Word of the day: Go on Holiday or Go on Holidays?

Word of the Day, ,

Happy, happy Monday!  Today is my son’s birthday, 15 years  in this world and every minute of it making me feel the proudest mum on earth. Lucas , I love you to the moon and back!!.

I have had lots of English teachers in my life so I wouldn’t know who to blame, if any, for some of the mistakes I ‘ve made  when teaching English. Some of these mistakes I have been correcting over the years and  as about the others, I´ll let you know as soon as I spot them. The truth is that  one is never aware  what  one is saying is wrong  until suddenly the penny drops.

When I first began teaching, like 24 years ago, I believed that as the teacher I always had to be perfect and know everything there is to know about English. At the beginning , when my students asked me to translate into English a word I didn’t know I’d make one  up and if I made a mistake sometimes I would cover it up.My only excuse is that I was 23 and my students were much older than me.  When I realised that I was not a machine but a far from perfect  human being , only then did I begin to enjoy what I was doing and only then did my lessons begin to get better , mainly because I was enjoying myself and finally putting all my heart into it.

♥Going on Holidays was one of my mistakes. It is easy for a Spanish student to make this mistake as we translate as Ir de Vacaciones and we use the plural here. But speakers of British English use (be/go) on holiday or return/get back from holiday

I met my husband while I was on holiday in Cuba

I am going on holiday next month

Speakers of American English use (be/go) on vacation

♥The plural Holidays is used with the/my/your etc

During the summer holiday(s) my son is going to work in a shop.

She doesn’t want anybody to know where she is going for her holiday(s)

 

♥By the way, do you know what a (BrE) bank holiday/public holiday (AmE) is ??? An official day when banks and most businesses are closed.

In Spain ,12th October is a bank holiday.

 

Pronunciation of some adjectives ending in -ed

Phonetics,

If you were one of my students, you would know that one of my favourite words to use in class in EASY- sometimes I say easy peasy, but I guess it sounds the same to them. In fact, I only realized I said it so often when I saw my students  looking at each other with  half a  smile on their faces  and it got me thinking. I put two and two together and realized  that, carried away by my enthusiasm, I might have been overusing the word a bit. Well, nobody is perfect! The truth is that English grammar is easy to teach and easy to understand, but pronunciation is quite another matter.

Pronunciation!!! You can only sympathise with students when after years of teaching them how to pronounce the -ed ending of regular verbs, they suddenly find words such as naked,  which  they   automatically  pronounce /neikt/. You might not believe me, but  almost feel like I need to apologize and this is one of the few times when I need to say … Ok, this  is not that easy!!

The thing is that some adjectives ending in -ed have a special pronunciation and the -ed is not pronounced /t/ or /d/  but /id/. Let’s have a look at them

To make matters worse, aged is pronounced | eɪdʒd | when it means years old ( my grandmother, aged 93, is a very smart person) or when it is a verb but, when it is an adejctive it is pronounced  | eɪdʒid |

♥ All the young men went to fight in the war; and only the aged | eɪdʒid | and infirm remained behind.

Other adjectives ending in -ed   follow the rule for the pronunciation of the -ed ending, ie, pronounced /id/ only after /d/ ot /t/.

Keep posted!

Sentence Your Dictionary: a great help

Dictionaries,

Hello everyone! I hope you have a  happy Monday!!

In this blog I have published a handful of links to different dictionaries  and today I want to share with you one  I’ve been using quite  a lot lately. Yourdictionary.com  has a lot of
tools to help you understand and use  a word .

It provides the user with simple and clear definitions, synonyms, quotes where the  word is used, the etymology of the word…etc,  but the tool I  like best and the main reason why I keep coming back to this dictionary is the SEE IN A SENTENCE tool, because very often, to understand  the meaning of a word  you need more than the definition. Seeing how the word is used in a sentence, seeing how the word is used in a context is a great help for the non-native speaker.

I seriously wish I had so many good dictionaries for free when I first started studying English. They would have made my life so much easier!

Word of the Day: Roast and Baked

Word of the Day, ,

Hope you are having a great week!! I can’t complain!! Apart from a visit to the hospital and another one to the doctor to have my wrist bandaged I can say that , all in all , it’s been a great week so far.

I understand  you might be a bit tired of reading about food , but that’s what I am teaching and that’s where my  brain is focused right now. In fact, I have just found a video in youtube to add to the growing list of food related posts. Keep poted !!

Today I just want to point out the difference between these two words which are very similar and therefore raise doubts

♥Both are adjectives

♥Both  mean cooked in the oven

♥Baked is used for bread, cakes and most sweet things, and also fruit and vegetables.

♥Roast  means cooked with fat, and is used especially for meat and potatoes.