As you can see, punctuation is very important, especially if the comma is missing from the following:

Let’s eat, Grandma

This is like an invitation to your grandmother saying something like “Hey Grandma, why don’t we have something to eat.”

HOWEVER…

If you don’t put the comma there, it becomes

Let’s eat Grandma

Here is sounds like you are telling your friends or someone else, “Hey, we should eat my grandmother.”

So, do you want to be cannibal? No?
Then don’t forgot the common.

Punctuation is important!

Today, February 14th is Valentine’s day.
We have created a page to help you learn English about Valentine’s Day including:

• The origin of Valentine’s Day
• Things you can do on Valentine’s Day
• Traditional Valentine Gifts

We have also created a fun interactive game about Valentine’s Day to test your English Vocabulary and Valentine’s knowledge in general.

One of the questions in the quiz:

Q: For Valentine’s Day, Some people give a box of _____.
A) worms B) chocolates C) dirty underwear D) fingernail clippings

See, it is easy and fun with lots of new vocabulary.

Have a great day!

Then you might want to try our interactive game about Australia:
www.vocabulary.cl/Games/Australia.htm

Since Christmas is almost here we decided to give you an early present.
We created a Word Search activity that can be downloaded for personal use and also for teachers that want to use them in class with their students.

You will be able to find a link to it at the end of the page about Christmas Traditions.

Hope everyone has a great Christmas.

How do you celebrate Christmas in your country? (…if you do)

The following is an example of what to expect in Task 1 of the Academic version of the IELTS exam. In this sample you will see a bar graph.

Woodward Chocolate Bars

You should spend about 20 minutes on this task.

The graph below shows the quarterly sales figures of Woodward chocolate bars for last year.

Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

Write at least 150 words.

What is the difference between Travel and Trip?

These two words frequently confuse learners of English.

A quick explanation that is valid for most situations is the following:

Travel – a verb (the action)
Trip – a noun

Susan’s husband isn’t in town at the moment; he is on a business trip. He travels to many different countries. Susan met her husband on a trip to the Bahamas.

Travel – to go from one place to another
Trip – a journey that is often for a short period of time.

NOTE: There are some exceptions to the general rule above.

Travel can also be a noun when it refers to the act of traveling.

• Travel is difficult in that part of the country since there are no paved roads.
• Travel broadens your mind.

Sometimes Travel appears in plural form and in that case is normally preceded by a possessive adjective (my travels, his travels etc.)

• She has had many adventures in her travels.
• I have never seen any as strange as that in all of my travels.

Trip can also be a verb though it has a completely different meaning.
To Trip – to accidentally stumble and almost fall while walking or running, usually after catching your foot on something.

• He didn’t see the cat and he tripped up.

Trip vs. Journey

A trip usually refers to traveling to a place and returning back to where you started.
A journey usually implies traveling from one place to another (not necessarily returning to where you started). It sometimes refers to the length of time taken to go from one place to another.

• They went on a journey through South America that lasted 6 months.
• It is a three-day journey by train.

Some more uses of the word Trip

A day trip usually refers to a tourist activity that occupies your entire day.
A business trip is when you travel for business reasons.
A round trip means to travel somewhere and return to place of original, there and back (= a return trip)

What is the best trip you have ever had?

The distance doesn’t matter; it is only the first step that is difficult.
Marquise de Deffand, 1697 – 1780

Vocabulary

To matter – (verb) to have significance or importance

Thoughts on the Quote

Distance is referring to a journey towards a particular goal.
The quote is suggesting that the initial step is often more challenging (and difficult) than the process or journey itself.

Many times people want to achieve a certain goal but never actually do anything about obtaining it. It’s sometimes easier just to think about doing it than actually doing it. They don’t like to leave their ‘comfort zone’ because it involves a bit of work. If you want something in life you have to START doing something to get it instead of just thinking / fantasizing about it.

Is there a particular goal you want to achieve?
What is stopping you?

The Joke

Waiter: How did you find the steak sir?
Customer: Oh, I just moved the potato and there it was!

