If you have good listening skills—we’re talking about native English—but you’re not confident in your grammar, have a look at Grammar Monkeys. It’s a blog—a podcast, really—run by the Wicheta Eagle, which is an American newspaper. At Grammar monkeys, you can hear fast and simple explanations of the kinds of grammar rules that are difficult even for native speakers. . . after all, it’s made more for Americans than for English learners!
Again, if your English is pretty good, but you’d like to work on your pronunciation, have a look at the American English pronunciation blog. There’s a lot on the blog that tries to sell accent reduction classes. . . and I’m all about the Internet being free. But, there are also a lot of good tips on how you can work on your own to improve your accent. Give it a look!
Do you know of other great online resources that should be mentioned? Let me know, and I’ll include them!
]]>For those of you who need really specific vocabulary, there’s a list of online dictionaries: many of them are for specific fields or topics. Two of the dictionaries are ‘visual dictionaries,’ and I think I should mention them specifically. A visual dictionary is great if you’re trying to use English ‘directly.’ By ‘directly,’ I mean without using your native language. If you think this could be for you, check them out:
Another stop you should make on the Internet is to Anne’s ‘Island Weekly,’ where she talks about learning English with a reflective journal. In the blog post, she makes an offer to help guide you in the journal-making. I say take it up with her! Writing practice is easy to find. Corrected writing practice is harder to find.
One of the things I don’t do enough of here is talk about idioms. They’re a big part of English, and I know I need to do it more. And I will. If you need to learn about idioms now, though, here’s a good website to explain idioms to you. You know I’m a fan of listening practice. . . and you’ll get listening practice here!
Have you found anything I should add to my lists? Let me know!
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There have, of course, been other great additions to the Internet. Some of it comes from How-To-Learn-English which I’ve linked to often, because. . . there’s often good stuff there! From How-To-Learn-English:
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Laughing All the Way to the Bank. Some really good bank idioms.
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Lose The Battle, Win The War. Some of my students think the U.S. talks too much about war. That may be, but here are some idioms from battles and war that you can use in a lot of other situations, too.
And I have two links for you from other English blogs. Check out these tips for English learners:
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Greeting Someone After A Long Time from English-at-home.com. Here are some phrases you can use for . . . well, just what it says: greeting someone after a long time.
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Y’all Use The Plural of You? From EnglishSpark.com. If your native language has a plural form of the word you, you might think it’s strange that there is no formal ’second person plural’ in English. Here are some of the ways that we use slang to talk about it.
Coolenglishpodcasts.com
A podcast is sort of like a radio show that is automatically delivered to your computer. You can get them on almost any topic, but if you’re learning English. . . well, you’re in luck: there are a lot of ESL (English as a Second Language) podcasts out there. And I want to recommend one, in particular: coolenglishpodcasts.com It’s more than just a podcast, it’s a website with plenty of listening content.
Do you use podcasts to learn English? Are there any you’d like to recommend?
Blog Posts
Bite-Sized-English isn’t the only blog out there that tries to help you learn English. I’ve already linked to How-to-learn-English several times and today I’m going to link to it again, today. Another blog that has some good resources is Learn English Online. The job interview preparation link below is from them.
Here are this week’s blog links:
- Lose the Battle, Win the War. Idioms with ‘battle’ and ‘war’ in them.
- Job Interview – Positivity is the Answer. If you’re looking for a job in English, this post includes some of the more common interview questions, plus advice on how to answer them.
- Lauging All the Way To the Bank. More idioms, this time with a ‘bank’ theme.
Are there any other blogs you recommend for learning English? I’d be glad to learn about them!
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If you think your English is pretty good–nobody’s is completely perfect–here’s a website for people who are ready for some pretty impressive grammar: Grammar Girl.
“Grammar Girl” is a website that’s more for native speakers–that’s right, even we make a lot of mistakes–so it includes podcasts on pretty tricky grammar points. If you’re still having trouble getting basics the verb forms, or sentence order, right, you might not be ready for Grammar Girl.
But, if you’re English is pretty good and you’re worried about keeping it good, not making it good. . . then the Grammar Girl might be good for you. Give it a look.
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For languages learners, the options you have can often seem endless. Many of my students dream of going to London, New York or Los Angeles to perfect their English. But, I advise all of them to pay the extra money to go as a part of a language learning program.
The reason is simple: if you go to the U.S. as a tourist, you’ll mostly use tourist Enlish: “How much does that cost?” “I’d like a beer, please.” That kind of thing. The problem is that you can practice that kind of thing in your own country. That’s why language programs can be so invaluable: not because they teach you English (but that’s good, of course) but because they give you a chance to connect with the ‘locals’ on a much deeper level.
