Untranslatable Words

Maptia.com

I found this on Facebook a while ago (thanks to the Memrise page).  It sent me to a really interesting website called Maptia, which is full of true stories from around the world.  They are not very long stories and many of them are very ‘uplifting’ (meaning they make you feel good).

Words like these are why English has so many words.  When we find a new word that we can’t translate, we often just steal the word!  These words aren't used in English... yet - but I might start using them in my conversations. ;-)

Maptia.com

If you are interested in the origin of words in English, then you might enjoy this little video.  It might be a little difficult to understand all the words that are said, but you will get a good idea of the story from the visual information.

Are there any other words you know in your language that don’t translate into English?  If so, please leave a comment below giving the word and some description of what it means - go on, it will be good practice for your English! :-)

To see the rest of the untranslatable words, click here.

Two Fun Little English Speaking Games

I find that students like these two little games.

The Yes/No Game 

The rules are quite simple. Person A needs to ask Person B questions for 1 minute. If B can answer all the questions without saying “Yes” or “No” then B wins. If B says “Yes” or “No” then A wins. Here are a few videos of Liverpool F.C. football players playing the game... they are not very good at it. :-)

If you are practising for a speaking exam, this is a really good activity because it will help you avoid giving basic answers and will give you more practice giving longer, more interesting answers.

The Question Game 

This game can be a lot of fun but you need at least an upper-intermediate level of English for it to work. The rule is simple – you can only talk using questions. The first person who doesn't use a question loses. This is really good to practise grammar and question structure. Here is an example although these American comedians are talking much faster than you need to.

Enjoy the games!

People you should be following, pt 3 (YouTube)

I don’t have lots of knowledge ‘when it comes to’ YouTube. When it comes to Twitter or blogs I feel much more confident but when it comes to YouTube, I still feel that I’m not really using that resource as much as I could be. By the way, the previous sentence is not very good because it has too much repetition of the phrase ‘when it comes to...’ but hopefully my repetition (see my earlier blogpost) will help you remember this phrase for you to use in the future! ;-)

A big, big thank you to Marcelo Mendes for recommending most of these channels! I highly recommend you explore his website. He is very generous with his time and obviously enjoys learning and helping other people to learn as well.

Two Great YouTube Channels

The Daily English Show amazes me – there is obviously a lot of work that makes this channel! On their blog, they say they are the world’s first daily online English language show. These videos come from New Zealand, which is great because it is very important to get used to listening to lots of different accents in English. This channel has been producing videos for over 5 years! What I really love about this channel is that the videos are about interesting things – I’m watching and learning from their New Zealand Summer Tour. Also, the English is clear and you can read the transcript of every video on the blog.

Try this video, and see the transcript here.

Next, EnglishClub.com is a huge resource for English learners and teachers but EnglishClub is also on YouTube and there is one specific series that I find very interesting – The Learning English Video Project. This project visits school and language institutes to ask learners and teachers about their experiences, goals, problems, solutions and achievements as well as getting tips and advice from them.

Like the Daily English Show, I love these videos because they are really interesting. Again, visit the website for the transcripts and lots of other things to help you when you are listening to the videos.  The project covers the UK, Brazil, China, Spain, America, Romania and Morocco.

Try this first video from Granada, Spain.

A Couple of Other Useful Channels

Daily Dose of English is a channel that provides short videos describing a few English phrases (usually with a common word or topic). There are now enough ‘doses’ (or videos) for one every day for 5 months. However, it is a good idea to watch one or two, take notes, write some example sentences to help you remember and then watch the same video again a week later. How much do you remember?

You can go to the website for transcripts and to download the mp3s. Unfortunately there are advertisements on the website but this is still a good resource.

By the way, a “dose” of something, refers to ‘a small amount of something that you take regularly’. This word is usually used to talk about medicine but we use it for metaphors and other phrases sometimes as well.

Use Phrasal Verbs is another channel of short videos by Linguaspectrum (who makes the Daily Dose of English videos as well). Each video talks about one specific phrasal verb. There is a website as well but I think it is quite confusing to navigate (meaning that it is not easy to understand where to find the information you want).

I like these two channels, Daily Dose of English and Use Phrasal Verbs, because you learn useful vocabulary and phrases but more important than that, you will get at least 5 or 10 minutes of listening practice (actually more than 10 minutes if you watch the videos more than once, which you should do if you really want to remember anything),

Next time I will look at websites you should be following with RSS – and if you don’t know what RSS is, I’ll explain it!

