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Your daily dose of English, now in a handy (get it?) app
Digital technology and the internet as a whole is not one of Germany’s strong suits. This starts in schools, where the current pandemic only highlights this predicament: when schools first had to close, all of a sudden everybody was forced to use computers to learn. Unfortunately, schools were not prepared and in many cases the…
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Idiom of the Week: A fly on the wall
Invisibility is a super power many people have daydreamed about. IGN ranks it as the second best super power – just after the ability to fly – and it is easy to see why this ability is so sought after. It would allow you to find out what people really think about you, or how…
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Idiom of the Week: the elephant in the room
Animals stuck in rooms are apparently a great source for idioms. Remember our post about there being „no room to swing a cat„? Today we will finally address the elephant in the room. Parts of this idiom are fairly straightforward. It is easy to imagine a standard living room, and it is easy to imagine…
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Weekly Poem: This living hand, now warm and capable
This living hand, now warm and capableBy John Keats This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And…
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1066: the Norman Conquest, bury your fury for the English language
When you first started learning English, you may have struggled with some patterns. You may have realised that there are a good number of words that are not pronounced the way you expected, in fact, there are words that are spelled virtually identically, yet pronounced differently. Why are the words fury and bury pronounced so…
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Weekly Poem: To His Coy Mistress
Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood,…
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Weekly Poem: Lost
Lost by David Wagoner Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside youAre not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,Must ask permission to know it and be known.The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,I have made this place around you.If you leave it, you may come back…
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Order of adjectives
A few years ago, a tweet addressing word order went viral. It is rare to see Grammar resonate with so many people, so let us have a look at what was going on:
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Vowels 3 – r-colored vowels – definition and examples and explications
Another area of pronunciation in which varieties of English can be distinguished is in the phoneme /r/. This is not only true between nations like Great Britain and the U.S., but also within them. Within the United Kingdom the pronunciation of /r/, or rather, how it affects the preceding vowel sounds, differs from shire to…
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Vowels 3 – Diphthongs – definition and examples and explications
Before you tackle this lesson, take some time to do a bit of research. See what you can find out about varieties of English spoken in North America. This needn’t be a vast amount of in-depth research, just spend about 20-30 minutes learning about what kinds of ’non-standard‘ English you might come across in: the South, the…