Oxford Dictionary

MFU English – เรียนภาษาอังกฤษ

My English Blogging

English Grammar Tool – Quick Review & Important Tips!

Author: Hacker_SP

03 10th, 2010

English Grammar Tool – can it change the way we write English? We use writing in order to express our thoughts, ideas, or communicate with our business partners for example, helping us on achieving our goals. If you want to achieve your writing goals it is important to write properly and professionally. Read the following article to find out how you can easily do that.

Getting some basics

English Grammar Tool automatically proofreads our writing for basic grammar, punctuation and spelling errors. Proofreading and fixing your English writing is quite challenging task, it requires a massive-dynamic DB, as well as sophisticated algorithms. This advanced technology offer the following: grammar check, misspelling and typos correction, and suggesting proper punctuation.

Important advantages

When we examine the advantages provided by this advanced technology we find the following:

* Helping with critical writing assignments such as job and patent applications.

* Saving precious time spent on manual proofreading.

* Providing extra capabilities which do not exist in conventional word processors.

Looking closer on this technology, we could easily find other advantages that aren’t mentioned here, as this innovative technology keeps improving, bringing us fresh improvements and ideas that help us on improving our Writing abilities.

Final words

English Grammar Tool technology provides the opportunity to improve our writing style, making it correct and fluent. It is important to keep in mind that this technology is not 100% perfect; however, it provides help for our most common writing problems. In the next few years we can expect this innovative technology to further develop itself, for a single reason: writing is one of the most important tools that help us expressing ourselves.

Watch how an advanced English Grammar Tool analyzes text and learn more about innovative technologies that can help you transform your English writing correct, professional and creative.

read comments (0)

Digza Kunken

Learning French – How to Say the Alphabet in French

Author: Hacker_SP

03 8th, 2010

Image : http://www.flickr.com

Now that you’ve got a few French words and phrases under your belt, it’s time to work on your pronunciation. I have a French friend who told me that when he was in London on holiday he tried to ask for a bottle of water from a vendor. Unfortunately, although he was using the right words, he had to repeat himself maybe ten times for the vendor to understand. It wasn’t what my friend was saying, but the way he was saying it.

This is likely to happen to you when practicing your French on native speakers. Get a vowel wrong, and you are likely to be misunderstood. Giving things like your name and address can be problematic, too, for your Anglo-Saxon name, if you have one, or your address will sound alien and be hard to recognize.

This happens to me a lot in France, even though after living here for several years my French is of a high standard. My problem is my surname, Lewis. Pronouncing it the English way is completely unintelligible to French ears, who often think that I should be saying ‘Levi’s’, like the jeans!

A good idea when having difficulties understanding or being understood is to ask how it’s spelled or to spell it yourself. Spelling in English, though, won’t help you very much. The way the French pronounce the alphabet is not the same, although they use the same twenty-six letters.

There are two approaches that I recommend for learning the French alphabet. Both are effective, but if you are not shy or self-conscious, I would go for the first option.

Method One

Go to youtube.com or any other video sharing site that also has pages in French. Do a search for ‘chanson alphabet’. You should find lots of videos of kids singing the alphabet in French to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ just like we teach our kids in English. Sing along with them! The melody and the rhythm will help you to remember the right pronunciation. Try to shake off any feelings you may have of being foolish or childish, remembering that child are incredibly efficient language learners and that you can learn something from their methods. Children learn languages by reciting songs and rhymes over and over. Do the same, it works.

Method Two

This is the grown-up way. Instead of reciting the alphabet in (alphabetic!) order, divide the letters in to similar sounds. The sounds you will hear in the French alphabet are roughly as follows:

‘ar’: A, H, K

‘ay’: B, C, D, G, P, T, V, W (pronounced ‘doobluh vay’ – double ‘v’)

‘e’: (like in ‘bed’) F, L, M, N, S, Z (pronounced ‘zed’)

‘ee’: I, J, X, Y (pronounced ‘eegrek’ meaning ‘Greek I’)

‘uh’: E

‘oh’: O

‘air’: R

‘oo’: U (say ‘oo’ not ‘you’, Q (say ‘koo’ not ‘queue’)

It is also a good idea to associate each of the letter sounds to a word that you know that contains that sound. For example, the French word for ‘tea’ is ‘le thé’ and has the same vowel as all the letters that are pronounced with ‘ay’.

Now you’re equipped with the French alphabet, one last thing you need to know is the question, ‘how do you spell that?’ It’s comment ça s’écrit, which literally means ‘how do you write it?’

Practice spelling your name in French, then your address. You now have a reliable communication tool to get you through those awkward moments when you can’t make yourself understood in French.

Learn French Now [http://speak-french-now.blogspot.com]. There are French courses [http://speak-french-now.blogspot.com] today that are not only effective, but fun too.

Jonathan Lewis has helped thousands of French speakers learn English, and can help you learn French. Since moving to France in 2001, he has worked on language projects for the French Ministry of Education and published a book on learning French with HarperCollins. Visit his Learn French website [http://speak-french-now.blogspot.com]

read comments (0)

Digza Kunken