RSS - We see this sign on many websites, but
what does it mean and how can we use it?

I Beg Your Pardon? a.k.a. What? (The Importance of Intonation)

Learning a language is not just about the words we say, it’s also about how we say them. Listen to the different ways that this question is asked, “Is that your car?”

Did you hear the differences? Each of these questions has a different purpose and a different meaning.  We understand these differences from context and from intonation.

Intonation is very important.

Look at the different focus of each of these sentences in the slides.

Did you understand the slides? If we stress that ‘David wanted to buy a red shirt.’ that means we are focused on David, not someone else (meaning another person). Take a look at the sentences again, can you complete the sentences based on the stressed word?

As well as understanding, it is important to focus on intonation for reasons of politeness. Some languages change the words used based on who you are talking to – there is a formal form and an informal form. In fact, I know that in some languages it is even more complicated than that! In English, we don’t change the verb form to show formal respect (like in Spanish, for example) but we do have polite phrases and we depend on polite intonation.

“Would you mind helping me for a moment?” is a polite request for help but if I speak with my friends I will probably say “Can you give me a hand for a sec?” (where ‘give me a hand’ means help, and ‘sec’ can mean ‘second’ but often just means a short period of time, not an actual second).

There are other examples that are much shorter. “What?”, for instance (‘for instance’ being another way to say ‘for example’). ‘What’ is a great word and ‘What?’ an easy way to get more information. BUT be careful, because how you say it will give your audience a lot of extra information. Look at this video about all the different ways one man can say “What?”

In these examples you can identify confusion, frustration, anger, disbelief and amazement. Sometimes he asks this to mean ‘Repeat what you said, I didn’t hear you.’ and this is a different “What?” than ‘Explain what you said, I didn’t understand you.” and these are both different from “What?” to ask ‘Why are you unhappy/angry with me?’  Watch again and see if you can identify these specific differences.

Obviously, when you are talking with friends intonation and polite phrases are not so important because you all know each other but if you are talking to someone you don’t know or you don’t know them very well (meaning you aren’t close friends) then this is important.

Try practising the different ways you can ask the same question. Try practising the different ways you can ask “What?” However, sometimes it is safer to not use “What?” and to use another, more polite phrase.

How many alternative phrases to “What?” can you find in this short video?

Many thanks to Kevin Cuckow for inspiring this post by sharing the Horrible Histories video, and thank you to Martin Sketchley for his wonderful blog and the example sentence for intonation.

Video: 1000 New Words & Phrases (Learning Language for Charity)

On July 1st 2011 my students tested me in a fun event to improve vocabulary and raise money for charity. This is how and why we did it!

During June this year, I spent at least half an hour every day trying to memorize 1000 new Spanish words and phrases. This was for an event to raise money for a local charity, Asociación Promover, in Argentina, where I am teaching at the moment.

The idea was simple: I had 1 month to learn the words and on July 1st my students tested me to see how many I could remember. Sometimes they gave me the English and I needed to give them the Spanish translation, and sometimes they gave me the Spanish and I gave them the English translation.

It was a fun event and I think everybody who helped improved their vocabulary!

We raised money by asking each person to donate for every word I remembered correctly: $0.02 for 1 word, $0.04 for 2 words, etc. A lot of the students helped by donating as well as helping me to find 1000 Spanish words and phrases to learn. Thank you very much to them!

To know about how I learned and memorized the vocabulary, take a look at my post, No Magic Please (Learning Vocabulary). In future posts this week, I will give some more information about the challenge, the motivation and how much I remember now, 2 months later.

Thanks for everybody’s messages of support. They were very much appreciated. :-)

If you are still a bit confused, here is my video explaining the challenge.

Using the Phonetic Chart

Does the picture below scare or confuse you?

If the answer is yes, the you probably should watch this excellent video with Adrian Underhill that explains the phonetic chart.



For some more information about phonetics, see these previous posts about Phonetics & Pronunciation and my message written in phonetics to learners of English.  You could also try some of my Phonetic Film Quizzes.

And thanks to Adrian Underhill for making such a helpful video!  For more help from him you should read through his blog - Adrian's Pron Chart Blog.

Laugh at me on YouTube

At the moment I am editing the video of my recent charity event.  For this reason I started to look at the other videos I have posted on YouTube.  You might have seen them already... but have you watched them with the English subtitles?

