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Asking questions in English

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Think about how boring your language would be if everyone spoke the same way.  If there were only one way of saying everything and if you didn’t say it that way, you were just plain wrong.  People would not be able to express their personalities and conversations would be a lot more boring.

So, we have a few different ways to ask for or check information.  Here  are a few of the different ways that you can ask questions in English.

1)      Inversion for asking Yes/No questions in English

Inversion means to swap the order of two things in a sentence.  To make a question, we often swap the subject and the auxiliary verb.  This makes a closed question so the answer is likely to be yes or no.

For example, I should go to the party becomes Should I go to the party? when you swap the subject (I) and the auxiliary (should).

If the sentence has no auxiliary such as I work hard, just add the correct form of “do”.  Do I work hard?

2)      Using question words to get the information you want

We use words like who, what, where, when, why, how, whose (+noun), which/what (+noun), how much/many (+noun) with inversion to create open questions.  Open questions are questions that ask for more information than just yes or no.

3)      Using intonation to ask questions in English

You can make just about any sentence into a question just by using the correct intonation.  Try saying, He is a doctor with standard intonation.  Now, try adding extra stress to doctor and raising the pitch at the end of the sentence and it becomes He is a DOCTOR? (sounds like he doesn’t look smart enough to be a doctor).

4)      Using tag questions to check information

We use tag questions to check information.  If I am meeting someone for the second time, I might casually say, Your name is Megan Fox, isn’t it?

To make a tag question, just add the inverse form of the auxiliary verb and the appropriate pronoun (he, she, it, they, etc).  The inverse form of the auxiliary means that if the auxiliary is positive, add the negative, but if it is negative, add the positive.  Don’t forget to use intonation on the tag to make it sound natural.

5)      What are rhetorical questions?

Rhetorical questions are questions that don’t need an answer.  When you stand in front of a large crowd and start your speech with,  Man is truly a remarkable creature. Have you ever seen a monkey programming a computer to fly a space rocket? You don’t actually expect anyone to say, Well, no, I haven’t.

A common example is, What do you think I am, stupid?  Best not to answer this question.  Ever.

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Top 5 common errors in English

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

When people learn another language, they make errors and mistakes.  Mistakes are when you know the right answer but you misspeak or get nervous and say the wrong thing or just forget.  Errors are when you say the wrong thing and don’t know that it is incorrect.  You can correct yourself on mistakes but not on errors.

The best way to improve your English is to correct mistakes for yourself.  Ask your friends or teachers to tell you if you make a mistake but not what the correct sentence should be.  If you correct yourself, you will learn and get it right next time.

If you make an error, you probably don’t know how to correct it so the solution here is to find the grammar that caused the error and to study how to use that grammar or that word.  This is where a teacher is helpful.

Most common type of error in English

One of the most common types of errors are when we assume that English is the same as our first language.

Top 5 common errors in English

Take a look at the 5 top errors/mistakes that I hear as a teacher from students from all over the world.  Can you find what’s wrong with these and correct them?

  • I am going to shopping.
  • He like to go to the movies.
  • You really should to fix your car.
  • I am go to the ski resort on the weekend.
  • I will go to upstairs.

Even students who know the correct way to say it still make these mistakes.  This means that you have a habit of making the sentence incorrectly even though you know the correct way.  In this case, you need to change your habit by saying the correct sentence more times than you say the incorrect one.

For example, if you say he like, say it correctly 5 times each time you say it incorrectly. Make 5 different sentences that use he as your subject.  Do this each time you say it incorrectly and you will change the habit.  I always tell students that it is better to speak first and then correct than to try to construct a correct sentence by applying all the rules of grammar (there are a lot).

Answers

Going shopping/he likes/should fix/I am going/go upstairs

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Introduction to idiomatic expressions

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Have you ever noticed that we don’t always say what we mean?  Sometimes we have two words that have two meanings but you put them together and they have a new meaning.  Every morning I get up at 7 o’clock.  What is get up?  I know that get means receive and I know that up is the direction of the sky but get up is not to receive in the direction of the sky, right?

What is an idiom expression?

When you put words together to create a meaning that is different to the meaning of the individual words, we create what we call an idiomatic expression or an idiom.  Idioms come from spoken language and they are basically new vocabulary that we create using old vocabulary because we are too lazy or unimaginative to think of new words.  Or perhaps because by using words that already exist, we can give a clue to the meaning.

