Learning American English

It certainly has been a busy month of October 2015!  My sister got married and I have just come back from 2 weeks in the U.S. visiting my family.  When visiting family, most of my professional activities take the back burner , including unfortunately this blog. What I learned from the trip on linguistic and cultural levels. On the Linguistic Level The words awesome  and amazing  are way, way overused.  People talk about an "awesome" sandwich or an "amazing" cocktail.   This is clearly, for me, an attempt to come closer to younger people (millennials), or to establish a relationship where the younger person can "trust" or "relate to" the older person or vice-versa (see more below).  I would sound ridiculous using very popular or slang language with my students because there is clearly a vast generational difference -- though I do not consider myself "old," I am clearly older in terms of number of years than many of their par...

Hi all, I am busy posting more new "Pages" on the blog.  You should consider these pages like a reference  or   text book and go back to them from time to time, especially the "Words" page, as I've realized that I cut it a bit short.  There should be some lines about count/non-count nouns, verbs never in the progressive form, and differences between Latinate and Germanic origins and their influence on grammar (comparatives/superlatives) and spelling, and so on. Also, keep an eye on these pages in the coming weeks for exercises both here and on my favorite web site for exercises:   www.quia.com .  All will be original of course and -- at least for the time being -- free of charge. Thanks for logging on and your interest! Paul

For those of you who are interested in literature, check out The Literature Network on line.  It contains a lot of real literary works that you can read free of charge and they are real books, not texts written for blogs or web sites. Also available is Project Gutenberg , which offers similar works but the quality of the transcription to online texts is not as good as the previous site. Check them both out and make up your mind which is the best! Paul

Having one of those geekish moments...  OK, so I'm not used to this and my ego has taken a bit of a hit, but one of my former and very good students, a native Chinese speaker no less (she learned French in something like 3 months just for the purposes of coming to the school where I work) came in with an application form for a major, major, MAJOR worldwide internet search engine.  One of her accomplishments was listed as upselling .  Now, I had heard of upsetting , upstanding, upscale, upmarket, uproarious, upending, upchucking ... but upselling?  Nope. So Marie-Anne (not her real name) explained the concept.  Upselling is when a member of sales staff in an upscale shop is able to sell a customer a higher priced or more luxurious item.  Imagine that you walk into a major department store (El Corte Inglès, Galéries Lafayette, Harrod's, GUM...) looking for a nice medium-range bag or coat.  Instead, you listen to the salesperson pull at your heart...