Learning English Blog

If you're reading this, then I can assume that you're not a kid and your English level is at least higher than pre-beginner. And, consequently, you're not fond of elementary studying materials and books just for kids. But I assure you that kind of kids' stuff can be rather interesting, enjoyable and helpful for you too.

What I mean by kids' stuff is two kinds of materials.

The first one is different "Learning English for kids" courses and other things, such as educational books, different tests, video and podcastings, games (especially online flash games). It can be seems as a rather senseless pastime, but believe me, it isn't. Why? It's easy. Easy for kids, so, of course, it's easy for you. And when it's easy, it's more enjoyable and less tiresome.

Are you a cinephile? I hope so!

And if it so, then IMDb.com (the largest Internet movie database) could be rather interesting for you.

IMDb is a really great project. As a movie fan, I'm loving it very much. I'm not fond of a kind of bestsellers movies, and in this case IMDb helps me a lot by providing an ability to find not so well-known movies but truly more interesting and qualitative ones (as for me, of course).

But wait a minute, how can it help us with learning English?

As I promised before, I'll post some music video with lyrics from time to time, approximately one video on ten other posts. And for today we have Let It Snow! by Frank Sinatra.

The song was written by lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne in 1945 and soon became a popular Christmas hit (nevertheless, Christmas doesn't mentioned in song's lyrics at all).

However many famous singers performed this song, the classic one without a doubt is by Frank Sinatra.

Enjoy!

For the English learning beginners the small vocabulary is a rather common problem. It's not so important in spoken language, but when you write it becomes a real trouble, especially if you write something longer than short posts or comments. The same words, repeated in each and every sentences, or at least rather frequently - isn't a good style. Furthermore, it's kind of hard to read such texts and, of course, poor vocabulary articles doesn't give any trust.

Unfortunately, it's need to admit that for success in learning English you should read a lot. No, really, a lot.

Blogs, forums, different articles and so on - it's all, of course, good and necessary... But not quite enough.

You should read books. Many, many, many books. Dozens of them. Regularly. Read over and over again for years. And yes, besides of getting a real progress in learning English, with every book you've read, you will become a more educated person as well. It cannot but agree that all well-educated people read a lot. And to know foreign language perfectly means to be well-educated too, isn't it?

The Internet gives us a great opportunity in many ways. And learning English is not exception. Last years' trend - social networks - can be rather helpful too. And they are.

Let's talk about twitter and reasons why it could be helpful for us.

Twitter is kind of blogging platform, or more exactly, "microblogging", 'cause the maximum length of each post is just 140 characters. But it's not a disadvantage. On the contrary, it's the main advantage. A really great advantage.

And here is why.

"Study English IELTS Preparation" is an educational series which may help you to pass IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam or at least give you a favour in learning English.

There are 3 series, 26 episodes in each series, ~10 minutes per series. The presenter is Margot Politis.

In the first and second series considered different topics such as global warming, electronic crime, eco-systems, etc., and after watching a little piece of TV news or other program, discussed vocabulary and grammatical issues being used in this video. The third series is more educational - vocabulary exercises, writing tasks and so on.

Wikipedia is a really great project, which can help us a lot with learning English. Practically all wiki articles are good quality with no grammar or other mistakes - it's worth to admit that it's a big value for the project with user generated content, on other social sites such as forums, blogs, social networks and so on, almost always nobody watching users' language and correct mistakes. With wikipedia you can be sure - all articles have no mistakes. And of course wiki in most cases contains well structured and useful information, so it's easy to find what you really want. And besides learning English, wiki helps you to improve your education as well.

As you know, wiki is not only a wikipedia.org but a bunch of different projects. Let's take a look at all of them (or at least at most important for us, as our main purpose is to learn English).

From my experience, rewatching something is a pretty useful thing for learning English.

It's so because of two main reasons.

First of all, when you watch some movie, tv-series or something like that, you don't even try to understand all speech, you're just watching it. If you understand more than, say, 60-70 percent of all talking, you simply enjoy watching movie and do not strain yourself to understand each and every word. But when you rewatching movie you try to watch it more attentively, 'cause you already know the plot and now try to follow all details which you didn't notice for the first time. So you try to understand more words, truly meaning of the words depending on the context and situations, and so on.

This is a very tiresome to find out meaning of each unfamiliar word in a dictionary. Its draw your attentions away from reading and, furthermore, takes too much time.

Fortunately, there is a great solution: Google Translate service and several tools based on its functionality.

I think you're familiar with Google Translate. So, it's time to use features to translation on-the-fly.