Understanding idiomatic expressions

Some idioms are easy to guess because of the words that make them.  For example, get up (get out of bed), look around (browse), eat out (eat at a restaurant).  But beware; they may have some hidden meaning that you cannot guess.  Eat out means to go out (to a restaurant) and eat but it does not mean to eat outside (you don’t have to be under the stars).  If you eat at a table just outside your house, we say eat outside not eat out.

The meanings of other idioms are harder to guess.  For example, work out (exercise), kick the bucket (to die), give up (quit).

Idioms are usually unique to a language so it is important that you do not try to translate an idiom into your first language or you will get confused.  Try it.  Translate kick, the and bucket into your own language.  Do you get the meaning of to die?

Idioms are fun to learn and they make the language much more colourful so if you are interested to learn more, I recommend picking up a good dictionary for idiomatic expressions or Googling every time you hear a combination of words that seems to make no sense.  Enjoy.

Improving your American accent

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Ever wanted to sound like an American?   Here are three rules that will help you to improve your American accent and impress your friends.  Read through the rules and practice saying the words with these rules.  But most importantly, keep your ears open and try to tell if someone that you meet comes from the UK or the US.  Hearing the difference will help you to create that difference for yourself (whichever accent you choose to follow).

1)            Hold the T and drop the vowel.

Words that have a T and an N, such as cotton, smitten and rotten are pronounced with a “ton”, “tin” or a “ten” sound in British English where the “tt” is clearly pronounced as a “T” sound.  Pronounced with a general American accent, this “T” is held and the vowel sound is dropped so it is pronounced more like “cot-n”.

When we pronounce a “T” sound, with British accent, you would touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue.  You would release your tongue and then touch again for the “N” sound.  With an American accent, you would hold your tongue there for the “T” and “N” sounds.

Try saying words like cotton, smitten, rotten, button, mutton and mitten.

2)            Always pronounce the R

In British English, the tendency is to drop the “R” sound at the end and in the middle of words.  In American English, these words are rounded off with the “R” sound.

Try saying the words car, far, fourth, carton and start.

3)            Vowels + L make two syllables

Words like feel and real are often pronounced by foreigners with just one sound which makes them sound more like “fill”.  To pronounce these naturally, try making two sounds.

•             Feel sounds more like “fee-ill”

•             Real sounds like “Re-ill”

Try saying words like feel, real, meal school, fool, and tool.

Take a little time to practice these and you will be well on your way to improving your American accent.

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How to improve English by reading

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Have you ever noticed that there is a difference between the words you recognize and the words that you use in a conversation?  Are there many words that you would recognize in a book but are not confident enough to try and use in conversation?

That’s because there are two levels of “knowing”.  There are the words that you know passively (you can recognize them but not use them) and there are the words that you actively use.  The trick is to learn to recognize as many words as you can but then to get confident using them in conversation.

One of the best ways to improve your passive vocabulary is through reading.  Increasing your vocabulary of passively learnt words builds a great foundation for later active learning.

Here’s why you should improve English by reading

Learning vocabulary should first be a case of recognition.  But once you are familiar with the words, you can start to see the way they are used in conversation.
Improve English by reading

Learning words from real contexts means that you are probably going to be able to use the word in the right situations.  This is much better than learning from vocabulary lists.

Reading provides you with a model of structured English where listening provides a model of more colloquial English.  And when you read, it is just you so you can read what you are interested in.

Here’s how to improve English by reading

Read content that is just right for your level. Just right means that you come across words that you don’t know but not so often that you break the momentum of your reading.

Read content that is interesting to you.  If you enjoy it, you are more likely to keep it up.

Reading regularly is better than forcing yourself to read 2 hours once a week so try 10 minutes a day before you sleep, in the morning or during your break in the day.

Try to guess the words before you look them up.  Remember, the first time you see it, you just want to start to recognize it.

Improve your English conversation, be a HIG!

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

How good are you at chatting? Not in English, just in general.

Are you a chatty person who always becomes the life of the party or are you a quiet person who prefers to think than speak?

Improve English conversation

Learn to mingle well to improve your English conversation

In linguistics (the study of languages) there is a term for people who are chatty and like to engage in conversation and as a result, get lots of listening and speaking practice.  They are called High Input Generators (HIGs).  A HIG is a person who can get people to spend time chatting with them, someone who is outgoing and sociable.

