You’ve checked your dictionary and your grammar books and you still don’t know the best way to say something.  Or maybe you know the “right” way to say something, but you want to know why it’s the “right” way.  You might have problems with an idiom, slang or phrasal verbs; or you just want someone to check some sentences you’ve written. Here are two great forums where English teachers and native...

We all use a spell-checker when we write, but most of them don’t notice when we write the wrong word.  If I wrote, “I had a bear at the pub last night,” all of the words are spelled correctly but I should have typed “beer.”  Ginger is a new kind of spelling and grammar checker that checks the context of your words, not just the words in isolation.  Ginger notices “pub” in the sentence and offers to...

Freerice.com seems like a simple game: you just match the word you see with a synonym.  But for every correct answer you get, the game gets harder.  When you choose an incorrect answer, the game gets easier.  The real challenge is trying to remember if the words are nouns, verbs or adjectives… it’s a lot harder than it seems!  This is a good way to practice for Part 4 of the Cambridge English: Advanced (CAE). The game is run by the...

Here’s a silly game for you to try: http://easywaytest.com/ Just pronounce the word on the screen (into your microphone), if you do it correctly you’ll see the next part of the cartoon.  The game understands the other things you say too, so be polite!

English names are notoriously difficult to pronounce when you can only read them.  For example, how many syllables are there in Loughborough or Leominster (these are towns in England)?  Two!  I know it’s strange, it’s strange to me too.  I come from the US, where our cities have normal-sounding names (that’s just a little joke!). So what can you do?  Here is one of those times when you just need to know the international...