Some of you may be wondering if you can take a free Google Hangout lesson with me to try things out. Well, on Sunday, 30th March you can. All times Japan Standard Time (GMT + 9:00). Each hangout is limited to 5 people. You can only take one of these hangout lessons. To book, email … [Read more…]
Should you pay to study? Some students do very well with free study material while others like to have a lot of textbooks. It can be quite expensive to buy a lot of textbooks but there are also advantages. I am going to talk about the pros and cons of studying using free material and … [Read more…]
In my old job I taught part of a weekend intensive English course. It was tough for a lot of the students, who had really high goals but they improved their English a lot over the course. Every one of the students liked English. At the end of term we had a karaoke party in … [Read more…]
You are not ‘bad at English’. What does ‘bad at English’ mean? Maybe your listening or reading comprehension skills are not as good as you want them to be. Practise with easy material and hard material. The easy material is a warm up and the hard material is work. I didn’t say you have to … [Read more…]
If you want to order food, use “I’d like”, not “I want”.
The English Blog’s Learning English Blog is rather good but only updated every month or two. It has links to materials for a mix of levels. This is where I found out about Speechyard, which has links to YouTube videos of movie clips and full movies with Google Translate powered subtitles (I’d recommend English subtitles … [Read more…]
So many people are busy and a lot of people think they are too busy to study English outside their English lesson time. That once-a-week lesson, with no homework in between, means that you leave seven days available for forgetting what you learned. This post from Learn English at Home gives you some ideas about … [Read more…]
Here are a some links to different sites that I like for English. The English Learner Blog is written by Michal, a Polish guy and it is very well written. I love recommending BBC’s Newsround because it is news for kids, but it is a great way for adults to get news vocabulary. Antimoon has … [Read more…]
Since I became a teacher I have been interested in how people use technology to help them study. When I was setting up this website and the social media that I use to let people know about it, I found some interesting ways to use Pinterest and Evernote for language study. Use Pinterest as a … [Read more…]
A couple of months ago I was teaching a student at a company class in Tokyo. “Can you help me prepare for a meeting tomorrow, please?” she asked. Her company had arranged a meeting with a machine salesman from Korea who spoke no Japanese. My student, an intermediate speaker of English – the best in … [Read more…]