Vocabulary

As there are elections taking place shortly in both Spain and the UK, this week we’ll look at idioms related to elections.

The United Kingdom is due to leave the European Union on 31 October, so “everyone” is talking about Brexit. But do you understand all of the funny new words and phrases they’re using? In this post, we explain what some of the most common ones mean.

So you’ve written hundreds of flashcards, you’ve read for hours and you’ve watched all 15 series of Grey’s Anatomy in English. You even looked up most of the words you didn’t understand in a dictionary. Now it’s time to actually use the words you’ve learned, by speaking and writing.

Most people enjoy watching TV and films, so it’s a very attractive way to learn a language if it works. Many people believe it does: the fact that most programmes in Spain are dubbed is often given as a reason why the Spanish don’t learn better English.

English spelling and pronunciation are famously difficult. Whoever established the official spelling of English words was either drunk, mad or both. One of the consequences of this is that there are lots of homophones – words with completely different meanings and spellings that sound exactly the same.

In our last post about building vocabulary, we talked about flashcards and spaced repetition. This time we’ll look at reading. It may be one of the most obvious ways to expand your vocabulary, but it’s also one of the best.

It’s that time of year again: Christmas parties, shopping for presents, spending time with your family and eating too much food. For most people, it’s a time to have fun and enjoy yourself. For others, it’s above all an important religious festival. And for yet others, it’s all overrated: “Bah! Humbug!” as Scrooge famously says in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Unsurprisingly, most English idioms that refer to Christmas assume it’s a happy time of year.

When learning a language, it’s obviously important to learn grammar and to practice speaking and listening. But without vocabulary, you won’t get anywhere. To be able to communicate effectively and understand what people are saying, you need to know lots of words. For many people, this is the single biggest challenge. In this first post about building vocabulary we’ll look at two of the possible approaches: vocabulary lists and spaced repetition.

When learning a new language, one of the first things you learn is how to greet people. With English, you’ll be taught “Hello”, “Hi”, “Good morning”, “Good afternoon”, “Good evening” and perhaps “How do you do?” However, when you meet native English speakers, or watch English television programmes, you quickly realise that there are lots of other ways to say hello.

We’ve been having some fairly extreme weather lately. Here are some English idioms related to weather with an explanation of what they mean.