The Blog

"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...

Speaking phrases vs. Listening phrases

Ever buy a book of idioms or phrases in the language you wanted to learn? Somewhere at my wife's parents' house in Japan is a book that I bought several years ago with several hundred pages of phrases.  I tried studying some of them, but at some point tried out a few on native Japanese...

The Scrabble Method to achieving super fluency

In order to speak a foreign language well, you’re supposed to think in that language. We all know this. The idea is so widely accepted among learners that it’s almost a cliché. So why don’t we do it?  Why don’t we think in the language that we're trying to...