PhraseMix Premium

Because of some technical reasons, I had to launch PhraseMix Premium with the audio player way down at the bottom of each lesson. It wasn't a good spot for it, because you couldn't read the sentence and look at the illustration while you listened.

Now the technical issue has been fixed, and I'm going to start putting the audio player closer to the top of the lesson. Try it out on the latest lesson.

One difference: if you get logged out of your Premium account, you won't see the big gray box any more. You'll still see the audio player, but you'll be sent to a sign-in screen before you can listen to it.

This change is going to be slowly added to new lessons going forward. If you find any technical problems, please let me know. I hope you like it!

One PhraseMix Premium user mentioned that this sentence was difficult to hear in the audio clip:

The last thing I want is for you to feel like you can't open up to me about this kind of stuff.

The difficult part was "is for you to feel". Can you hear it?

To help, I split up the sentence into smaller parts. Listen to it again:

By popular demand, I've added a "downloads" section for PhraseMix Premium users:

http://www.phrasemix.com/downloads/

So far there's just one file with all of the sentences from the past week. It's not much, but I'll be adding more as time goes on.

A couple of PhraseMix Premium members have asked about getting a way to download lessons. I've been thinking about how this should be formatted, and I'd like to get your feedback.

Single files

It would be pretty easy to make all of the separate sentence files downloadable. I see a few problems with this:

• Would it be useful to listen to just the sentences by themselves, without seeing the illustration or reading the situation and explanations? It seems confusing to me.
• There are a lot of files, and they're all really short. If you loaded them all into your music player, you'd end up with a really long list of files. It would be hard to navigate and keep track of where you are.

Click to read more ...

This week, I'm celebrating Thanksgiving with my family. In honor of Thanksgiving, I posted a list of phrases for thanking people in English.

But what does it sound like when people thanks each other? Here's a collection of past PhraseMix lessons that involve thanking someone:

No, I packed my lunch today. Thanks, though.

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A long time ago, I used to include video clips with some PhraseMix lessons. I thought I'd bring it back for the Premium members. Take a look at some real-life examples of recent phrases in use.

any (something) that comes along

In this video, the speaker is talking about how Google prevents spam. He uses the phrase "any fad that comes along". I introduced a similar phrase in the lesson "We can't take in every stray that comes along."

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Yesterday I posted some "Mystery words": words taken from the middle of sentences. Here are five more. See if you can guess what each set of words is. Then check to see if you were right!

#1

The mystery phrase:

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I posted a version of this to non-Premium members as well, but you get the enhanced version!

The way that people pronounce words in English sentences can be very different from how they pronounce the same words by themselves.

The 10 audio clips below are short groups of words taken from the middle of a sentence. See if you can guess what the speakers are saying. Then hit the "Show answer" button to see if you were right!

#1

The mystery phrase:

Click to read more ...

Here's another breakdown of a complex sentence. This time it's this one:

I urge everyone to take advantage of the free flu shots being offered this week.

I urge you to listen to it!

So is there anything you'd like to urge the other PhraseMix Premium members to do?

The most recent lesson, "Unfortunately, the people who seem to get ahead are the ones who know how to kiss ass the best.", is a little complicated. Here's the audio recording broken down into smaller pieces again:

This time, instead of playing the pieces in order like last time, I started with a simple expression and then added more pieces onto it. Which method do you like best?