Hi, this is Susan Broder from Speak Languages and Travel the World here to help you improve your English with minimum effort and maximum benefit. Now do you ask for a stick, a stick or a stake when you order a piece of meat at the restaurant? The importance of pronunciation is always underestimated as some students have mind discovered when they ordered a steak at the restaurant and had to point it out on the menu because the waitress hadn't understood them. So you can't rely on spelling to know how to pronounce a word. You have to find out how it's pronounced. And the easiest way is to look it up on something like word reference where you can listen to the pronunciation in British, English or American English. And so a stick is a long piece of wood while the stake is a piece of meat and a stake just doesn't exist. Hope that was helpful. Bye!