Archive for 'English Language'
Famous movie quotes in English Posted by Gabriele on Jan 27, 2015
Famous lines from movies (or movie quotes) are a fundamental part of everyday English language and culture. People often remember famous movie lines and use them in their own lives when the moment is appropriate. Often people quote movie lines, but don’t even know what movie the line comes from, they have just heard the…
Using the diminutive in English Posted by Gabriele on Dec 30, 2014
Many languages have a special way to talk about things (usually people) with tenderness, love, endearment, or familiarity – this is usually referred to linguistically as the “diminutive.” A diminutive form of a word implies that something is small, cute, loved, or special. It is often used when referring to children, but as I already…
Commonly misunderstood words in English Posted by Gabriele on Dec 18, 2014
Take a look at this great infographic from Gammar.net. This is a wonderful list of 10 very commonly misunderstood words in English. To help you better understand these words I have used all the words from this infographic in sentences below, in order to put them in context. 1. The enormity of the villain in…
English metaphors and idioms about life on the farm Posted by Gabriele on Dec 4, 2014
Nowadays, most Americans don’t live on farms. Even though most Americans don’t live or work on farms anymore, farm life and idioms about this life are still part of our everyday vocabulary in English. So, today I am going to present a number of metaphors, idioms, and expression that have to do with life on…
November Numbers: What are ‘empty numbers’ in English? Posted by Gabriele on Nov 25, 2014
This is the last post in a series of four posts that have looked at numbers in English. So far we have looked at some special numbers (i.e. the number 7), different names for certain numbers, and tips for remembering how to use ordinal numbers and spell some tricky numbers. Now, we are going to…
Check out some advice on how to learn a new language from trained translators Posted by Gabriele on Nov 13, 2014
The slogan for the Technology Education and Design (TED) organization is, “Ideas worth spreading.” Well, I have some great ideas for you about language learning from TED – and these ideas are definitely worth spreading! First let me tell you a little bit about the TED organization, which is really a great resource for you…
November Numbers: English numbers with special names Posted by Gabriele on Nov 11, 2014
Learning how to count to ten is probably something you learned very early on in your English language learning, but did you know that many of the numbers between 0-10 (and other important numbers in English) have special names? People don’t always use the traditional ‘counting names’ when using all numbers. Here we are going…