And, believe me, that’s worth the extra money.
How do you find programs like that? Google is full of them, but I’ve found another website that lists a lot of programs to learn English (and other languages) according to which country you’d like to learn them in. It’s Study-Languages.com And it’s worth a visit.
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This entry is the beginning of the “Garden Fresh” series. The other posts in this series are:
This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class.This entry is spoken, so that you can listen to it while you read. (MP3) |
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We say that something (usually a fruit or vegetable) is ‘garden fresh’ when it comes directly from the garden. The only tomatoes I like, for example, are garden fresh tomatoes. I can’t get enough of them. Because I love fresh tomatoes so much, I have a small container garden on my balcony every year. You’ll hear more about that on Friday, in the listening quiz. Tomorrow and the rest of this week, we’ll be talking about gardens and gardening.
I thought it was a topic that fit well with the beginning of spring. This way, if you’re out in your garden working, you’ll be able to think about what you’re doing in English.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about what a garden is, exactly, and Wednesday we’ll talk about the verbs we use in the garden. For those of you who—like me—don’t have a garden. I don’t want you to think that this will be a week of vocabulary that you can’t use. A lot of this vocabulary also applies to areas of your life outside the garden. And Thursday we’ll learn several idioms that come from the garden—maybe we can call them ‘garden fresh idioms’—but that you can use in several different contexts.
And, just like I promised in the first paragraph, on Friday I’ll tell you about my own gardening attempts—all the gardening we can do in an apartment—and there will be questions on everything you learned this week in the listening quiz.
For the week, though, it might be good to have a little bit of vocabulary for gardening. Here are three words that you will need to discuss your garden. . . and to understand the rest of what happens this week.
Vocabulary
Plant: We all know what a tree is. It’s what you get an apple from. But is a tree a person? Of course not! Is it an animal? Nope. A tree is a plant. In fact, any living thing that gets its energy from sunlight can be called a plant. (Biologists might call me crazy, but for normal people, I think that’s a good definition.) Your garden is where you take care of the plants that are important to you.
Seed: Plants don’t start life as babies. They start life as tiny seeds. You put seeds into the ground and give them water and they grow into plants in your garden. For most gardeners, the cheapest way to buy plants is to buy seeds.
Weed: You want your garden to be full of plants. But you don’t want just any plants, you know exactly what plants you want in your garden. The problem is that the plants that seem to grow most are the ones you don’t want. These are weeds. A weed is any plant that’s growing where you don’t want it to grow. I don’t know why, but it always seems as though weeds grow faster than the plants you want. Most gardeners spend a lot of time taking the weeds out of their gardens.
Photo Credit
The photo above is from Flickr. It was taken by Laura (& Garrett), who made it available under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Laura and Garrett!
Here are this weeks links:
- Study English News – A site that offers you news–and help–in English. They even have the news in different levels.
- Perfect English Grammar – Because you can never get enough grammar, right?
- English Idioms and American Socializing – Here is a list of a lot of ’standard’ idioms that I’ve used since I was a kid. The blog is right: these idioms are so common that they’re almost cliché. But you’ll want to know them!
- If you looked into a crystal ball, would you see a ball and chain? – Here How to Learn English explains two more common ‘ball’ idioms.
What do you think? Will any of these sites be useful? Do you have any favorite sites that I should include in the next list? Let me know!
]]>If you’re using English for business–or just want some more idioms–How To Learn English has two great pages:
If there isn’t enough listening for you on Bite Sized English–or if you want to hear other speakers–have a look at Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab for a lot of listening exercises. I think the site is a little bit confusing, but maybe you’ll think it’s perfectly logical.
Did I miss something you think is really great? Do you run an ESL blog or website? Tell me! I’ll add it!
]]>- BBC Words In the News: This is a site from the BBC that includes short news stories. . . and at the end, there are explanations of the words and phrases in the stories.
- How To Learn English- Ball Idioms: Karenne from How To Learn English does a great job explaining English idioms, with a special focus on business idioms. I’ve heard myself use a lot of the ‘ball idioms’ she explains here. Good stuff!
- The English Teacher Online has a good guide to using a, an, and the. This is a trouble spot for a lot of English learners and it’s a thorough explanation.
- Learning Resources from Literacynet.org is a collection of news stories in full length and in an abridged, or ’shortened,’ version. With each story is a collection of quizzes you can take online to see how much you’ve understood the news story. Also, there are quizzes on the vocabulary in the story.