Friday, March 21, 2014

Interview with Jaime Miller - TOEFL teacher

Hi everyone,

In my former blog posts, I was writing about Jaime Miller. First, when I summarized my TOEFL experience. Second, when I introduced her excellent right notes course. And now I'm very happy because Jaime gave me the possibility to conduct an interview with her. I hope you'll like it and maybe some of you feel like visiting Jaime's website, youtube  channel or even working with her.

Update - please visit my other interviews as well: Gardeniafly and Kate. Both of them from Georgia, USA.

So, let's meet Jaime.

 -     Hi, Jaime. Thank you very much for this interview. Let’s begin with your studies. When and where did you graduate from university? 
-       I graduated from a school called Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon. It was in May, 2008. It was five years ago.
-       What kind of faculty did you attend?
-       I studied History mostly.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Today’s Idiom – Pay Through the Nose



Hi everyone,

A couple of weeks ago I began a new series about idioms. The first idiom was spill the beans. As I told you, Americans (and other native English speakers) use a great number of idioms. It makes the English language beautiful, varied and alive. If you try to learn them, it is a great adventure. In this series within my blog, I can show only a few idioms, but I’m going to introduce books, websites, and video channels that can help you.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Cattle vs kettle - Short A (AA) and Short E (EH) sounds



Hi,

Earlier in this blog, after the classification of American English vowels, we began to work on the vowels in pairs. In this series, we were speaking about the /i/ (Long E - EE) and /ı/ (Short I – IH)sounds. And now we’re going to learn about the /æ/ (Short A - AA)  and /ɛ/ (Short E – EH) sounds. The methods we will use will be similar. We’re going through some useful materials from Rachel’s website and video channel, and we will talk about Mandy’spronuncian.com and her excellent podcast. There are many good teachers who concentrate on American English pronunciation, but in my opinion Rachel and Mandy are the best.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Five Common Excuses Not To Learn a Foreign Language – guest post from Lingholic

Hi,

I don’t need to tell you that I like learning languages. I know there are many people who don’t like to do so. When I ask them why, there are some frequently repeated answers. It’s surprising these people don’t know each other, but I hear the same reasons again and again. I was very surprised when I found a blog called Lingholic. This blog has excellent articles that are helpful and I’d like to show you the kind of excuses the author encounters when he asks, “Why aren’t you learning a foreign language?” This article is based on the passage that I read on Lingholic (written by Sam Gendreau). I have added my comments to each statement. Also, I will give two additional excuses that I hear frequently. You can find Lingholic on Facefook as well.