Believe me, the subtitles make the experience a bit... different, and it makes me think I need to speak more clearly the next time I make a video for this blog! :-)

Simply follow one of the links below to play one, or all, of the videos in YouTube.  At the bottom of the video you should see a button that says "CC".  Click on it and select "Transcribe Audio".  Then sit back, watch and listen, and see if you can understand what I am saying better than YouTube can. :-)

SMART Goals for the 1000 Challenge (from mid June)

Personal Challenge for Charity‬‏ (from early June)

Blog Introduction‬‏ (from early March - my hair and beard are MUCH shorter in this video!)

Enjoy - some of the errors are quite funny.  Have a good weekend!

Gordon

I don't remember saying that, I don't know what it means...
but I like it! :-P

SMART Goals for my 1000 Challenge

This is a short video explaining my S.M.A.R.T. goal of learning 1000 new Spanish words and phrases in one month for charity.

Inspired by Arina Nikitina's article.

Have a good weekend!

1000 Words & Phrases for Charity in Argentina (#ELLchar)

Cudunagonbeda

Well I was teaching today and the class couldn’t have gone better!

Oh!  That’s a difficult piece of language: “couldn’t have gone better”.   You might ask, ‘what does that mean?’  Well let’s look at it in two parts:

“gone better”

This is from the phrasal verb, “go well” which means if something is a success.  You want some examples?

“My IELTS speaking test went really well!  I think I probably got a 9.0!  Really, it couldn’t have gone better!”

“Portsmouth beat Manchester United 4-0!  What a result!  It was a brilliant game!  It couldn’t have gone better for Portsmouth!”

“couldn’t have”

This is the part that tells us it was basically perfect.  Think about it like this.

“It was a good party and it went well.”  (It was 80% but it wasn’t 90% or 100%)

“It was an excellent party and it couldn’t have gone better.”  (It was 100% and there is nothing better than 100%)

Okay.  Are we happy with this?  I will assume the answer is yes.  But how do you say it?  If you want to sound natural you certainly don’t say “it… couldn’t… have… gone… better”.  No, we say it like this:

“it couldn’t have gone better”

“it couduntav gonebetta”

“it cudunav gonbeda”

“it cuduna gonbeda”

“i cudunagonbeda”

These are NOT the spellings but how you should say it.  For those of you who know your phonetic alphabet, it looks like this:

/ɪˈcʊ̈dnəgɒnbedə/

For these more difficult grammar points (this is a present perfect modal of speculation or deduction) I think it is more important to know how to say it and use it than to understand the grammar of it.

You see the words, you see the context, you hear the sounds, and you produce!  Let’s look at some others:

“James had a job interview this morning but I saw him at lunch time and he looked pretty down.” (*pretty down = very sad)

“Oh dear, his interview couldn’t have gone well.”

Do you remember how to say it?  Practise the phrase five times before you continue reading.  Okay.  Let’s change the sentence.

“Oh dear, his interview must have gone badly.” 

Don’t worry, this sentence means almost exactly the same as the previous sentence.  But how do you say it?  How about this:

“must have gone badly”

“mustav gon badly”

“musta gon badly”

“musdagon badly”

In the phonetics, this ‘musdagon’ looks like this (well, it looks like this when I say it):

/məsdʌgɒn/

Okay.  I've done most of the work now.  I will leave you with a few situations and a few phrases.  See if you can see what the words are and build the sentence because I will only give you the modal + have + past participle (e.g. must + have + gone).  The situations and the speculations are in the same order.

Situations

Maria looks really tired.

Michael’s face looks bruised.

Benjamin isn’t here.

Andrew’s iPhone is missing.

Kathleen and I were talking on Skype but she suddenly disappeared.

Speculations

cudabeen = /cʊ̈dəbi:n/

mayabeen = /meɪʌbi:n/

mydamist = /maɪdʌmɪst/

mydaleft = /maɪdʌleft/

cudalost = /cʊ̈dəlɔst/

Good luck.  Let me know if it goes well for you.  Now with all the examples you saw, all the times you repeated those words and sounds, you have a lot of those necessary 75 times.  :-)

As always, I look forward to your comments.

Gordon

P.S.  Remember, if you are interested in learning more about the phonetic alphabet then go here where you can select the sounds and listen to examples.  Or just click here to download the small program onto your computer.

P.S.S.  I’m reluctant to put links to this song because American Country & Western music is NOT my cup of tea.  However, if you want to hear some examples of “couldn’t have”, you might want to listen to Johnny Duncan’s ‘It Couldn’t Have Been Any Better’.  If you want more reading practice then simply try doing a Google search for “couldn’t have gone better” or “must have gone badly” to see how people use it.  Alternatively, try the British National Corpus.