I have to disagree. talk is correctly pronounced like t-al-k (like saying tall and adding a k) same with walk w-al-k (again like wall with a k) otherwise you would say tak and wak. Again I'll say that a lot of it has to do will accents that people have but the "L" in talk and walk is not supposed to be silent.

I have a problem with a lot of words that people are saying have silent letters in them.

Someone said that the "i"'s in Hawaii were silent when in fact the Hawaiian language is polynesian and built upon pronouncing each letter and the letters often sound like the way you would say them in spanish which means that the two i's together sound like an e... making ha-why-e.

a word like "talk" or "walk" You would have to have the l's or you would end up saying tak or wak.

vogue was used at some point for the e to be silent but really the e is what makes the word sound like va-oh-g/ugh. with out the e you get vo-goo.

often was used for the t, while it is arguably pronounced either with the t or with out the t and correct either way... the word often comes does from old english "oft" which would mean the original way to say often would be off-ten.

basically what I'm getting at is that just because you don't think you say the letters you see you actually do need them to make the letters surrounding them sound correctly. a word like psychology technically does not need the p to sound the same to us,( but the root word psykhe was Greek and they needed their trident looking letter (Psi) in order to spell psykhe... thusly why the p is there in the first place. )

Also... just about everyone has an accent (of some kind or to someone from another area) and will pronounce things differently upon where they grew up and how they learned and developed speech patterns. Lots of times we think there are silent letters in words simply because of the way our brain visualizes things. For instance studies have shown that your brain can actually see the shape of words (outline of the whole word... esp in words that we know well) and instead of you reading each individual letter you actually instantly know what the word is by shape. It is like if you see the out line of a tree you know that it is a tree. You see the word "the" and you don't have to tell your brain "ok the t next to an h makes a thhh sound and the e makes an eee sound so that is thheee... the". So when our brain visualizes things and we don't read each letter it is easy to say "Apple" has a silent e when really if the e was not there the word would be pronounced more like you were saying "appel" which still has an e in it but CAN be silent.

lol... sorry... i got a bit carried away there... XD