Tag Archives: fun

Voice Recognition Elevator- Eleven

Funny Stuff, Phonetics, , , ,

Some time ago I went to Edinburgh to do a course for teachers. I spent about a fortnight enjoying the city and struggling to understand Scottish people.

I remember that on my last day there was a girl on Princess Street, which is Edinburgh’s main street, trying to sell flowers. She was shouting, like mad, two or three words. I stopped and decided not to move ‘till I could grasp what she was saying. It was important for me at that time.  I can’t tell you, without running the risk of lying, the time I spent staring at her mouth trying to see what my ears couldn’t hear but in the end, I convinced myself that she was saying something on the line of “three for a bunch” , but to be completely honest, I think I tricked myself into believing I could finally understand the Scottish accent!
Why is it so difficult to understand Scottish Pronunciation? To start with, English has 5 more vowels sounds. Scottish people don’t pronounce the schwa as English people do, for example, the pronunciation of the vowel in “the” is the same as the one in “sit”; they don’t make long /o/, for them, “cot” and “caught” are both pronounced with short /o/. What is more, the diphthong in “coat” is also pronounced as /kot/ and the vowel in “heard” is the same as the vowel in “bet”. There is no /æ/-/ɑː/ distinction so bath, trap, and palm have the same vowel
And finally /ɪ/ may be more open for certain speakers in some regions, so that it sounds more like [ɛ] Other speakers may pronounce it as [ɪ], just like in many other accents, or with a schwa ([ə]) quality. Others may pronounce it almost as [ʌ] in certain environments, particularly after /w/ and /hw/. ( from Wikipedia)

And now, after this boring explanation, watch this hilarious clip in which two Scottish guys get stuck in a lift which uses voice recognition for selecting the floor.

 

Should you have problems understanding the accent, read the transcript below.

Continue reading Voice Recognition Elevator- Eleven →

Word of the day : To get drunk and the like

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I’ve been away for a short school trip and that’s the reason why I haven’t been posting for a week.

Though in my forties, this one has been my first school trip,ever. My father was not a big fan of school trips and me and my sisters were never allowed to go; we were sent to Great Britain or France  instead, to study the language under the wings of some religious institution or other. What he didn’t know is that, even under their watchful eyes,  I had my fair share of unpleasant and pleasant (if you know what I mean) experiences.

And, in this school trip, and as a teacher, my role was trying that my students didn’t experience any unpleasant things, which they might think were pleasant enough to try. But, unfortunately, I caught two students red-handed trying to smuggle alcohol into their bedrooms. Pity, they were kept in detention and couldn’t enjoy the disco!

In English as in any other language there are countless alternatives to the traditional to get drunk

So, let’s imagine that you and your friends decide to go out on a bender/binge or maybe  go pub crawling or bar hopping to get drunk and after two or three beers you are a bit tipsy (slightly drunk) because you challenged one of your friends you could drink him under the table (drink more than him without getting drunk)and then you realized you could not hold your drink (drink without getting drunk) and that  he drinks like a fish. So,  you decide to go home but your friends decide to  go on drinking and after two hours they are loaded /wasted/gone/slushed/hammered/legless/plastered or pissed  and one of them starts to puke/spew/gag/chunder/barf, which is quite disgusting.

You phone your friend in the morning and find out he can’t even talk to you because he’s got the worst hangover and needs to take an alka-setzer and get some more sleep.

Do you know any other expressions ?

Lyreach.com : learning through songs

Audio, Grammar, Listening, Music, Resources, Vocabulary, , , , ,

I can’t imagine life without music but much though I love listening to it when I’m driving, working, relaxing or having fun, you won’t see me bringing music to the classroom just because. There is always a reason to choose the song I ask my students to sing. It could be either because it contains a certain structure we are working with or because of its vocabulary or its phonetics, but there is always a reason
This is why when I bumped into this site lyreach.com I was thrilled as it offers the possibility of typing words or idioms or structures as you might expect to get them in the lyrics. The lyrics of about 470000 songs are stored so the hard part is choosing which of these songs you would like to work with. Then you click on your choice to see the paragraphs that it appeared in, the title of the song and the singer and sometimes a clip from Amazon.com
In this case I was looking for a song containing Adjectives with too and enough and this is what I found.

You might be interested in having a look at these songs:

A Word on Grammar:Reported Speech Questions and Orders

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Walking towards the end of the course we tend to feel rather stressed and pressed for time  and I’m not the exception. But I don’t really believe that an awful amount of time will be saved by not introducing new grammatical points in a nice way.

This is how I introduced Reported Speech Questions and Orders. This time it was the traditional way of teaching, ie, chalk and blackboard  and I’m not good at drawing so needless to say, my students had to use their imagination to guess that I was drawing a little girl and her mother.

The truth is I did little more than guiding them. My students named the characters and provided the questions. I only had to set the atmosphere -which was a four-year-old girl pestering her mother all day long with questions  -and from there, we had the husband coming back home and her mother complaining about their talkative daughter.

Grammar here, Exercises here ,here and here

Realizing they were learning and “sort of” enjoying themselves I continued with the story and went on to teach Orders and Requests in reported Speech, the girl being 15 years old in this context and, as it’s usually the case, the mother now pestering the girl to do things (I’ve got a 15-year-old son, as you have probably guessed)

Grammar here . Exercises here.

And now that we are on the subject, why not continue with the story and use it to introduce suggestions in reported speech?

Using jokes to teach Grammar: ESLjokes.net

Funny Stuff, Grammar, Resources, ,

Why the hell (excuse my enthusiasm) does a lesson have to be boring when you can teach grammar using jokes and unbelievably the only thing you have to do is a click away.
ESLJokes.net offers us ready-made lesson for teachers and for students. The jokes are graded as elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate and upper intermediate/advanced and they cover lots of grammar points from present simple to reported speech.


If you are student, you can use them for autonomous learning because it also provides the answers to the exercises and if you are a teacher, then this is just pure heaven! Everything done for you!
I’m planning to use the one about the Penguin (please, see Intermediate) to teach reported speech and I’m sure my students will be glad to have reported speech introduced in this way. Wouldn’t you if you were a student?