Languagelab.com Blog

Two weeks ago, I discussed the meaning of ‘the.’   For this week, I wanted to show you an excellent exercise I’d found on http://www.usingenglish.com.

Please do the exercise on http://www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/84.html because it highlights the fact that geographical nouns may use ‘the,’ depending on what they are.

After you’ve done that try the following:

Read this letter. Look at the ‘x’ and decide whether to use the definte article ‘the’ or not.

Hi Grammar Girl,

I arrived in x USA last Monday. We left x Rome, flew over x Alps and made a quick stop in x London. There we went shopping in x Harrods, visited x Tower of London and enjoyed a sunny afternoon in x Hyde Park. On the following day we left for x New York. x time on board wasn’t boring as there were two films to watch on x monitor. x people on plane were all Italian. Before we landed at x JFK airport, we saw x Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Empire State Building. hotel I stayed in was on x corner of x 42nd Street and x 5th Avenue. I don’t like hotels very much, but I didn’t have time to rent an apartment. Please say hello to Jessie and Chris.

Yours,

Shiv.

Answers will be next week.

See you soon,

Grammar Girl !

I’d like to continue with my discussion of ‘the’ but I’ve moved to a new flat and I don’t have broadband at home yet. This means I can only write a very brief post this week from my blackberry.  Instead, I wanted to address a common request from my readers on how to learn English.

Learning English is like learning any language. You have a few familiar words that you’ve picked up from television or films. You may even have listened to some words in songs. What do you do now? Do you wait for a teacher to tell you what to do?

There is no easy answer but I’ll suggest a few tips:

In a blog post last year, I asked you to sing along to your favourite tune.

Keep reading.

Join online English forums.

Write letters to yourself.

Go to http://www.thefreedictionary.com and read their word for the day.

Have a good week !

Grammar Girl

This week I’m going to start the first in a series of blogs on the 200 key words in English.  These are called key words because they are the most commonly used or most important words in English.  These words were developed by Scott Thornbury.  Please see http://www.tefl.net/reviews/natural-grammar.htm

Today’s word is ‘the.’  The grammar word for it is the DEFINITE ARTICLE.  There is quite a bit I could say about ‘the’ because we use it in a number of different contexts.

To put it simply, the definite article ‘the’ is used to refer to a specific instance of the noun, often already mentioned in the context or easy to identify. Definite articles are slightly different from demonstratives (like ‘this’), which often indicate the location of nouns with respect to the speaker and audience.

* “Let us look for a good restaurant.”
* “What about the restaurant at which we ate last week?”
* “That restaurant was terrible. What about this one on the corner here?”

If you are wondering about the difference between fourteen hundred hours (14.00) and 2pm, then this is for you.

There are twenty four hours in a day.  In the world clock, http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/, you’ll see that times are written this way, from zero hundred hours (00.00) to twenty-three hundred hours (23.00).

There are other ways to talk about and write about the time.  The more commonly used format is am and pm.  Am refers to the time between midnight (00.00) and noon, or technically until 11.59.  Noon (12pm) to 11.59 pm is the afternoon.  Am and pm are abbreviations for Latin (ante-meridian and post-meridian).

Of course, it doesn’t end there.  What is the difference between two thirty and half-past two?  The answer is nothing.  They are both 2.30.  You also have two fifteen and quarter past two (2.15) and quarter-to-three or two forty-five (2.45).

You’ll find http://www.teachingtime.co.uk/ very useful because it explains the differences in more detail and gives you some practice.

Until next time …
- Grammar Girl.

We’re back to the subject of commonly-confused words and this week we’ve got three or possibly even four.

Poor is an adjective, normally meaning that the person described has little money. But it has a second meaning as well which is that something is not very good.  “This is a poor effort, Kingsbury!”

A pore, on the other hand, is a tiny opening, normally on skin. It’s pores that give you acne! It can also be used as a verb, meaning you’re studying something closely.  “David pored over his books when he was preparing for his exam.”

Finally, pour means to make flow, normally a liquid.  “Please would you pour the milk?” asked Jessie.

Don’t forget that the hands and feet of animals are often called paws!  If you are from London or the South-East of England, ‘paw’ might sound like ‘pore.’

If you are worried about which word is being used, listen to the rest of the sentence or the context.

See you soon !

Grammar Girl

It’s summer here in London.  When the sun shines it shines brightly.  Oxford street is heaving with tourists, which means it’s rising up, as if pushed.  There are tourists from almost everywhere in the world here.  London is particularly popular with Japanese and Korean tourists.  A lot of single, young students come to London to shop, to have fun and to study English.  They come to the UK for the summer because they believe in a concept called ‘language immersion.’

