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TEN MINUTES OF ENGLISH A DAY!
You can find a mixture of reading, crosswords, videos and short English lessons: these will normally be vocabulary, but I may also treat you to some grammar!

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''Let nature be your teacher''
William Wordsworth, poet, 1770-1850

''Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift''
Albert Einstein, physicist, 1879-1955

''... to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed''
P.M. Roget, lexicographer, 1779-1869

Wednesday 9 February 2011

Vocabulary learning websites

There are many websites to help you with your vocabulary. Here are some of my recommendations.

One Word A Day
Every day you are sent an email with a word (or phrase); you are given three possible answers to choose from. The reason this site is so good is that it uses English to explain the meaning of the word and gives lots of examples. And it's free!

Cambridge Word of the Day
There are many 'word of the day' sites, but they often have very difficult or unusual words which are not suitable for a learner (or even for a native speaker!). The Cambridge site works because it gives a definition of a word from the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary.

Snappy Words online dictionary
Make your own word maps! Type in a word and see related words and synonyms

Do you use these sites? What do you think of them?
What other websites can you recommend?

2 comments:

  1. I've been using OWAD for quite some time now and they do tend to present quite odd words or phrases every now and then. An advantage is that they often include words which are somehow related to current events.
    A site I like to use to look up words I don't know is: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ They offer good and comprehensive explanations and examples and furthermore provide you with the AE and BE pronunciation.

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  2. Thanks for the comment!
    We'll look at online dictionaries in more detail in another post.

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