The Funniest Way of Learning New Words

Recently, I have discovered a web site thanks to one of fellow translators who commented on my blog. I literally spend hours when I visit this web site. It is funny and very useful. When I began learning English, I used to memorize lists of words. I was categorizing words and writing them on a paper. Generally I did not know real pronunciations and memorized them with a wrong pronunciation.

This web site works on eleven languges basicly but you can find more by clicking on Add Your Language or Archived Languages. The site has grammer rules and vocabularies with pictures. When you point one of the pictures, you hear the pronunciation. The pictures are funny and the vocabulary is enough at least for beginners.

I immediately bookmarked the site. When you give a break or something during the day, you can just visit this site and learn a couple of words 🙂

The website: http://www.languageguide.org/

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The Best Books of 2011

I am somehow happy that our reliance on traditional paper-books still continues. Internet is a vast source of information; however, there are only few decent web sites that you can follow all the time. When it comes to grammar, word choice and sentence structure, internet –not always but- generally fails. In my opinion, grammar mistakes can be reduced to minimum either by studying a grammar book or reading books in the languages you know. Especially nowadays, many people do not read book or newspaper regularly. They just check online news sites and that’s all. They are full of grammar mistakes and in time, as you see a mistake several times, you begin not to see them as mistake but the true form. This is the most dangerous thing that may happen to a language because it results in generations (like ours) who are not aware of real grammar rules. So, here is the list of books of 2011 by Guardian. As far as I see, this list is a result of a discussion, so they are the reader’s choices. I will write the names in an order, you can click the link at the bottom for their reviews. Let’s read- not only the article but also the books 🙂

1. Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side
2. Thomas Penn’s Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England
3. Glyn Hughes’ A Year in the Bull-Box
4. Eileen Battersby’s Ordinary Dogs
5.  Alice Munro’s New Selected Stories
6. Ali Smith’s There but for the
7. Sarah Raven’s Wild Flowers
8. Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers
9. Richard Lloyd Parry ‘s People Who Eat Darkness
10. Elen Caldecott’s Operation Eiffel Tower

For more books and reviews, click here.

Ten translated novels that you should know, click here.