English Diary 2026
0810 All of my British and American friends have clear pronunciation and are relatively easy to understand, which certainly helps. Even so, there are still times when I hear familiar words perfectly well but fail to recognize them immediately. I have done a tremendous amount of listening practice over the past two months, but I clearly need more training. Of course, I probably have not yet caught up with someone in their second year of studying abroad in the UK or the US. When it comes to English on social media, there seem to be quite a few people who cannot resist acting as though the subject belongs exclusively to them and that they have to be the one to explain everything. On the other side are people of roughly the same generation who try to silence them by appealing to the prevailing orthodoxy. The confrontation between these two camps seems endless. What I find particularly amusing is that both sides consist largely of middle aged English learners who spend an enormous amount of...