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Three Tips for Learners

When not teaching English, I try to teach myself a little Polish or Spanish. It's the former I struggle with more. Polish is a highly inflected language and even simple utterances can invoke several grammar rules. Take the sentence 'I drink green tea', for example. We have a subject followed by a verb, an adjective and finally a noun. In Polish, you not only conjugate the verb, but also make the adjective agree with the gender of the noun AND change the endings of both of those words as they constitute the object of the verb. Do you see what people mean when they say that Polish is a hard language to learn? I know I'll never speak the language perfectly, but no one is asking me to. Therein lies a problem when it comes to language learners' expectations: Some people want perfection; they want to be fluent and flawless. Very often, though, you can't be both. You might speak English fluently, but make a lot of mistakes. On the other hand, you might speak English pe

Why We Need Proofreaders

'To those who care about punctuation,' writes Lynne Truss in her bestselling book Eats, Shoots & Leaves , 'a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence.' The book is heavy on hyperbole and seeks to entertain as well as educate its reader, but it also highlights a growing concern among some people about a perceived decline in standards of written English. Facebook is littered with poorly punctuated comments left by folks who show scant regard for apostrophes, commas and capital letters. How many times have you seen 'it's' (with an apostrophe) in place of 'its'? It strikes me as odd that lots of people fail to observe this simple rule: Use 'it's' when you mean 'it is' or 'it has'. “Yes, but who cares?” you might say. I would argue that if we expect high standards in other forms of public communication then why not on social media websites? The pro

Introducing Shakespeare

A train threads its way through the darkening suburbs of Liverpool as bright orange flames leap up from people's gardens. It's Bonfire Night, and my fellow drama students and I are going to see Macbeth at the Royal Court Theatre. I don't remember the details of our conversation exactly, but there was some excited chatter about the prospect of seeing Pete Postlethwaite in the lead role. The memories I have of that evening are blurry at best, hardly surprising when you consider that it was more than twenty-five years ago. For anyone not familiar with English customs, Bonfire Night takes place annually on the fifth of November and commemorates the failed plot to destroy the Houses of Parliament in 1605. It is believed that William Shakespeare's play Macbeth was performed for the first time in 1606, so it's quite possible that the famous playwright was working on it when Guy Fawkes, a chief conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, was discovered in a cellar underneath Parli

Summer School Highs & Lows

There's something a little bizarre about someone peddling cosmetics at 30,000 feet above sea level. Bemusedly, I watched a heavily made-up flight attendant push her trolley full of wares up the aisle of the plane to London. Things were about to get a lot stranger. I'm not really a fan of big cities. Frankly speaking, I don't think the word 'big' does London justice; it's home to more than 9 million people, which is greater than the population of some countries, and it's estimated that 300 languages are heard among its many residents. I didn't hear anywhere near that number at Stansted Airport, but I certainly heard English spoken with different accents. After hauling my suitcase onto a crowded tube train, I headed for Euston Station, where another train would take me to the quaint market town of Sherborne in Dorset. I was to spend the next four weeks at a boarding school in the employ of Devon School of English. The summer of 2018 was one of the hott

Monolingualism in Britain

This headline from a popular British newspaper doesn't surprise me: “UK voted worst country in Europe at learning other languages.” That was in 2016, the year in which 17 million people voted to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum, triggering a political earthquake that continues to be felt today. Politics aside, though, why are Britons notoriously bad at learning another language? It's not an easy question to answer, but in this post I will attempt to do just that. Anyone who has watched the first episode of the Netflix series “Red Rose” will have seen a group of sixteen-year-old school leavers in the north of England celebrate not having to endure any more “boring” French lessons. This scene stayed with me, one reason being that I, on the contrary, enjoyed learning French at school, although there were times when I was expected to memorise long lists of verb conjugations, a rather dull process that is best avoided, in my opinion. Schools in the UK now allow pu

Of Words & Wizards

Aberto. That's Portuguese for 'open'. It's also a spell used to unlock doors in the magical world of Harry Potter, brought to us by J. K. Rowling. The hugely successful author at one time taught English in Portugal, so it's understandable that she drew some inspiration from the language spoken there. Latin and Greek also influenced the language of spells in the Harry Potter series. Where does the word 'spell' come from? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it has its roots in Old English and is similar to the Old Norse 'spjall'. However, the other meaning of 'spell', to form words by means of letters, comes courtesy of a French word that likely displaced its Old English equivalent, and if you know anything about the history of Britain, you'll know how French words entered the English language, following the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Imagine, Harry Potter fans, if King Harold had said 'Alarte Ascendare!' and sent William