary, its spelling system is a mess and there are many tricky little rules. Personally, I don't think any language is easy, not if you wish to master it. As languages embody entire cultures, they are highly complex things and require years of learning for most. I'm still learning a lot about English and I have been trying speaking it since the best I can. Fortunately, this course is another opportunity to improve my knowledge of English. In fact, I relentlessly try my best to finish this assignment and I would like to thank my tutor, friends and whoever put their effort to help me on my study. I sincerely appreciated all their time and effort and hopefully I can do a favour to them in the future.

i. For each of the following pairs of English consonant, provide 5 other minimal pairs of the same types for each pair that illustrates their occurrence in initial, medial and final position.

|Consonant Pairs |English Consonants’ Position |

|...