Drinks and Beverages

Find a computer dictionary program with verbal word pronunciation and say it along with the computer. Most places where you can buy programs and games should have something that will help.

Hang out with native speakers. Best to choose well-spoken ones, though: English is famous for being badly pronounced by some of its own speakers.

Listen to news broadcasts and commentary on radio and television stations such as National Public Radio (NPR), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Dissenting opinion: Broadcasters speak with increasingly stilted, unnatural diction. The media are not a good source for proper pronunciation of English. Most media speakers have had to take "communications" courses in order to speak at all, and many have had their accents "modified," which results in overcompensation. For example, many media people mispronounce two as "tew" and noon as "nyune" because some teacher of accent modification taught them that saying "styudent" and "nyews" is better than saying "stoodent" and "nooze."

Dissenting opinion of dissenting opinion: as a college linguistics professor and teacher of accent modification, my experience and training is that pronunciation improves by training the ear through extensive exposure to spoken English by a variety of speakers.

Listening to broadcast radio does not limit one to the speech of broadcasters. There are many interview programs that include exposure to common vernacular English reflecting a wide variety of spoken English.

The best way to improve pronunciation is to keep the radio and TV on at all times to train the ear, even when not actively listening and to dictate the English one hears from the radio and TV which can be done on the computer, for example, at the NPR website where there are audio files of programs which can be played, stopped, rewound and replayed for the purpose of dictating. Do this for several months and you will find your perception of English changing.

Then get yourself to a pronunciation/diction coach/teacher who can give you feedback on your production of English sounds/intonation/stress and help train your oral muscles to produce the most intelligible sounds for the native speaker ear.

A lot of people don't realize that a good dictionary isn't just for definitions, but for pronunciations too.

Firstly, get a good dictionary (e.g. Oxford, Collins, Merriam-Webster, or whatever you feel comfortable with), making SURE it has pronunciation keys, which are those funny symbols which tell you how to pronounce a word. The symbols are part of the International Phonetic Alphabet (see http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa) which are used in most dictionaries.

Every good dictionary will have a small IPA chart, usually in its first few pages. All you do when looking up a word is check which symbol links to which sound (there will be examples in the chart). After doing this for a time, you will get used to the symbols and be able to easily check and learn the correct pronunciations as well as definitions in the dictionary!

If your native language is not English, an important part of the solution is to train yourself to hear the different sounds of English. One of the simplest ways of doing this is to listen carefully to native speakers of English speaking your own language with an English. Listen for their r-sounds, for example. Listen for the way they mispronounce your native o-sound and so on. You can then try to imitate them and later use their sounds when speaking English.

The gods and goddesses drunk proper wine. The Greeks drunk wine made from grapes.

ANSWER -

The Grecians drank three types of alcoholic beverages; Wine, Beer, and Honey Mead. However, they did not drink wine undiluted, for they thought it was barbaric. Instead, they took three parts water to one part wine so that way they could still enjoy it. Although, only the men were allowed to drink it and did so at what would be called a Symposium. A Symposium is where men gather, sing poems, play music and of course...drink wine! Wine was also not aloud to be drunk with meals, except for small peiced of cheese or bread, therefore, the purpose of the Symposium.

Take a whole lemon and place it on your kitchen work surface. Press on it rolling it backwards and forwards a few times until it feels like its softened inside. Once your lemon feels less firm, half it and give it a good old fasioned squeeze with your hand.

Be careful to catch any seeds you might have loosened when rolling your lemon.