improve your English
-
Posted by Liz Potter on May 10, 2012
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 (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the patterns that follow the noun possibility. The noun possibility is never followed [...]
Read the full article
-
Posted by Orin Hargraves on May 08, 2012
English has a jumbled inheritance of words from many sources; the pie chart shows a statistical analysis based on dictionary etymologies. Even simple contrasting word pairs, such as in and out, may come from different sources: in is a Latinate word, and out is Germanic. Despite their disparate origins, you can usually count on words [...]
Read the full article -
Posted by Liz Potter on May 03, 2012
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 (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about how to spell the inflections of develop. Don’t write the -ed and -ing [...]
Read the full article -
Posted by Beth Penfold on April 26, 2012
In this weekly post, we bring English language learners useful tips on tricky areas of the language. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the differences in pronunciation between Corp. and corps. Here in the UK, there [...]
Read the full article -
Posted by Liz Potter on April 19, 2012
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 (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the differences in use between whether and if. Both whether and if can [...]
Read the full article -
Posted by Liz Potter on April 12, 2012
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 (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about two words that are easily confused, whether and weather. Notice the spelling of [...]
Read the full article -
Posted by Liz Potter on April 05, 2012
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 (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip helps with the spelling of nouns whose related adjective ends in ‘y’. Although the adjective [...]
Read the full article -
Posted by Heng-ming Carlos Kang on April 04, 2012
This post comes from guest blogger Heng-ming Carlos Kang of the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. It is based on a talk that Carlos gave at the recent Asia-Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference in New Zealand. Have you noticed any difference between what people like to say and what they like [...]
Read the full article -
Posted by Liz Potter on March 29, 2012
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 (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip helps with the grammatical patterns of the noun difference. When you are talking about a [...]
Read the full article -
Posted by Michael Rundell on March 22, 2012
In his recent post on speech acts, Orin made the point that “many of these formulas … can be used to convey a meaning very different from the one they’re usually used for; sometimes just the opposite”. A good example is the expression Yeah, right, which people use to signal that they don’t believe what [...]
Read the full article
