[HaraKiriBlade]

Take a look at my thread 'How do I improve oral English?' in Ask a Teacher section of the forum, and you'll know what I mean. Yes if I have to say umms several times per a sentence that's a problem. Almost 7 years of living in an English-using country (8 years if I count my 1 1/2 year in Australia but there's a reason I don't count it), and my English processor in my brain is still quite... crappy.

My pronounciation, although not quite as good as that of native speaker, is something I take pride in, because, believe it or not I've acquired 90% of this pronounciation back in Korea.

I was lucky to go through a very systematic English phonetic program - I won't reveal the name of the program (I'm not allowed to endorse products of any kind, aren't I?) but basically casette tapes, books and a short daily morning phone call in English comprised it. The books explained how lips and tongue should move to pronounce just about every English sound.

For example, to pronounce 'A's in words, try putting one finger between your teeth, and that's just about how much you should open up your mouth... kind of thing. (note I forgot how many fingers you actually need to put in... I'm just improvising here based on my fading memory) And the explanation is accompanied by casette tapes with native English speakers' pronounciation.

The result was quite impressive. In two years I was able to pronounce words quite like North American. It's funny though because I still couldn't form even the simplest "This is..." sentence in English. But hey, I pronounced single words like "Cat", "Dog" and "Girl", and all my classmates looked at me in awe.

Almost a decade has passed from that point, and I still seem to be where I was back then; If I was asked to pronounce a single word, I bet I can fool anyone into thinking that I'm a North American native. Sentences, however, is a different story. Words connect to each other and some sounds change, get omitted or added, and I still haven't fully grasped the whole thing yet.

And that's just the pronounciation part of my English problem. Not being able to lay out words in the right order and come up with the intended words in time when speaking, is far bigger issue I have. Trust me, my 'reading' and my 'speaking' sounds very different for that reason.

OH and would anyone be kind enough to receive the higher quality version of my little reading thru E-mail and analyze it for me? it's slightly longer, too.