Today's lesson is from Danica Steyn, teacher at EC Cape Town English school
A couple of days ago we had a request for a lesson on poetry. I'm sure most of us have terrible memories of poetry-writing in school. I remember my teacher telling me to write a poem with no instructions on how to form one. "Just try" was her instruction...not very helpful. Can you imagine a piano teacher telling a student to "just try and play the piano' without any guidance on notes, keys or timing and expect a student to be magically able to play?
Take a look at these idioms. They all use clothing vocabulary.
So it seems that there is a little disapointment that yesterday's exercise on singing songs in English did not actually include a song for you to sing. Let's put that right. Here is a classic Beatles song, suggested to us by Grivna, a regular user of this site (thanks, Grivna). The lyrics are included in the video.
I studied Spanish in high school and Japanese in college, so I understand that learning a foreign language is not easy. One thing that has always helped me is to memorize song lyrics. That way, you can learn new vocabulary and practice grammar while having fun. If there is a good melody, I guarantee you will never forget what you learned! I know that I will never forget Shakira's "Estoy Aqui" or SMAP's "Sekai ni Hitotsu Dake no Hana". So be sure to find the lyrics online if there is something you don’t understand.
Here are some idioms that you will only here in the UK:
Usually used after a set of simple instructions and has the same meaning as the phrase "and there you have it". It shows that something will be successful:
'To access the site, simply enter your password here and Bob's your uncle..'
When something's very cheap, it is as cheap as chips:
'These shoes are only ten pounds a pair - cheap as chips!'
We asked all the readers of our monthly newsletter to give us the first paragraph of a fictional novel. We didn't ask them to write the whole novel, only the introduction. Here's all the responses we received. Can you add your own entry?
Every month we ask our newsletter readers to send in their questions to Tim, our teacher at EC Brighton, our English language school in Brighton, about the English language. Here are your questions:
Not getting the newsletter? Sign up for it now!!
Thanks to Kate Kapustina for this question:
Read through these ten example sentences. They all contain common mistakes made by English learners. Do you know what is wrong with each sentence?
