False Friends English - Spanish #2

Hi everyone and welcome back!

Today's post will be about two false friends that English and Spanish have and so many times Spanish speakers have made mistakes with these words. I remember one day, when one of my student sent me a message in Whatsapp telling me: "Sorry, Denis, I don't feel well today and I'm constipated...". Of course, English speaker will think, that she might have this, as you can see on the right picture.

But I understood her, that she literally translated the Spanish word constipado into constipated, and these two words are similar, but their meanings are absolutely different!

If I say "I'm constipated"(Estoy constipado) in Spanish. it means that I have flu, I'm sick, I've got cold and don't feel well, as on the left picture. But the same phrase in English has absolutly different meaning. If we say "I'm constipated", it means in Spanish "Estoy estreñido".

So sometime literal translation from Spanish into English can be a little bit dangerous, because we can missunderstand you!

Idioma Online - electronic library

Hi everyone and welcome back again!
In our Idioma Online web we´ve created a library with the materials that you need for your English studies. It´s quite difficult to find materials in the web to study languages online, so we decided to open our own library with the materials that usually people need to learn foreign languages, in particular, English.

We added books for official exams and for specific parts of English: grammar, listening, reading, writing and speaking. As well, we added some books for kids.

Check this out here: http://idiomaonline.com/english-library/

Phrasal verbs #1 - BACK

Hi everyone and welcome again!

From today we begin our first post about Phrasal Verbs in English. This is quiet problematic topic for all sutdents in the world when they learn English language. Also my students ask me quetions when we read texts or do some exercises. So, to begin with, let's watch this informative video about phrasal verbs with the verb "Back". You will see different combinations of phrasal verbs and their meaning.

In the future I'm planning to write my own videos and add my own information about phrasal verbs to make it more clear and with some tips and hints.But beofre that I recommend you to see the next video.

If you have some questions about phrasal verbs, don't hesitate to ask me in comments!
Enjoy it!

LOL, LMAO, fun, comedy - expressing jokes in English

Hi everyone and welcome again!

See this picture? Do you have any idea of what it said? Any suggestions? Before continueing to read, write your comment below ;)

Can you understand the joke from this 9gag image? If so - you have a very high English level, congratulations! 

For those who didn't get the idea I strongly recommend to start watching the YouTube video below to understand the idea. 

LOL, LMAO, WTF and other shedload of words like this are very used in English and if you don't know their meanings - you're toast! But don't worry, here I am to help you. Watch that video below and come back to the picture and try to understand the point. If you could do that - congratulations, today your English level became a little bit higher than before! LOL

Actually, I recommend you watch all the videos I post in my blog, because they are quite useful, and lot's of my students asking me to post them, especially about specific topics like this one. 

Enjoy it:

Write what do you think about that picture?

How to learn English Vocabulary faster and easily?

Hi everyone and welcome again!

All my students that I have with me always want to improve their vocabulary as the main goal on our classes. We are trying to do different exercises but, as I always say to my students, your own after class work is important on vocabulary. For this reason, I found a free platform where we can practice English vocabulary online. I’m talking about Vocabulary.com – online platform for learning new words online by yourself and also on English classes in Skype.

From famous 3,000 Core English Vocabulary Words to a standard and formal language – all of these you can learn on these webpage. They have two interesting tools that make it interesting for my classes. First of all, as a teacher I can create my own lessons where I invite my students to make exercises. Here you can see an example of today’s class, for instance:

Our first vocabulary class

Than we can choose an article to read and discuss. Let’s take The University of World Wide Web:

Example of an article

As you can see, we have a link to the article and below we have words that we’re going to practice over the class by clicking Practice tab:

Practicing new word from the article

Now, after reading and discussion we can practice these words and the results will be saved in the program and we can see a progress of students.

Basically, to train your vocabulary online we have two options, one of them is to do The Challenge

The Challenge sample

And the second is to read your favorite article and get unknown words by list making tool on Vocabulary.com

Just copy a text into the box and press Next Step

If you want to practice these new words with us, you can join our lessons, we start today! Enjoy and good luck!

How did you like this free platform? Did you try my lessons? What's your opinion?