If you are familiar with the phonetic alphabet you may find English Accent Coach helpful. Listen to the sound and choose the correct phonetic symbol. It works like a game and you can access quite a lot free on the website. You can also buy an iOS app for any of your Apple devices.
Is it a good idea to use the English word perambulate? On this new website you can see the trends in word usage. Looking up perambulate I can guess that it is an old-fashioned word as its use has plummeted over the last hundred years. Collins have put a whole range of their dictionary and language products online for free. The website includes English, French, German and Spanish dictionaries, thesaurus and translation tools. On the dictionary page you can not only find out what a word means, but hear how it is pronounced and see how commonly it is used. So maybe you don’t have to remember what perambulate means.
It’s a very good idea to find different ways of saying the same thing to avoid repeated use of the same word.
What sort of gardener are you? How well do you know your parts of speech? You can test yourself by playing with the Language Garden Plant Maker which you can then save as an image. You could try making your own garden plants from scratch or you could take a sentence from a coursebook, novel or website and see if you can correctly illustrate it in the language garden as well as making variations on the original sentence.
A brilliant tool from David Warr.
Pronunicator is a very simple web-based tool to help you practice your pronunciation. Select your native language and the language you want to practice and you will access a series of lessons based on single words, simple sentences and short conversations. You can listen, listen and repeat and listen, repeat and have your pronunciation evaluated. Pronunciator also has a YouTube channel for the purely listening exercises with no feedback. Pronunciator is free and you can use it without registering but if you do register then it will track your progress which is probably more motivating. The screenshot shows that I have chosen to practice my English and that I am a Danish native speaker. So the English sentence is shown with a Danish translation. When I test my English pronunciation skills I get a score which in this case was 74% which gave me a yellow score. So this means that I’m good but could be better and aim for a green light!
How good is your written English? Do you always know? Are you aware of the types of mistakes you make? To make long term improvements in your written English it may be a good idea to use a tool which tracks the errors you make and provides timely help to coach you away from them. One possibility is Grammarly which is a spellchecker but also gives language help on the errors found. You can use it for free or pay to get enhanced features. It works in your browser.
Another option is Ginger which is a program that you download and which can check texts in your browser and elsewhere, for example in your email or word processing program. Ginger is a contextual spell checker which means that it takes into account the whole sentence rather than looking only at each word individually. This means that it would pick up an error such as ‘He wood like to buy a car’ which a traditional spell-checker would miss becuase the word ‘wood’ is spelled correctly even though it is wrong in the context of that sentence. Ginger has additional features such as a text to speech reader which could help with pronunciation and it offers help with the grammar errors which you make most frequently.
When you are preparing for an exam such as IELTS or TOEFL one of the skills you need is to be able to read quickly the passages which you have to work on. Eyercize is a web-based tool which can help you do that almost unconcsciously. The site has a library of texts which you can practice your speed reading skills on but the really useful feature is the bookmarklet which means that you can mark any text on a website and turn it into a speed reading exercise. This means that you can get a great deal of practice quite easily simply from visiting the webpages that you are reading anyway.
The tool is also good for other languages and will cope with accents and other special characters in for example, French.
The trick to improving your reading speed is to increase the speed for two minutes or so and then revert to your original speed which will then feel quite slow in comparison.
What RU up 4? If you are finding Business English less than riveting then you might enjoy signing up for this game by L’Oréal. In fact Reveal is not just a game, it is a competition with prizes and the hidden agenda is for L’Oréal to find promising interns and future employees. In the meantime, by playing the game you get to learn about different aspects of running a large multinational company, make decisions and improve your business English. Good luck!
