How Do You… in English?
(An English Blog for Language Learners)
Our English blog focuses on grammar, idioms, punctuation, pronunciation, conversation, reading and vocabulary. There are new posts every week, including grammar quizzes. Please leave comments or questions these topics or about any part of the English language, and we will respond!
If you need a quick vocabulary reference, this is a great online English dictionary.
You can learn more about English Portal’s online English language classes on our Home page or our What We Do page.
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Welcome back to the English Portal blog! This week, we are going to review one of our reading skills: being able to guess meaning from context. In our introduction to this topic, we focused on standard vocabulary. In another lesson, we focused on guessing the meaning of some different idioms. This week we are going to return…
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This week on our English blog, we’re going to talk about an English grammar structure called tag questions. For some reason, they’re not discussed very often in most grammar books, but they’re really common in speaking (So they should be in more grammar books, shouldn’t they?). You probably haven’t heard the term tag question, have…
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Welcome back to our English blog. This week’s post is the first of a series in which we will explore the many meanings of some very simple English vocabulary. Our word for this post is the word ‘get’. This is a short word (three letters! one syllable!), and it is an extremely common word. It is…
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It’s time for another grammar quiz on our English blog! This time we are going to review the information in our earlier post about English parts of speech. Here are the parts of speech that we discussed in that post: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, conjunction and interjection. Let’s have a look at a few…
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This week on our English blog, we want to talk about the question: What are parts of speech? We can think of parts of speech like different shapes of building blocks (like Legos*) that children play with. We use short blocks, long blocks, wide blocks, narrow blocks, etc. Each part of speech is like a different…
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This week in our English blog: using the phone in English! We are going to have a look at something that is sometimes very daunting* to learners in any language: communicating effectively on the phone. In the 21st century world of email, text messages and other online methods of communication, it is often possible to avoid…
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Today on our English blog, let’s combine two of our recent topics: idioms and context. In our first post about idioms, we saw that idioms have meanings that are different from the meanings of their individual words, and in our post about guessing meaning from context, we learned that the information in a text can be very…
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This week in our English blog we are going to focus on reading skills. One of the most important reading skills is the ability to guess the meaning from context when we encounter new or unfamiliar words. What does this mean? What is context? Context is information that helps us understand other ideas. Why is this…
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For the first time on our English blog, let’s talk about pronunciation. English pronunciation is an important and sometimes challenging part of learning the language. You might think it will be difficult to improve pronunciation by reading, but if we use the correct vocabulary, we can definitely make pronunciation make more sense. Today we’re going…
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This week’s post in our English blog focuses on different ways to say hello in English. This should be pretty basic because one of the first things we learn in English is to say ‘hello’. This ought to be simple, right? Hmm. It’s not complicated. It’s just a little strange sometimes because there are actually…
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Let’s review the English grammar that we looked at in our previous post. Here are a couple of practice exercises to reinforce forming the passive voice in English. In the first section, try to rewrite the active sentences in the passive voice. Part 1 Example: Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. -> The Mona Lisa…
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Today, let’s look at something very scary. It’s called ‘passive voice’. Before we look at it, let’s consider three ideas 1) If you can understand active sentences, you can understand passive sentences. I promise. 2) In the beginning, it is more important to be able to recognize and understand passive voice than it is to be able…
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Oh boy! We all have to go to the doctor sometimes. This means we have to talk to a doctor! This is not always a great experience in your native language, and the experience can be more difficult and tiring if you are trying to do it English. First, let’s move forward thinking that we…
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No! Noo! Nooo! Punctuation! Punctuation in English is terrible and might give you a headache. Unfortunately, it is very important to learn, especially for academic or professional English. Let’s have a look at one type of punctuation that might seem very confusing for English language learners: how to use colons. That’s right, the punctuation before “the…
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Most people love movies, and they love to talk about movies, so it’s great to be able to talk about them when you are learning English! Americans especially love to talk about movies because we make so many of them. Let’s start by becoming familiar with the different types of categories we have for movies. This…
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There are many challenges when you are learning English (or any foreign language). One of these challenges is especially tricky: how to make requests sound polite. What does “tricky” mean? Here is a great dictionary to use: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/learner-english/tricky Ok. Let’s continue. It is very important in English to understand how to use language that is polite.…
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Finally, something fun in English! This is the answer to one of the most common questions about idioms: why do we use idioms? Because they’re more fun than “normal” English. Now the “what”. What is an idiom? The Cambridge dictionary has an excellent deifinition here: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/learner-english/idiom But let’s try another approach to this. Here is a…
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Let’s try this short exercise to practice using the correct forms that we looked at in our last post to talk about the future in English…
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Talking about the future in English is not difficult, but like most areas of English, there are some important rules. If you are studying English, you will probably learn these rules slowly over time, but in many cases, you have probably heard the different forms from native speakers or from watching movies, television or streaming.…
