The Blog
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...
How to think in English: put in the time!
A user on the UsingEnglish.com forum posted a question that got me worked up to respond:
How to thinking in english....???
When I practise to speak english. I always repare a sentence with a native language then I translate it to english to speak.
I knew it wrong for speaking english. But how...
"Will", "Going To Do", and "Doing" - why learners get them wrong
Here's a little example of something English learners get wrong that I attribute to a failure of textbooks and teachers to properly reflect the way language is used.
I've been spending a lot of time recently hanging around Lang-8.com and helping people out by correcting their journal entries....
The Importance of Not Being Thorough
This morning I was trying to think of some phrases that use the word "face" to show to someone and did a quick Google search. One of the results I came across was this: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/32/messages/937.html
I think that this is fairly typical of phrase lists and...
Uncommon Common Phrases
I was going through a list of English phrases that I collected from watching TV, reading online articles and so on. I came across this one:
Are we still on for Saturday?
As natural an English expression as one could hope for, but not something I expect to hear from my students or friends...
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