I want to know about your English learning environment. When and where do you most often learn English?
Do you study in the morning when you wake up? At night in bed? On your lunch break?
Do you like to listen to lessons on your phone while you're jogging? Do you take an English class at a university? Or do you meet up with a language exchange partner once a week in a coffee shop?
Please share your English study habits in the comments!
EnglishClub.com has announced their 2011 "Site of the Year", and thanks to you, PhraseMix won!
Thanks so much to everyone who voted in this competition. Because of your help, PhraseMix won by a landslide.
Voting helps a lot. When we win an award like this, new people find out about PhraseMix and visit. They tell their friends about it, and the site grows. The faster the site grows, the more learning material I'm able to create for you.
If you've never visited EnglishClub, you should go check them out. It's a huge site with all kinds of material for learning English. The site really does have a "club" feeling, with people of all different ability levels helping each other out.
In related news, the results of the Macmillan Dictionary Love English awards were also announced. We didn't win that one, but ended up in about 4th place. Thanks to everyone who voted in that contest as well.
If you're a good reader in English, try to challenge yourself with this article from Wired magazine:
Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong
The article gives three main suggestions for improving your ability to learn:
The article is pretty hard to read, but it's written in a casual tone. I think you might enjoy it. Have any questions about it? Ask them in the comments!
Out of all the PhraseMix example sentences you've read, what's your favorite one? Why is it your favorite? Because it was new to you? Because it's funny? Because it perfectly fit a situation that you've encountered?
If you need to refresh your memory, here's the index of all the past PhraseMix lessons.
Leave your answer (with a link, if you can) in the comments!
What does it mean to say that something is "wrong" in English? Sometimes PhraseMix readers ask me things like "Is this sentence correct?" and I have trouble answering directly. That's because there are actually several different meanings of the words "correct" or "incorrect", "right" or "wrong".
Here are some of the different categories of "incorrect" English that I've found:
Something that people just can't understand is "unintelligible".
Here's an example of unintelligible English:
"If me and if we don't you have know me find."
Huh?
You might speak unintelligible English if you're drunk, or if you're trying to talk about something that you don't have enough ability to explain.
If your English is "unintelligible", you'll probably find out quickly because people will make strange faces and ask you to repeat yourself.
When your words are "misinterpreted", it means that someone thinks that they understand you, but actually they don't. The message that they understand is different from what you meant to communicate.
For example, you can easily be misinterpreted when you're talking about days and times:
"Let's meet next Saturday."
If you say this on a Monday or Tuesday, you might mean the Saturday 4 or 5 days later, but the person you're speaking to would probably think that you meant the following Saturday.
This type of incorrect English can be tricky, because you might not find out that your words were misinterpreted until much later.
My wife is a non-native English speaker. A few times a day, she says something that makes me smile because of how funny it sounds. Like if I'm cooking some spinach, she might ask me:
"Did you wash the leaves? We don't want any sands in it."
This is funny to me because "leaves" is a funny word when you're talking about food. I imagine leaves on a tree, not spinach in a bowl. Also, "sand" is uncountable, so it sounds funny when she says "sands". I imagine trying to count each little piece of sand stuck to the spinach.
You probably make a lot of mistakes like these. In fact, you might not be able to avoid them even after studying for many years. You should try to improve these errors, but they're not as big of a problem as unintelligible or misinterpreted English.
Why do native English speakers have to study English grammar in school?
It's because we all pick up language habits which are common, but frowned upon. In other words, some people speak that way, but other people frown upon it (meaning they don't like it).
A good example of English that's frowned upon is the word "ain't" to mean "am not":
"I ain't had a meal that good in a long time!"
Picky people will tell you that this isn't correct English, but a lot of people use "ain't" every day.
People learning English as a foreign language might think that they should avoid expressions that they hear are "bad English". But it's good to remember that some "bad English" is actually really useful.
As a native English speaker, I use words and phrases incorrectly all the time!
I do this because I want to sound new, fresh, and different. For example, when someone asks "How are you?" the standard answer is:
"Good! And you?"
But that's a little boring to me, so I often answer:
"Magnificent!"
That's a strange and unexpected answer.
Sometimes it's fun to say things the "wrong" way to give your words a different flavor, as I've written about before.
The categories listed above are in order from the worst to the best. What kind of "wrong" English do you use most often?
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