Languagelab.com Blog

Gamer is a noun for a person who plays games. Until recently a gamer was someone who played and enjoyed role-plays
(in which you take on a fictional character and create a
target=”_blank”>role) or war games (in which you play military games).
A gamer is now the word for someone who plays a lot of computer games and is very good at them. They are able to think quickly,
make decisions and react to their environment, and some say that gamers may do very well when they learn or practice English,
because of the very fact that they are able to make logical and quick connections between ideas and the world around them.

In the context of this word, and its meaning, there are adjectives that you can use before it to make more phrases. Some are:

• console, game
• handheld game
• pc game
• video game

Interestingly enough, gamers have a special phrase for people who like games with simple rules and who don’t like to spend a lot
of time playing computer games. They call them ‘casual gamers.’ The phase for the opposite of a
casual,
gamer is a ‘hardcore gamer’ which means that they spend most of their free time playing video or computer games.

Of course there are many other games but we don’t always call the people who play them gamers. This is now mainly used for the
players of online, computer or video games.

Is it only teenage boys who play video and computer games? Research has shown that 40% of gamers are female and that the
number is rising. My favourite game is Scrabble but I don’t think I’m a gamer.

This post isn’t only about some gamer vocabulary. I’m not a normal gamer but maybe I’m an English gamer because I’m helping Languagelab experiment with
English learning activities
which have gamer ‘rules’. It’s really really interesting. In fact students who have tried it out found it
addictive,! Imagine that -addictive learning :-)))

Digg.com

StumbleUpon

facebook

Important! Read this blog quickly, before you look up difficult words.

To improve your reading skills, it is sometimes a better idea to find the main point of a paragraph, chapter or even the book.
To do this, you could ask say or ask yourself:

• This mainly deals with …
• The main idea may be expressed as …
• The title that best expresses the ideas of this paragraph is …
• The writer wants to tell us that …
• The best name for this story is …

Last month, I gave you part of the opening paragraph of Eva Luna (by Isabel Allende). Here is the first paragraph, again,
but in full. As you read it, try and complete the sentences.

My name is Eva, which means “life,” according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a
shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy,
because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory. My father, an Indian with yellow eyes, came from the place where
the hundred rivers meet; he smelled of lush growing things and he never looked directly at the sky, because he had grown up beneath
a canopy of trees, and light seemed indecent to him. Consuelo, my mother, spent her childhood in an enchanted region where for centuries
adventurers have searched for the city of pure gold the conquistadors saw when they peered into the abyss of their own ambitions.
She was marked forever by that landscape, and in some way she managed to pass that sign on to me. (Allende, published by Knopf, 1988)

This paragraph is a little complicated and, in my opinion, there is more than one idea. Here are my answers. What do you think?

• This mainly deals with an explanation of why Eva is such an unusual person.
• The main idea may be expressed as how it is possible to have a rich and a poor life.
• The title that best expresses the ideas of this paragraph is (perhaps) ‘Drama, Comedy, History’
• The writer wants to tell us that Eva is a good story-teller.
• (One of) the good names for this paragraph is ‘Where I was born’ or ‘My parents.‘

This tells us that there are no wrong answers. Think, read and then think again.

Digg.com

StumbleUpon

facebook

Hello everyone,

after my post last week to get you thinking about vowel sounds in English, I promised you a joke related to pronunciation. Often it is hard to understand English jokes when you are learning English. Here are seven simple jokes related to pronunciation which all contain an interesting learning point.

1. What do you call a pig with three eyes?
2. What goes Oh, Oh, Oh?
3. Where do you find giant snails?
4. What starts with E, ends with E and only has one letter?
5. When does the (English) alphabet have only 25 letters?
6. What happens when “you” and “I” are gone?
7. What letter of the alphabet is an insect?

1. At Christmas time, because it is the time of Noel.
2. Only 24 letters are left
3. A piiig.
4. An envelope.
5. On the ends of their fingers.
6. B
7. Santa Claus walking backwards.

1 – c, 2 – g, 3 – e, 4 – d, 5- a, 6 – b, 7 – f

Explanation

• Q: What do you call a pig with three eyes?
  A: A piiig. It doesn’t have three ‘eyes’ but three ‘i’s!
• Q: What goes Oh, Oh, Oh?
  A: Santa Claus walking backwards. … Because he is a happy guy he is normally laughing “Ho, ho, ho”
• Q: Where do you find giant snails?
  A: On the ends of their fingers. … This depends on a feature of English pronunciation where it is difficult to say where
  the sound of the 1st word ends and the sound of the 2nd word begins so is it
  “giant
  snails”
  or “giants’ nails“?
• Q: What starts with E, ends with E and only has one letter?
  A: An envelope…. The word ‘envelope’ begins and ends with the letter ‘e’ and an envelope is what you use to post a letter
• Q: When does the (English) alphabet have only 25 letters?
  A: At Christmas time, because it is the time of Noel. …The synonym in English (and many languages) Christmas is Noel which sounds like “no ‘L’”
• Q: What happens when “you” and “I” are gone?
  A: Only 24 letters are left. … Similar to the previous one. you=the letter “u” and I the letter “i”.)
• Q: What letter of the alphabet is an insect?
  A: B. … the letter ‘B’ is pronounced like the word ‘bee‘

These jokes and some others can be found at this site for EFL teachers The Internet TESL journal.
More jokes here.
Languagelab is not responsible for the content of outside sites.

That’s all for now. Next week is grammar. Yummy!

Digg.com

StumbleUpon

facebook

Digg.com

StumbleUpon