SYNONYMOUS OF... (OTHERS WAYS TO SAY...)

ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD

ONLINE ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION PRACTICE

Here you can find collected some interesting links to practice English pronunciation online:

- BRITISH COUNCIL PHONEMIC CHART

- BBC: Pronunciation tips.

"LET HER GO", PASSENGER

 "LET HER GO" by Passenger, an English singer and songwriter called Mike Rosenberg, who keeps his artistic name from the band which separted in 2009. Here's the official video, the audio with on screen lyrics and the video with English/Spanish subtitles.

Video "LET HER GO", Passenger:

Audio+letra/lyrics "LET HER GO", Passenger:


Video "LET HER GO", Passenger+subtitulos:

EVERY DAY ENGLISH IMMERSION

There's no doubt that the best way to learn a language is spending time in the country where it's spoken.  It will improve your fluency skills and it will give you the cultural context of the language, too.  Listening to spoken English in the classroom is completely different to listening to it on the London streets.

But nowadays it's quite easy to get some immersion in English every day in your own home. Here are 5 practical tips on how you can immerse in English easily every day.

[Taken from The WorldIsYourOyster]

1- LEARN A LITTLE EVERY DAY. Learning a language takes practice. The more regularly you practice, the better you'll improve. The best way of getting this practice is having a daily routine. A little every day is better than once a week. 20 or 30 minutes a day will be enough.

2- LEARNING BELONGS TO YOU. Choose what you're interested in. If you don't like reading, don't read books in English. But if you love football, immerse into football, looking up sport articles in English, watching football matches in English or listening to sport boradcasts.

3- READ ONLINE MAGAZINES, ARTICLES & BLOGS. Immersing into English now is so easy as there is lots of online information avalaible. Online newspaper and magazine articles are a quick and effective way of getting your daily dose of English. Again choose from your interests.

4- WATCH TV SHOWS & FILMS. There are many TV shows streamed and on demand on the internet. Watch films on DVD, you can watch them with English &/or Spanish subtitles. 

5- LISTENING TO MUSIC & POSCASTS. Songs are a wonderful way of practice you English and listening skills. if you prefer to listen to spoken radio programmes you can listen 6/or download podcasts.

Whatever you choose, the most important thing to remember is to make your immersion experience fun, practical and convenient.

HAIR-STYLES

Look at this picture chart to check on vocabulary about different possible hairstyles or vocabulary related with hair.

Hair basics:

WORLD TEACHER'S DAY 2013

Once again, it's Teachers' Day. We remember previous post of this day in our blog.
- 2012.
- 2011.
- 2010.
- 2009.

Link to the official UNESCO website: WORLD TEACHER' DAY.
Link to unesco.org.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE "-S" ENDING

Here's another post devoted to pronunciation. Pronunciation in English because there aren't many fixed rules for it. But the few there are must be known. One is the pronunciation of final regular verb "-ED" ending. And in this post you can see the rule to pronounce plural noun endings, 34d person singular "-(E)S" endings and "'S" possessive endings. At the same time you can check on plural spellings, too.

Video "-(E)S" ending pronunciation:

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Can you read this? Believe it or not, it's English...

THE ORDER OF ADJECTIVES

Here you have some charts of how to order adjectives before a noun in English.

Remember:

ADJECTIVES IN ENGLISH GO BEFORE THE NOUN.

ADJECTIVES IN ENGLISH DON'T HAVE PLURAL.

THE PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE: HOW IT COULD HAVE SOUNDED

What did our European ancestors sound like?
Professor linguist Dr. Andrew Byrd has recently reconstructed his own recordings of Proto-Indo-European language, the language which our ancestors in Europe would have been speaking between 4,500 and 2,500 B.C. 
All the information in this link from The Huffington Post.

Here take a listen of what it could have sounded like:

Here's the phonetic transcription:

Here's the passage translated into English:
A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Galician version of this post @ ArquivosDoTrasno.

GOOGLE'S 15th BIRTHDAY

Today's Google's fifteenth birthday. September marks 15 years since graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up a small web crawler from a garage in Silicon Valley, which went onto become the world's biggest search engine.

The site was originally called BackRub, but was changed in 1997 to Google - a misspelling of the word googol which is a term for the number one followed by one hundred zeros.

There is a little confusion around when Google's official birthday is, but reports claim papers to incorporate the company were filed on September 4 1998. The company became incorporated three days later and the domain was registered on September 15.

Google, however, now officially celebrates the event with a Google Doodle on September 27. 

The site is now the world's number one search engine and its name has become so synonymous with searching, it is now used as a verb in its own right in trhe English language.

Below the video of the interactive animated doodle that Google has created to celebrate the day.

