A Taste of Home

When you're away from home, food can be one of the biggest things you miss.  Eating unfamiliar food is an adventure for a while, but sometimes you just want a taste of home.  There's a good reason we talk about comfort food.

In a British city it's usually possible to find international supermarkets, while some countries like Italy and India are well represented in mainstream supermarkets as well, and many local high streets now have Eastern European shops.  In more rural areas though, international food can be harder to find.

But if you can find the right ingredients (and have access to a kitchen), preparing your own food and cooking for others can make you feel more at home, and help you share your culture.  Why not have an international dinner party with some other students?

Learning vocabulary about food can be surprising - you may find that some foods from your country are called the same thing in English, or that there is no English word for them at all.  Pizza is international!  So are sushi, samosas, moussaka, tagine and tapas.

For cooking in English, as well as finding your ingredients, you need to know what to do with them.  So here is a handy set of kitchen verbs to help you.

So, what foods from home do you miss most when you're away?  Can you get food from your country in the UK?  Do you ever cook for your friends?  Please leave a comment below - I'd love to hear from you!



Photos taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @thornburyscott, @grahamstanley, Christina Martidou and @sandymillin, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0

Why record yourself speaking?

You want to get better at speaking English, but how?

Well, you do have a powerful communications device in your pocket.

Oh yes, that device.

You know that recording yourself speaking is a great way to judge where you're currently at with speaking, and measure your progress. So why aren't you doing it already?

Here are the most common reasons why, and some tips to help you start.

All work and no play... Experiencing British culture during your study visit.

So you're in the UK, studying hard for your language exam.  You're constantly thinking about vocabulary, grammar tips and listening practice, and free time is a distant memory.

Students hard at work

Then one day your teacher asks you a practice speaking question:

"Can you tell me about an arts performance that you attended?"

And.... your mind goes blank.  Performing arts?  When was the last time?  Back in school?  Before that?  Never?

So what do you do?

Confused by -ing and -ed adjectives? You won't be.

Two students are sitting in a lesson, trying hard to stay awake.  Student A turns to Student B and whispers "I'm boring."  Student B replies "I'm bored too."

Which one of them is right?  Do you get confused with -ing and -ed adjectives too?

New Year's Resolution: improve my English

Did you make any New Year's Resolutions last week, as the clock ticked towards 12, the fireworks started and people everywhere tried to remember the words to Auld Lang Syne?  If your resolution was to get better at English, what are you going to do next?

Actually, it doesn't really matter what your first step is, just as long as you do something.  You could...

• look up language classes in your local area
• find out whether studying in an English-speaking country is a possibility
• set up a new social networking account that you'll only use in English
• download a language learning app for your phone
• beg, buy or borrow a book in English to practise your reading
• start a blog
• try to meet English speakers socially to practise conversation
• do what you love - look for English videos, groups and sites relating to your hobbies and interests

And whatever you do, practise, practise, practise.  Time, effort, and repetition will all help you to improve.

Congratulations!  By taking that first step and finding a way to incorporate some more English into your daily life, you are already doing better at keeping your New Year's Resolution than most of the population!  Now for the second step, and the third...

Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @eltpics, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Little differences that make a big difference

Sometimes in English it's possible to say a sentence that is perfectly correct in terms of grammar, but doesn't mean quite what you intended.  So, why not try this quiz - it could save you some misunderstandings in future!

A quick language quiz (with answers):

1) You walk up to someone and say 'What's the problem?'  What are they likely to do in response?

2) You walk up to someone and say 'What's your problem?'  What are they likely to do in response?

3) You're talking about your job, and you say 'I work like an accountant'.  Are you a qualified accountant?

4) You're talking about your job, and you say 'I work as an accountant'.  Are you a qualified accountant?

5) Your friend says she's going on holiday for three days.  When does she leave?

6) Your friend says she's going on holiday in three days.  When does she leave?

Is that priceless or worthless? Confusing words part 2

Two pictures of priceless objects, and two of worthless objects - but which is which?  This is one of those cases where the English language can seem totally illogical.  You would expect priceless and worthless to be synonyms, but in fact they're opposites.

Here's why:

The suffix -less means not having ______

• A useless thing is something that doesn't have a use.
• A homeless person is someone who doesn't have a home.
• Something worthless does not have worth - in more natural English, it isn't worth anything.

So in our picture, the bags of rubbish, the broken umbrella, and the dead fish are all worthless.

Something that is worth a lot of money is very valuable, so you would expect to pay a high price for it.  But for something completely unique, like the vases in the top-left picture, or the helmet in the bottom-right, are even more valuable than that.  In fact, they are priceless - they are so valuable that they do not have a price.  A synonym for priceless is invaluable, which means that something isn't possible to value, or decide the price of in money.

Memory is the most important... err...

Is it important to have a good memory to learn another language well?  Hopefully the answer is obvious, since learning a language involves learning:

vocabulary - individual words like cat, library or superstitious;

word patterns - regular verbs like stop / stopped, irregular ones like throw / threw / thrown, and word families like confide / confidence / confident / overconfident and so on;

grammar rules - like using the past simple and would + the infinitive when you make a second conditional;

pronunciation - the 's' in island is silent, and the 'ed' in stopped sounds like 't';

intonation patterns - how to sound interested, or bored, or confident, or like you're asking a question;

'chunks' of language that can be used automatically in relevant situations - like 'You're welcome' or 'Can I take a message?'

and so on.

But how good is your memory, actually, and how can you make it better?  Like anything else, memory skills will improve with practice, so here are some tips and techniques for memory practice that are sure to have an impact.

IELTS Ahead? Read these tips first!

Preparing for an exam that is important for your future is not something that many people enjoy, and IELTS is no exception.  Just a few short papers can determine whether you get a job, university place or visa, so the pressure is on!  Fortunately there's lots of good advice out there about preparing for specific parts of the IELTS test, along with practice questions, model answers and video material for the speaking test.

This post is not more of the same.  Instead here are four tips of a slightly different kind, which are mostly related to you and your motivation:

Confusing words: fun / funny, typical / traditional

Learning a language can be like climbing a mountain sometimes.  At the base, all you can see is the first bit of the path, so you start out confidently.  After a struggle, you get to the top of a steep climb, and suddenly the mountain looks bigger.  You climb and climb again, and all you can see is more of the mountain.  Is there even a top?  The higher you go, the more the mountain seems to grow, as you start to understand more and more of the size and complexity of the language.

And let's face it, the English language can be pretty confusing at times.  There are vast numbers of words that are synonyms, or near synonyms, or sometimes synonyms and sometimes not.  So what's a student to do?

Getting More out of Google

If you’re reading this, it’s very likely that you use the Internet to help you study English.  But are you making the best use of it?  How do you find sites that provide good quality information?

Whether you’re a digital native or a technophobe, you probably use Google most times that you go online.  For some of you, that will be several times a day, especially if you are a smartphone user.

Here are some tips for getting more out of your Google searches as a language learner: