Archive for February, 2013
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Posted by Kati Sule on February 28, 2013
In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English which learners often find difficult, e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc. This week some advice about the noun tendency: When a verb comes after tendency, use the pattern tendency to [...]
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Posted by Lars Trap-Jensen on February 27, 2013
Today’s guest post comes from Danish lexicographer Lars Trap-Jensen. Since 2004, Lars has been Managing Editor of Den Danske Ordbog (The Danish Dictionary) – a corpus-based dictionary of modern Danish – and of the website ordnet.dk, which gives access not only to the The Danish Dictionary and the big historical Dictionary of the Danish Language, [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on February 25, 2013
If you are a teacher or learner of English, you are probably familiar with advice beginning You do not …, You cannot …, Be careful …, and WARNING! Older coursebooks, especially, used ‘strikethrough’ to herald the errors that you must simultaneously notice and unlearn, e.g.: I need to concentrate myself. Strikethrough is a curious convention: [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on February 22, 2013
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 21, 2013
February 21st is UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, which is intended to “encourage people to maintain their knowledge of their mother language while learning and using more than one language”. This annual event was established to commemorate a protest march at the University of Dhaka (in what is now Bangladesh, but was then in the [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on February 20, 2013
In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English which learners often find difficult, e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc. This week some advice about the spelling of the word occur and other examples of words ending in -ur [...]
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Posted by Kerry Maxwell on February 19, 2013
In 2003, my son was 8 years old, tablets were still the things the doctor prescribed to make you better, and no-one had much of a clue about tweets, smartphones and apps. Yes, a lot can happen in 10 years – my son is now on the cusp of ‘adulthood’, I own a tablet, tweeting [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 18, 2013
Consider this line, which appears in William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light: “One of the Sharman Group’s research initiatives centred around the possibility of isolating mutant strains of HIV.” Gibson is a skilled and careful writer, and it’s clear what he means by the words centre around, yet some readers automatically reject the phrase as an [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on February 15, 2013
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on February 14, 2013
Many of you would have watched James Geary‘s popular TED talk about metaphor from a few years back. In his presentation he calls on the ‘King of Metaphorians’ Elvis Presley to discuss literary metaphor, but his talk also touches on conceptual metaphor – a unique feature of Macmillan Dictionary. To celebrate Valentine’s Day, this post [...]
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