Are you a HIG?

Trying to learn how to have great conversations in English may just be more difficult than it should be if you don’t have the skill to have great conversations in your own language.

The good news is that when you learn a new language, you are actually creating a new identity for yourself, an English-speaking identity.  This means that you can have conversations in English in a completely different way to your first language if you decide to be more chatty or outgoing in English, you can be.

Tips to improve your conversation in English

  1. Actively listen.  Have you ever had someone tell you a story and you suddenly realize that you are not listening and you don’t know how this story began?  This means that you have entered the passive listening mode where it easy to just switch off sometimes. To avoid this, make sure you keep eye contact and expect questions on everything the other person says.  Stay involved in the conversation by asking questions and don’t use passive responses like ah-huh, I see or yeah.  Repeat content back to the person to show that you are listening.
  2. Find the topics that they want to speak about.  If you can engage someone in a conversation about their passions, they will enjoy talking with you.
  3. Honestly see things from others perspective.  If you are always trying to force your opinion on others, you will often find people who disagree with you.  Rather than finding ways to conflict your opinions, accept that there can be two differing opinions.
  4. Use people’s names and make them feel important.  By using a person’s name, you can make them feel like they are worthy of your respect.  The more details you remember about them, the more important they will feel.
  5. Smile.  Do you like to talk to grumpy people?
Being a High Input Generator will help you to improve your English conversation by giving you more listening and speaking practice.

High Input Generators was first coined by H. Selinger and M. Long in Classroom oriented research in second language acquistion. Rowley, MA: Newbury House

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Do ya get what I’m saying?

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

How good is your English?  How do you measure your skill?  Do you talk about how well you speak, how well you can write a letter?  How well you understand what other people are saying?  Learning a language is made of many different skills including listening, speaking, reading and writing but also grammatical structure, vocabulary and general communication skill.  Dividing these into the productive and the receptive skills helps us to understand what we can do in order to really take our English to the next level.

Listening is the key

The receptive skills are the skills that people don’t usually work on intentionally but spend most of their time using.  They say that 45% of the communication that we experience is listening (compared with 30% speaking) and 16% of our communication is reading (compared with 9% writing).  So, the receptive skills are, at least on average, more common than their productive counterparts.

Improve your English listening skills to learn speaking faster

Improve your English listening skills to learn speaking faster

But how much time do you spend drilling your listening?  Yet we need to listen at the speed of thought to keep up in conversation.

Think about it this way, when you were a child, how did you learn to speak your first language?  Did you read a grammar book?  Did someone train you to speak in a classroom?  Chances are, you learned your first language by listening to your parents.  Listening and understanding are the key to fluent production.

So, how do we improve our listening?

First we need to decide what to listen to.  The material that we learn the most from is close to where our level is now.  If you are a beginner, listening to the BBC World News is probably not going to very helpful.  Choose something that is near your level but still includes words, phrases and structures that are new to you to ensure that you will learn from it.

Listen to something that you can repeat again and again.  DVDs with subtitles, music (get the lyrics from the Internet), videos on YouTube are all useful as they can be repeated a couple of times.  When you get stuck, you can check the written version to help you.  It is important that you do not develop a dependency on hearing everything repeatedly so be sure to keep in mind that the goal is to be able to understand the input at natural speed the first time you hear it.

To improve your listening, try some of these activities:

  • Listen and repeat.  Listen line by line and repeat back what the characters say.  Try to imitate the intonation when you do this.
  • Play the role of one of the characters.  You need to listen to the speaker and respond, then compare your response with the real responses.
  • Dictation.  Listen to the conversation and write down what they say.  Then check it against the subtitles or find the script/lyrics on the Internet.
  • Catching the gist.  Listen to a YouTube video and explain what the article was about and then listen again and add more detail to your explanation.

 

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It’s like writing but fun

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Here is a very easy way to make your writing immediately more interesting.

In English, we start most sentences with a subject.  This is usually a person or a thing.  But sometimes, we want to talk about an activity.  The easiest way to make your sentences more interesting is to add some variety to the way that you make them.

Mix up the short and the long

If you create a mixture of short sentences and long sentences, you will quickly make your writing unpredictable.  It’s that simple.  This means that you should not use connectors to make every sentence a compound sentence.  Just some.  But be careful not to use sentence fragments in your formal writing.

