Ah, the bane of every non-native speaker’s existence!  The dreaded “can” and “can’t.” In American English, you need to use contractions in order to sound natural.  Unless you are trying to emphasize your point (along the lines of “I can NOT believe she just did...

Placement of stress in a sentence is critical when trying to get people to understand your meaning and to arrive at that understanding quickly and easily.  Against gut intuition, the main emphasis or stress in the sentence does NOT go on the most important word. A...