Vocabulary

To find = (verb) in the context of this joke ‘to find’ means to have an opinion on something. It can also mean to discover the location of something.
Steak = (noun) a thick, flat piece of meat used for grilling

Why is it funny?

A polite way of asking someone’s opinion of something is to say, “How did you find the…?” which is how the waiter has asked the customer about his steak.
The customer has misinterpreted the question as, “how were you able to discover the steak” and has given his opinion accordingly.

Must have been a small steak!!

Have you seen our other joke about a customer at a restaurant?

What do you like to order when you go to a restaurant?

Redundant Letters

One of the most difficult things in English is spelling and pronunciation. Because English is a mish mash of Latin, Old English, French, German, Greek… in fact every language in Europe.

There are a lot of odd spellings for words which originated from other languages.

As the pronunciation of these has become more ‘anglicized’ the pronunciation of the letter has been dropped but the spelling kept. For example, think about:

answer – dumb – gnash – gnome – knife – plumber – wrong

In fact in any word beginning with gn, kn or wr, the first letter is almost certainly silent!

There are loads of words in the English language like this, many ending in a silent ‘E’ (but not the magic ‘e’ which changes the pronunciation even if you don’t pronounce it).

Have a look at this (long) list of the most common words with redundant letters:

above, answer, appear, are, base, beauty, before, blow, blue, book, build, colour, come, correct, country, course, develop, does, done, door, early, earth, enough, every, eye, family, field, figure, flow, follow, foot, friend, full, give, good, govern, great, group, grow, have, head, heard, hour, house, island, knew, knife, know, laugh, learn, leave, listen, live, love, low, measure, minute, more, move, often, once, people, piece, pull, ready, room, rule, said, serve, several, show, slow, snow, some, stood, sure, their, there, though, through, thumb, took, true, watch, were, what, where, who, whole, wood, world, write, you, young, your.

Which letters are redundant in the above words?
Can you think of any more? (think about days of the week and months of the year)

The Joke

Customer: Waiter, what do you call this soup?
Waiter: It’s bean soup, sir.
Customer: I don’t care what it’s been. What is it now?

Vocabulary

Bean (noun) = a common vegetable
To call (verb) = to name
Soup = cooked food in a liquid form
Been = Past participle of the verb To Be
 

Why is it funny?

Been (past participle of To Be) is pronounced the same as bean (the vegetable). The customer thinks the waiter is using the present perfect tense and saying, “It’s (It has) been soup”. In other words, it was soup in the past, but it is something different now. The customer wants to know what it is in the present tense. Really the waiter is saying however, is that “It is bean soup”.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes
Oscar Wilde

What is experience?

The process of gaining knowledge or skill over time by seeing or doing instead of by studying.
Study is theoretical, Experience is practical.

What are mistakes?

An action that is not done correctly or words that are wrong. An error.

Have you learnt an importance lesson from one of your mistakes?

The difference between Million and Millions

Which of the following sentences is grammatically correct?

A: New Zealand has a population of four million people

B: New Zealand has a population of four millions people

The first sentence (A) is correct and the second sentence (B) is incorrect. Why?

English students often get confused about when to put an S on the end of words like hundred, thousand, and million. Below are the rules:

Million

When we have large numbers or a specific number, we do NOT put an S at the end of hundred, thousand, and million.

We say five thousand (correct)
NOT five thousands (incorrect).

Sometimes we say a hundred instead of one hundred and a thousand instead of one thousand (and the same for a million).

Remember, when we are talking about an exact number (e.g. one million, eight thousand, two hundred and sixty-four), we do not put an S on the end of any of the numbers.

Millions

We can use an S at then of hundreds, thousands, millions etc to express an approximate figure.
This gives people an idea of quantity but not a precise amount.

In addition hundreds/thousands/millions etc are often followed by of + countable noun
As we are using plurals here, you should never put A in front of hundreds, thousands or millions.

Compare:

• He won a million dollars in the lottery
  = He won exactly $1,000,000

• He won millions of dollars in the lottery
  = He won an unspecified amount but it was in the millions.

