PhraseMix Articles

The 25 most famous English movie quotes

This is a list of the most well-known movie quotes in American culture.

You should definitely learn and memorize these quotes. Not only are they useful as English sentences to practice; they're also useful because English speakers quote them all the time! It's common for someone to drop a famous...

The 50 most important English proverbs

What are proverbs?

Every culture has a collection of wise sayings that offer advice about how to live your life. These sayings are called "proverbs".

How can you use proverbs to learn English?

It's good to know the really common English proverbs because you hear them come up in conversation all...

13 qualities of a great athlete in English

This article is about some qualities that great athletes have. It will teach you some useful words and phrases for describing people in English.

Some of these phrases apply only to athletes, but a lot of them can be used for talking about successful people in all walks of life.

Phrases...

How do you use the words "clothes", "clothing", "apparel", "garb", and "attire"?

When it comes to a group of synonyms like "clothes", "clothing", "apparel", "garb", and "attire", how do you know the differences between them? If you look them up in a dictionary, you'll probably get definitions which seem to point to each other. For example, here's one definition of "attire"...

English for talking about clothing: shirts

Can you name all of the shirts in the image above? Scroll down to find the answers!

Types of shirts

A. a tank top / a wifebeater ("Wifebeater" is a slang term for a white tank top for men that's meant to be worn under other clothes. It's called this because in...

How far should you go to avoid mistakes?

This week, I wrote about the concept of fossilization. This is the term for when your language ability "freezes" and stops improving. You keep making the same mistakes over and over.

I got the idea to write the article from a blog post on the interesting site Keith's Voice on...

Fossilization

A "fossil" is something which used to be alive, but has now turned into stone. Dinosaur bones are fossils, for example. The process of turning from a living thing into a rock is called "fossilization".

In language learning, "fossilization" is when a learner' bad speaking or writing habits become...

Learning through explanations and learning through examples

When some aspect of English confuses you, what should you do about it? Should you ask a teacher or consult a book? Or try to figure it out for yourself?

If you've been reading PhraseMix for a while, you probably already know what my answer is going to be. In the past, I've written about why you...

Describing a divorce in English

Divorce terminology

When a married couple decides that they don't want to be married anymore, they get divorced.

Sometimes the couple will separate first without getting legally divorced. This can also be called a "trial separation". If they can fix their problems, they might reconcile, which...

What's the difference between "still better", "better still", and "better yet"?

I recently got this question on Twitter:

@phrasemix Speaking of still, do still better,better still and better yet have similar meaning?

— Sergio Rodrigues (@serpiro) June 26, 2012

The answer is "no". Here's what each of them means:

Still better

Use this when something was better before,...