PhraseMix Articles

What is the difference between a "distant family member" and an "extended family member"?

An extended family member is anyone other than your:

• mother/father
• husband/wife
• children
• brothers & sisters

Uncles, aunts, grandparents, nieces and nephews are all "extended family".

"Distant family" is extended family that's quite separated from you, such as your...

Why you shouldn't focus on the differences between words and phrases.

People really seem to like it when I point out differences between words or phrases. This morning I sent out a Twitter message about my recent post, "I'll just be glad when it's over." The message I sent out got a lot of response - people re-tweeted it and wrote back about it, and about twice as...

Watch out for unnatural translations!

The other day I saw some discussion on a language forum about a project called "Tatoeba". This is a site where users are creating multi-language translations of example sentences. If you register for the site, you can write translations of sentences from one language into another. I signed up,...

How to memorize the phrases

I keep going on and on about how important it is to memorize phrases and other pieces of language in order to become fluent. But I realize that I haven't written much on how you memorize something.

Here's the secret to memorizing phrases: TRY to remember them.

It sounds so simple, and in fact it...

Sometimes rules don't help.

The other day on Lang-8, I answered a post about when to use "it" vs. "that". I think the distiction this poster was asking about is the type of difference that

• takes a long and complicated explanation
• has a lot of exceptions to the rule
• doesn't cause much confusion when used differently from...

A funny list of "True Meanings of Common Idioms"

One of my favorite entrepreneurship blogs, A Smart Bear, posted a list of "The True Meaning of Common Idioms". Check them out - they're good for a laugh.

I've seen lists like this before - comical explanations of what certain phrases "really" mean. A quick example:

"To be perfectly honest with...

Why Memorize? My theory of "hook phrases"

I want to expand a little more on why I think memorization is so important for lanuage learning.

What is memorization exactly? It's different from simply "remembering" something. When you "memorize" information, you focus on it and repeat it over and over. That's how kids learn to say the...

Memorizing and understanding

Learning a language is primarily about remembering lots of different words and phrases in that language. But as I pointed out in an earlier blog post, the word "learn" has more than one meaning. There's learning how a bike works, and then there is learning to ride a bike. The first kind of...

4 common mistakes English learners make

In my last post, I pointed out that the kind of mistakes that you read about on the Internet are mistakes that English speakers make, not ones that English learners should watch out for. So the obvious question is: what should English learners look out for?

Before I present my list, I should warn...

Native speakers' mistakes ≠ learners' mistakes

I sometimes browse through Twitter looking at things with the #English hash tag to re-tweet out to my followers. Today I came across this one:

I clicked on the link, and found pretty much what I expected to find: a list of mistakes that English speakers make in written English. These are...