A variety of subjects

Using simple nouns for subjects all the time can become dull.  To use a variety of subject types is to make your writing more interesting.  You can use the following to start a sentence:

Pronouns

I am having a party.

She is definitely coming.

Other simple nouns (or more precisely noun phrases if they have an article or adjective with them)

The party is at my house.

My house is near the police station.

Modified nouns, which are nouns that have a clause to modify them

The party that my friend went to is over now.

Improving your writing skills

The house where the party was held is badly damaged.

Infinitives

To go to that party would be a mistake.

To drink and drive is illegal.

Gerunds

Going to parties is just something that I don’t enjoy doing.

Cleaning up afterwards is something I hate even more.

Empty subjects- there and it

It is great to be able to have a party at my house.

There will be another party next week.

Noun clauses

Who is at the party is a surprise.

Whoever is left at the end of the night can help me clean up.

So, when you next find yourself with a pen in your hand, try to keep these in mind for the benefit of those who will read your words.  Variety is the spice of life.

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Taking your English to the next level

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)
Learning Plateau

Take it higher!

When learning a language, people  tend to progress in bursts.  This means that there will be times that you feel like you are really learning fast and other times when you seem to plateau.  The reason for this plateau is not quite clear although I would like to suggest a couple of theories and ways to combat this and take your English level higher.

Loss of motivation

Motivation will come and go and if you want to keep it longer, you have to find ways to motivate yourself.  Motivation is usually a combination of your emotional state, your feelings toward the teacher or class, your stress from studying and other activities, pressure from family and friends and the goals that you set yourself and how you feel about them.

The easiest way to break out of a motivational slump is to set yourself a few short, easy goals.  A couple of easy wins will help you to feel confident and willing again.

If that doesn’t work, try finding the source.  If you are losing motivation because of stress or your relationship with a family member or your teacher, then that is the challenge you need to face to get your motivation back.

You need time to absorb

Sometimes, if you study at a quick pace, you need to just step back a little and spend some time practicing what you have already learnt.  A lot of times, students study the grammar to an advanced level but they have not spent the time practicing the language that they have learnt.  So they feel that they are not progressing.

In this case, the best thing to do is to start with the basics and practice.  Remember, the stronger you build the foundation, the taller you can build the tower.  This is especially true of English.  Practice and work grammars that you have already studied into your regular vocabulary and you will be ready to take your English to the next level.

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A great way to practice your writing in English

Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Most people understand that the best way to improve a skill is to practice.  How to practice a skill when it comes to learning languages is not always so obvious.  I would like to suggest a novel way to practice your writing in English.

It is fun, it is modern and it is great practice. It is called blogging.

These days, anyone with an email address can quickly and easily start their own blog with the help of sites like WordPress.com and Blogger.com.  You can keep them private so that they can be your own little diary which is good if you are not confident to share your writing yet or they can be accessible to the world.

There are many advantages to running a blog for writing practice and so that you can make an informed decision, I have also included some possible disadvantages.

The advantages of blogging over a diary

The blog will spell check as you go, just like a word processor.  This is good for immediate feedback on your spelling.  People can also read the blog and make comments and corrections.  Your friends can help you to improve your English, especially good if you have native English-speaking friends.
You can add tags to your posts.  This is a great way to remember vocabulary.  If you create tags, you can click on the word and it will show you all posts that include that word.  Use this feature for new vocabulary and you can see how you have used this vocabulary in all of your posts.
If it is more fun and sociable, you will do it more often.  Get your friends involved and start blogs together.  Meet and share your blog with other people who are studying English and the Internet will become your classroom.  Just don’t forget to go outside and meet some real people too so that you can practice your speaking from time to time.

The possible disadvantages:

You don’t practice speaking and you don’t practice handwriting. And be careful not to become dependent on spell-check.
You should be careful of what information you put on the Internet.  This means that you should get into the habit of not mentioning names or otherwise identifying people when you talk about real events.
You might get so addicted to it that you get carpal tunnel syndrome!
Well, whichever you choose to go, the flash new shiny blog or the trusty old written diary, just remember that the most important thing is regular practice. This is what will get your writing from the level it is now to the level that you want it to be.


As a complement to this, Live-English.net has developed an online English writing course to help you improve your writing skills in English.

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