Pronunciation of sentence "I liked him......."

[Williamyh]

Hi All,

When I listen to native speaker speaking, they always drop the "h" letter. For instance, "I liked him", they would say "I like tim".....I don't know how many other letter they would drop, could you please give me more examples? How do I learn this kind of English, any DVD and books?

WYH

[konungursvia]

Maybe you're right. But if we do make the effort and say the /h/ quickly after the /t/, the /t/ is so much more perceptible that we feel we have wasted the effort on the /h/. Generally, we don't drop too many sounds like that.

Also, don't eat dessert before finishing your meat and potatoes.

[raindoctor]

/h/ drops before unstressed vowels.

ORLAPUBS P. L55:* CONTINUATION OF L18 on errors in English

[Williamyh]

Maybe you're right. But if we do make the effort and say the /h/ quickly after the /t/, the /t/ is so much more perceptible that we feel we have wasted the effort on the /h/. Generally, we don't drop too many sounds like that.

Also, don't eat dessert before finishing your meat and potatoes.

Thanks. But I want to know what is the meaning of "don't eat dessert before finishing your meat and potatoes"? Is it an idiom? I guess that you ask me "Please learn the basic technique first, then learn the difficult one, right?

[konungursvia]

Right. You're spending so much time on funny little oddities, when there are the fundamentals to master. If your Cantonese accent has disappeared to the point that people think you were born in Vancouver, great! Let's talk about the finer points. Otherwise, let's do what you said was your goal, and work on pronunciation in terms of frequent norms, rather than exceptions.

[reckless05]

tyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy