Learn English - with Audio and Transliterations

Jacob Richman" <jrichman@jr.co.il> has an educational website called Learn English with Audio and Transliterations

The site is a free, on-line, educational resource for ESL and EFL students to learn English words. The flash site incorporates 40 topics, along with over 1,500 English words and phrases. When you click on a word or phrase you can hear it spoken. The high quality audio was created in a sound studio.

The site is multilingual. The menus, transliterations and translations are in four languages: French, Hebrew Russian and Spanish. There is an English Only menu, for those that prefer not to use language translations and transliterations.

Both the student and the teacher will find the site easy to use and very educational. As mentioned, the site is free to all.

Feedback (in English) is welcome. 
 

STOP SOPA: #SOPASTRIKE Jan18

My favorire "stop sopa" page is Zachary Johnson's shadowbox with the moving light (just move your cursor) on Zachstronaut. Adding this one to my feed reader... tomorrow. Today ..... 

 

Sites are striking in all different ways, but they are united by this: do the biggest thing you possibly can and drive contacts to Congress. *Put the source code for this page your site* ~ it's my main page at Mountainair Online (the web page). I have no control over blog policies. I'm not really up to tinker with source code to show a black out page on my blogs. So I am settling for posting information and exhortations (like this one). Except for following #sopastrike on Twitter and @fightfortheftr) and Reddit, I'm staying off public pages today. No Facebook or 

Personal blackouts seem to be running either 24 hours (midnight to midnight) or 8AM EST to 8PM EST. Major supporting sites like Wikipedia, WordPress, Google, Internet Archive (+ Wayback Machine), Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tucows and many, many more are striking for 24 hours. Looked like a major slow down on Facebook when I checked (before 8 am).  

What can you do to support the strike if you don't have a blog or web page, can't blog and RT #sopastrike stories? Make a call; sign the petition; learn more; the action of the hour is to speak out. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper, opposing the bills. Contact local news stations and let them know that this is an issue worth covering. And there is still email, what they could be coming after next...

Today's Google search page:

 

Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web! 

So what is Academic English? | ENGLISH FOR UNIVERSITY. COM

"Academic English is the genre of English used in the world of research, study, teaching and universities. If you read an article in an academic journal or listen to someone giving a presentation or a talk about an academic subject in an academic environment, Academic English is probably being used. If you are studying in an English speaking university (or going to) you will need to learn this type of English.

Native English speakers also have to learn Academic English too because it is not like the English that is used every day by English speakers. Academic English is different from other types of English and it often has features like these..."

Read the rest of the article So what is Academic English? and more at ENGLISH FOR UNIVERSITY

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Why2Fly: Environmentally Friendly Airplanes are Better than Cars!

Why2Fly: Environmentally Friendly Airplanes are Better than Cars! - I always knew that! Now I found a very number-supported proof.

On ad-speak and poetry

On ad-speak and poetry shamelessly re-posted in toto from Harriet the Blog at the Poetry Foundation

Ian Daly — a “planning director and cultural strategist” at a marketing firm in New York called Anomaly — recently compiled a list of words and phrases that he titled “Shit I Never Said Before Working in Advertising.” A sampling:

Blow it out

Ladder it up

Tease it out

Bullet it out

Build it out

Build affinity

Soft launch

Hard stop

Fair push

Push back

Reach out

Touch base

Connect around

Loop in

Circle back

Topline

Top-of-mind

Share of mind

Are you tracking? I’m tracking.

And it goes on, reading a little like a weirdly intricate instruction manual, a little like half-baked inspirational literature, and maybe a little like… poetry?

We’re reminded of Robert Archambeau’s recent essay on the various ways that advertising has co-opted (unwittingly?) the language and approach of Symbolist poetry. Writing about Lexicon — the company behind such evocative product names as “Blackberry,” “Swiffer,” and “Pentium Chip” — Archambeau says:

The greatest of Symbolists Stéphane Mallarmé, in his Crise de vers describes the poetry he admires as… “verse that from its constituents makes up a total word, new, strange to the language and like an incantation”. For him, the poem itself was a single word. And like the words coined by the people at Lexicon, Mallarmé’s total word gives us “an array of specific, resonant meanings and associations” rather than something more defined and limited.

Read Ian Daly’s full list and Robert Archambeau’s full article.

Using Educational Techology for Adult ELT | Scoop.it

Packed with useful links and learning resources, including but not limited to vocabulary, pronunciation, writing, passive voice verb use, games, building sentences, text to speech, lesson plans, irregular verb videos and more.

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Using Educational Techology for Adult ELT | Scoop.it

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Short simple sentences will get you through!

Post by Patrick at Academic writing 

This post is for students who are having problems with writing longer texts: write short simple sentences! If your teacher can't understand what you are saying, then your marks will plummet  (students of English for International Finance will know the meaning!). Look at this paragraph from a website about the rise of house prices:

One of the main factors in the UK housing market is the acute shortage of housing, especially in popular areas. This means that even a very small increase in demand has a proportionally bigger increase in price.

Understand the main point? Yes! It's a great example of clarity in writing. Academic writing is a vehicle for IDEAS. Good academic writing is not noticed at all, because the reader can just focus on the content.

In fact, you don't need to be very inventive at all. Just use one of a small variety of sentence patterns you can see from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University here.