weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Are you bored or boring? Was the last film you saw interested or interesting? There are many adjectives in English that can be used with the endings -ed and -ing, and students sometimes confuse them. If you are unsure when …
Continue reading "Grammar practice: adjectives in -ed and -ing"
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] There are countless resources on the internet that can help you with learning and practising new vocabulary. In this post, I’ll introduce you to just three websites I always recommend to my students and that I regularly use myself. Make …
Continue reading "Top 3 online resources for your vocabulary study"
There are many different kinds of beans, from kidney beans and string beans to pinto and lima beans. Apart from being the key ingredient in many popular dishes all over the world, did you know that beans also happen to be an ingredient in a number of phrases and idioms in English? Let’s learn a …
Continue reading "Do you know how many beans make five? – Expressions with the word ‘bean’"
I haven’t blogged much about the history of the English language, but the arrival of summer is just begging for a quick introduction to something called Middle English. It's a form of English spoken in the Middle Ages, between the 11th and the 16th century. During that period, Old English underwent massive changes that eventually …
To most readers, the name of Arthur Conan Doyle will forever be connected with the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his trusted friend Dr Watson. The celebrated writer of detective stories based his whole literary career on extolling the virtues of science, reason and logical thinking, which leaves many surprised to learn that …
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Correlative conjunctions are used to join words, phrases or clauses within a sentence. They always come in pairs, which is where learners sometimes make mistakes. In languages such as the South Slavic ones (which most of my students speak as …
Mark arrived on time. Or was it in time? At time??? The use of prepositions in English can be quite confusing to native speakers of other languages. Prepositional phrases can be even trickier because they seem to have a special logic of their own; one needs to learn them one at a time, understanding the …
In an earlier post, I wrote about the etymology of the English words for the days of the week. As we saw there, those words have their origin (for the most part) in the names of some of the main deities of the Germanic pantheon. In this post we’ll look at the names of the …
Continue reading "Modern English names for the months of the year – 100% Latin!"
In an earlier post, I’ve given a few tips on how you can use podcasts to improve your English listening skills (you can read it here; also available in Serbian here). This article is for those who have neither the time nor the patience to listen to hour-long programmes, but would like quick and more …
Continue reading "Listening tips: five-minute practice using news podcasts"
Each year, lexicographers1 working for prominent publishing companies announce a word that, in their judgment, marked the previous year. Their choice usually tells us something about the state of affairs2 in the world we live in and the way language reflects it. In this post, we’ll look at the English words of the year 2021. …
grammaticus 