(Information from MailOnLine)

Video Google 15th anniversary's doodle:

Galician version of this post @ ArquivosDoTrasno.

EUROPEAN DAY OF LANGUAGES 2013

The European Day of Languages is celebrated today, 26th September, as proclaimed by the Council of Europe on 6 December 2001, at the end of the European Year of Languages (2001), which had been jointly organised by the Council of Europe and the European Union. Its aim is to encourage language learning across Europe.

The general objectives of the European Day of Languages are to:

• alert the public to the importance of language learning and diversify the range of languages learned in order to increase plurilingualism and intercultural understanding;
• promote the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe;
• encourage lifelong language learning in and out of school.

In keeping with these rules, people, young and old, are encouraged to take up a language, or take special pride in their existing language skills. Also, those responsible for providing access to language learning are encouraged to make it easier for people to learn a range of languages, and to support policy initiatives to promote languages.

There are about 225 indigenous languages in Europe – roughly 3% of the world's total. Most of the European languages are of Indo-European origin. Since the end of the 18th century, the most widespread language of Europe (both in terms of geography and the number of native speakers) has been Russian, which replaced French. Counting only native speakers, approximately 150 million Europeans speak Russian on a daily basis, followed by German (approx. 95 mil.), Turkish (approx. 80 mil.), English and French (each by 65 mil.), Italian (60 mil.), Spanish and Polish (40 mil. each), Ukrainian (30 mil.) and Romanian (26 mil.). As far as foreign language studies are concerned, English is currently the most popular foreign language in Europe, followed by German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

Video "European Day of Languages":

Galician version of this post @ ArquivosDoTrasno.

THE PERFECT LANGUAGE LEARNER

WELCOME BACK...

Today's the first day of the 2013-2014 school year. Once again we open up this blog to give students opportunities to keep in touch with English in context.

This course, I'll be teaching 1st ESO & 1st BAC, so many entries will have focus on them, but you know that the blog is open to everybody.

So welcome back to you all and good luck.

September brings in a new academic year where kids will be moving class, meeting new classmates and teachers.

• In the UK, schoolchildren wear school uniforms with their school’s badge sewn on their blazer or jumper. Every year parents have to buy new uniforms (children have a habit of growing out of their uniforms with lightning speed!). Most of these uniforms consist of a blazer (jacket), a pair of trousers or shorts (boys), skirts (girls),shirts, jumpers, cardigans, socks and shoes. Every school has a different uniform with specific colours.
• Then there is the school stationery to buy, for example, exercise books, pencils, sharpeners, pens, rulers, erasers, scissors, highlighter pens, pencil sharpeners and pencil cases. Anything else I’ve forgotten?
• The start of school sees an increase in traffic on the roads especially with parents doing the school run in their cars. Some walk to school accompanied by their parents, normally mothers, when they are in junior school. As soon as they reach secondary school (13 years old), they do NOT want to be seen any where near a parent!

AN INCORRECTLY PRONOUNCED OLYMPIC SPEECH

Unfortunately, Madrid didn't get the Olympic Games after its third bid in a row. Now everybody is considering the reasons why. One of the possible reasons is that our politicians either can't speak English very well or don't even speak it at all.

The Mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, tried, but her pronunciation isn't very good. Here's a video of her speech with "funny" subtitles.

Video Ana Botella's speech at Buenos Aires last Saturday:

Links:
 - OTHER RIDICULOUS MOMENTS OF SPANISH VIP SPEAKING ENGLISH.
- THE REASONS WHY SHE DID IT WRONG (In Spanish).
El español tiene isocronía silábica -todas las sílabas duran más o menos lo mismo-, mientras que el inglés tiene -isocronía acentual-. O para que lo entiendan 'English is stress-timed; Spanish is syllable-timed'. O sea, para que suene a inglés-inglés las sílabas que no llevan acento no se deben pronunciar apenas, y en ellas la vocal debe perder su sonido característico.
Dado que la Regidora de Madrid no domina las peculiaridades de la fonética inglesa, convierte 'nuestra amistad' -'our friendship' pretendida- en 'nuestro cordero amigo ' -'our friend sheep' [audio]-, simplemente por acentuar la vocal que no debía.

2013-2014 SCHOOL YEAR IS ABOUT TO BEGIN...

Breaking news summer update: TRAIN CRASH IN ANGROIS (SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA)

Listen to the information of Angrois-Santiago's train crash in English on these videos:

HAVE A NICE SUMMER!

This blog closes down once again for the summer holidays. Hope you have a good break and charge your batteries for the next course. Enjoy! See you again in September.

SIMPLE PAST vs PRESENT PERFECT ( CONCEPT & SIGNAL WORDS)