In language immersion, you don’t follow a traditional language course to learn.  You do every-day activities in the target language.  You live, breathe and eat in that language.  In other words, you go to where it is spoken.  This is why students come to the UK.

What do you do if you can’t afford to take time off work or your studies, or if your Daddy can’t send you to Oxford Street?  The answer is that you download Second Life software for free, and you visit English cities in Seccond Life.  It’s so much cheaper.  And you can speak to real people in English.  Go to Languagelab and ask for Grammar Girl.  I’m there at least three days’ a week at 4am PDT.

I was working away on my island in Second Life and doing my best to make it easy for visitors to find their way round without getting lost. To do this I went to every location and ‘installed’ teleporter pads. If you are from my generation you’ll remember the old Star Trek episodes on the television, where Captain Kirk said ‘Beam me up, Scottie.’ Those beams looked and sounded like my teleporter.

So I ‘installed’ teleporter ‘pads,’ which means I placed objects round the island. These objects would ’send’ people from one object to another, without the person having to move on their own. All they would have to do would be to ‘right-click’ on the object and select ‘teleport. Thus, ‘teleport’ is a verb and ‘teleporter’ is a noun.

Once you have chosen a location (or as we might say ’selected a location from the menu’ or selected a location from the ‘list’) you click on the word that says ‘energise.’ This squeezes you into a little ball and sends you to another location.

These space age words have become common vocabulary in virtual words. Here they are again:
install
teleporter
pad
teleport
menu
energise.

If you haven’t been to Second Life before, you might want to visit this virtual world so that you can experience what these words mean. You can to do that by going to http://www.secondlife.com. But Captain Kirk would probably say that he’s been using these words for years.

Scott Thornbury is a teacher, teacher trainer, text book writer and an inspiration to many people and this is why I suggest that when you’re trying to decide on what English language learning book to buy, you look for one that he’s written.

If you go to his website you’ll not only be able to find the right book for you but you’ll also be able to follow him on ‘twitter (write to jessie@languagelab.com if you want to know more about what ‘twitter’ is and how to do it).

Scott Thornbury encourages teachers and students to think about the best way to learn vocabulary and grammar.  He refers to something called ‘collocations.’  A collocation is a grouping of words in a sentence.  When we learn which groups of words go together we may find it easier to put phrases together.

For example, do we say ‘turn on the button’ or ‘push the button?’  Do we say ‘watch television’ or ’see television?’

In my next blog, I’ll be looking at collocations,

See you next Monday!

Grammar Girl at Languagelab

What is this:?  I am not asking you about the question mark.  I am asking you about the two dots that came before the question mark.

A colon is a type of PUNCTUATION.

Use a colon

We use it before a list, summary or quote.

1) Before a list.
I could only find three of the ingredients: sugar, flour and coconut.

2) Before a summary.
To summarise: we found the camp, set up our tent and then the bears attacked.

3) Before a quote.
As Jane Austen wrote: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

We also use it to complete a statement of fact.  It adds a little variety to your writing and allows you to experiment: it is used in place of the following or thus. Here is an example:

There are only three kinds of people: the good, the bad and the ugly.

If you would like to continue to learn about the colon try reading newspapers, books or articles and observing if and when the colon is used.

Teachers of English use lots of strange words that may not always seem clear. The words are used as a ’short cut.’ They’re labels that educators define so that next time you hear the word you can understand the whole meaning behind it. I suspect that if you asked a teacher of English they might not always be able to explain ALL the words in a way that would make you understand them because the meaning is too technical or has been misunderstood.

Take the word TENSE, for instance. I still have nightmares about the time I first started teaching and said to my students ‘Today we’ll look at the present perfect tenses.’ I hadn’t realised that they would need more than an explanation of the ‘present perfect’ when a student said ‘Miss Miss. What does ‘tense’ mean?’ I knew what it meant and how to use it but I couldn’t explain it in a clear and simple manner for an elementary student. I said ‘Er … erm … when we look at the present perfect the meaning of the word ‘tense’ will become clearer.’

Today I’m giving myself a second chance to explain the NOUN ‘tense’ and here it is:

It is an expression of a location of an ACTION in TIME.

Does that help? Of course there is much more to it than that but as long as you remember that it is about the time or the ‘kind’ of time, you’ll be all right.