We often use hundreds/millions etc when we want to give the impression of ‘very many’ and we are often exaggerating, using the numbers as a figure of speech.

e.g.

I went camping in Australia and returned with hundreds of mosquito bites!
This is obviously an exaggeration but it gives the impression of very many.

I went camping in Australia and returned with one hundred mosquito bites.
This gives an impression that you literally have one hundred bites on your body. It sounds like you counted them since it is a specific number.

See our vocabulary notes about Numbers in English.

You don’t drown by falling in the water. You drown by staying there.
Anonymous

Vocabulary

Drown = to die in a liquid (usually water) because you cannot breathe. It normally happens when water (or other liquid) enters the lungs.

Grammar

By + Gerund = to describe how to do things = to say how something can happen
You can improve your English by watching movies in English.
You can find the answer by clicking on the blue button.

Thoughts about the quote

With this quote you can compare “falling into water” as being in a difficult or bad situation.

When you are in the water what are your options?
You can stay there, do nothing and eventually drown, or you can try and do something like swim to safety, or call for help or find some other solution so that you are no longer in the water.

When you are a difficult situation what are your options?
You can stay there, do nothing and eventually “drown”, or you can try and do something / find a solution to get out of that situation.

Some people when they are in a difficult situation, they spend more time complaining about how bad their life (or situation) is without doing anything. No amount of complaining or doing nothing is ever going to make things better. Don’t wait for external events to improve; YOU have to make a decision and take steps to improving your own situation!

So what do you do when you are in a difficult situation?

To lose my train of thought

= to be talking and then suddenly forget what you were talking about.

Examples

- Yesterday I… oh look, there’s a bird at the window. Wait, what was I saying? I lost my train of thought.

- Every time she tried to tell me her story, she would get off topic and lose her train of thought. I never did hear the whole story.

Does this sometimes happen to you?

The Joke
Son: How much does it cost to get married dad?
Father: I don’t know, I’m still paying for it.

Vocabulary

To pay for something = obviously in a literal sense this means to give money in return for a product or service, but we can also use “to pay” in a figurative sense, meaning that you pay for something you have done with personal suffering.

 

Why is it funny?
The son is asking about the monetary price of a wedding, but the father has answered ironically, implying that he is suffering as a consequence of getting married.

Are you married?
How was your wedding?

Vocabulary

To keep in mind – Remember; Keep something in your thoughts. Don’t forget about something
To be on the right track – to be heading, or going, in the correct direction (on the path of life).
To be left behind – to remain after the departure of others; similar to fall behind.

Thoughts on the Quote

The purpose of this quote is to motivate you to stay focused so that you will achieve your goals. There are many people who set out to do something great with their lives, but they inevitably get sidetracked (lose their focus), lose interest, or procrastinate too long, thus never achieving their goals.

To accomplish feats in life, you must not only make the initial steps to achieve your goals, you must also continue to pursue those goals. When we get lazy or comfortable in our lives, we can give up actively pursuing our dreams. If we do this for too long, we may altogether lose the opportunity to achieve those dreams.

Summary of quote: Stay motivated and keep going!

Is there a goal that you have not been actively pursuing? What is it?

Irony and Ironic Statements

Irony is a technique used in English to emphasise a point using the opposite (or deeper) meaning of something. It can be used in many situations but most often it is used to be comical. For example:

The world’s full of apathy, but I don’t care.

Apathy is the state of indifference – not caring about something either way. The statement is negatively saying that the world is full of people who don’t care (who are apathetic) but the speaker doesn’t care – he is being apathetic himself.

Irony is similar to sarcasm, which is saying the opposite meaning of something for effect. For example:

Brilliant, I’ve been fired!

Shakespeare often used irony in his plays. In Romeo and Juliet:

For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men

The quote (spoken by Marc Antony) is reporting that Brutus (a tyrant) is an honourable man.

However, Marc Antony does not agree and is saying that if Brutus is an honourable man then everyone is honourable; in effect, he is no different than anyone else (and is indeed worse).

Think about these ironic statements. What do they mean? How are they ironic?

