No Job for a Woman? Mind your Language!

Question:  Is there anything wrong with the following sentences?

1. It's important for a doctor to be good at listening to his patients.
2. Sometimes a manager needs to make decisions that will be unpopular with his staff.
3. A nurse knows that she has a lot of responsibility for her patients' welfare.
4. If someone wants to become a scientist, he needs to study hard at school.

Answer:  It depends what you mean by 'wrong'.  Grammatically, they're all fine.  However, to many English-speakers, there's something just a bit... uncomfortable... about them.

Simply put: why are the doctor, the manager and the scientist automatically men, while the nurse is a woman?  Aren't women doctors too?  And men nurses?  In English it's now customary to include both genders in statements like these - it's polite, even!

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/

The Christmas Post

Merry Christmas!  I'm off for a couple of weeks, but will be back blogging again in January.  For now, enjoy your holiday (if you have one), and enjoy this video of a rabbit opening a Christmas present:

See you in the new year!

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.

Improving your Reading skills in English

A lot of students ask me how they can improve their reading skills.  They typically say that they read a lot, but it's very slow, and they just don't seem to get better at it.  Most of these students always read in the same way in English - slowly, and with a dictionary in the other hand for the words they don't know.  This is actually quite bad for your reading skills, but more on that later...

What I tell these students is that they need to practise reading in different ways, to get better at different reading skills.  In particular, they need to practise Fast Reading and Slow Reading techniques.

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.