23 Comments
Wow, I actually wrote "black exam" even though it makes absolutely no sense. Good for me.
It's not always a multiple-choice type of exercise. Different forms of the exercise go to the same discussion page. Also, the wrong options to select are random, so could be different than the ones you saw next time that you get it.
Am I the only one that thinks at "prov" sounds completely difference than it seems like it should sound?
The p sounds a lot like a b sound to me, and the v sounds non-existant.
Edit: If I listen very closely I can hear the missing sound at the end, and then it doesn't sound weird to me. Just not sure if it's my own non-native ears or if it's a TTS error.
That's interesting. Exam, as in school/university exam is almost always reffered to as "prova" in portuguese. The only differences are the O sound, and of course the A in the end.
en svår X vs ett svårt X.
You add the t to the end of this adjective to make it neuter gender because it wants to match the word it is modifying, which in this case is the "ett word" prov.
On this page I see it is translated as "a difficult exam". In the exercise it is translated as "a hard exam". Same meaning, but I think it should be "an hard exam". But when I give "an hard exam" as an answer it is said that it is fault.
Well, for most speakers it would be completely wrong to say "an hard" because we pronounce the /h/ in hard. There are some dialects, most of them in England, that would say it like "an ard" as you seem to want but it's not standard in RP (UK) nor in Gen Am. English.
I learned to write "an" if the word after it starts with a vowel or an h- and to write "a" in all other cases. Is it more complex in reality?
It's not complex. An is only before vowel sounds.
/h/ is not a vowel sound but if it's silent then the word starts with a vowel sound and so requires an.
I think that rule is old-fashioned. The only phrases where that is even remotely acceptable nowadays are 'an hotel' and 'an historic [occasion, day etc]'. However, most of the time people use 'a' even for these words.
So, in general I would advise always using 'a' with h-words. I'm a UK English speaker.