• On one hand, I’m indecisive; but on the other, I’m not.
• If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s intolerance.
• There’s no such thing as nonexistence.
• Cooperation can only be reached if we work together.
• Avoid idioms like the plague.
• An oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
• I always wanted to be a procrastinator!
• Rehab is for quitters!
• I am becoming increasingly worried that there isn’t enough anxiety in my life.
• I have this nagging fear that everyone is out to make me paranoid.

What other ironic statements can you think of?

The Quote

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

- Albert Einstein

VOCABULARY
Mistake (noun) = an error

What does it mean?
Einstein is saying that if you have never made a mistake before then you haven’t done anything new.
He is saying that doing things wrong and making mistakes isn’t a bad thing, it is simply part of the learning process. In effect he is saying that the only person who has never made a mistake is a person who has never done anything, i.e. no one!

What new thing have you done that you did wrong the first time?
Was it a big mistake or a small one?
Have you learnt from it?

Winter in England

Well, winter has arrived in Santiago and it reminds me of winter in England, especially when I was a child.

Many people have a romantic idea of what winter in England is like: snow covered rolling hills, small robins (birds with red chests) chirping on a red post box, rosy-cheeked kids breathing huge clouds of steam running around sporting woolly hats and scarves and gloves, building a snowman complete with a carrot for a nose and lumps of coal for eyes and a smile.

Unfortunately winters in England aren’t quite like that. We don’t really get much snow (the last two years have been an exception), it’s far too cold to spend much time outside and the robins aren’t chirping happily on the red post box, they have actually frozen to death and are now stuck to it, motionless and stiff.

As a hater of cold weather and a staunch advocate of global warming, there are two main things which I hate about the English winter. The first is the rain. It doesn’t come down very heavily and it rarely floods, but it rains. And rains. For weeks. And weeks. When I say weeks and weeks I don’t mean that we get a few weeks when we get a lot of rain, I mean that the rain comes down non-stop for literally two weeks, without a gap or hint of stopping. Not only does it rain endlessly but this rain doesn’t come down from the sky. This rain comes at you sideways, whipping you in the face and leaving your cheeks and forehead stinging, red raw. The wind is so strong that it stops the rain from falling vertically and hitting the ground and instead seems to blow it directly into your face, no matter which direction you happen to be trying to walk in. There’s no point using an umbrella (it would get turned inside out anyway) and there’s no point trying to see where you are going – you will be squinting, trying to protect your eyes from that driving rain.

The second thing I hate about winters in England is the grayness. It doesn’t get light until 10am and it’s pitch black by 4.30pm, which means that we have about 6 hours of daylight. And when I say daylight I don’t mean actual sunlight – it stays pretty dark, cars have to keep their headlights on at all times and the actual sun won’t be seen for months (the only trace of it is a slightly less grey cloud which you gaze at, longing for it to move so that you might actually be able to see where you are going).

So, as you might have guessed, I don’t like winters. However, the winter in England is good for one thing: it gives us something to complain about. Us English love to complain and we love to talk about the weather (while drinking cups of tea and eating cucumber sandwiches). Complaining about the weather is a national pastime and the terrible winters we suffer for 11 months of the year have unified us and brought us together as a nation with one common goal – to moan and berate the cold weather and to yearn for the summer. And what do we do when it comes to August and we get our one month of summer, when we can actually see the sun and the temperatures start to hit 20ºC? We stand around sweating, moaning about how bloody hot it is and longing for the winter!

By Tim from England

How is winter in your country?
Does it sound better or worse than winter in England?
What is your favourite type of weather?

Nick – Informal British English

The word NICK has different meanings in British English and it is always informal and slang.
Below we have included some of its uses:

To nick is also an informal way of staying To steal in British English

• Who nicked my pen? = Who stole my pen?

In good nick / in bad nick = in good (or bad) health or condition (Informal British English)

• She’s in pretty good nick for an eighty-year-old.
• Your bike is in bad nick, you should buy another one.

The nick also means jail, prison, police station (cell).

• He spent last night in the nick.

See also the English Idiom In the nick of time

Have you had anything nicked from you?