A Daily Dose of English

Get your daily dose of English at English Daily. Here you can find great activities and resources for students. Below are a few of the sections you can access on this web site:

Train your ear - Listen to authentic news clips and fill in the blanks with the words that have been removed.
Learn slang - Get a start on understanding many of the slang terms you will hear people in the U.S. use. Complete with examples.
Movie lines - Great for those students who are Hollywood film aficionados. Read dialogs from real-life films.
English proverbs - Practice some of those English proverbs.
Common English mistakes - Although geared toward mistakes Chinese students of English often make, any student can learn from looking at these mistakes that are common across languages.
TOEFL vocabulary - For students who need more formal, academic vocabulary, there is a section where you can study words commonly found on the TOEFL exam.

Have fun exploring the site, and be sure to comment on any web sites you may have found that are helpful!

Run for President of the United States!

Surprise your family and friends! Put the best candidate on the podium and run for the job of President of the United States.

Discuss the issues that are important to you. Pick your own party. Upload an image and get started.

Image from www.yourct.com

Who do you want to win?

With all the excitement of the upcoming elections in the United States, you may be wondering who you would vote for. Compare the candidates and decide for yourself who you would like to win.

Keep up with the last minute information of who is ahead at the polls. The political dashboard at Yahoo will show you who is winning and where, along with how many electoral votes each U.S. state gets.

Convert Text to Speech

Programs that convert text to speech are really fun! Make eggs talk at the Talking Egg-a-Gram web site, courtesy of Holiday Inn. Or try Monk-E-Mail. Send your message on to a friend!

Walkthrough for Friday's game Phantasy Quest is here. Follow these directions if you get stuck.

Tell Others What To Do! (Practicing Commands)

Practice your commands and get a laugh as you do! Tell the subservient chicken what you want him to do and watch him bow to your every word!

How? Type in a command and submit and then just watch. Here are just a few to use:

• roll over
• bend over and touch your toes
• dance
• jump
• scratch your head

Try a few of your own!

Not a fan of the chicken suit? (I admit, it could be a little cuter!) There is a cute little dog waiting for your instructions at I Do Dog Tricks. The dog can't do as much as the chicken, but it's fun anyway, and maybe you'll learn some new vocabulary! Try these commands with the dog: dance, beg, bark, jump, sit, stand, etc.

Are you a higher level learner? Try the Family Friendly Simon Sez Santa, where the commands understood are greater and new ones are being added.
If you are there to practice your English, be sure to choose English as your language. If you're there just to have a little fun, there are a lot of languages to choose from. An added feature here is that some fun commands appear at the bottom - ideas for you to try!

Enjoy!

PS I saw these on Larry Ferlazzo's blog, although I'd seen the dog web site before. Check out his blog if you're an English teacher looking for ideas!

Voice Threads - Connect with people around the world

Looking for a place where you can interact with people around the world, plus practice your speaking, listening, and reading skills? Try Voice Thread, a great web site where you can post a picture, record yourself explaining something about the picture, and then receive comments about it from other internet users. Try it - it's free!

Visualize the tenses with cartoons

Here is a web site to check out. This web site not only shows you, through colorful, interactive cartoons, the way tenses are used in English, it also gives step-by-step rules of how to form the structure and when to use it, as well as common phrases used with the tense. For example, in the case of future perfect, common phrases are: until, before, by the time.

Using YouTube to Improve Your Pronunciation

YouTube isn't just a place to find funny videos or shorts of your favorite TV shows. You can actually use YouTube to help you improve your speaking and pronunciation skills. The video below, which works on word stress, was created by an English teacher for speakers of other languages, and is a good example of how you can use the Internet, and web sites like YouTube, to work on your English skills.



To find more videos like this one, put "english pronunciation" in the search field of YouTube and click! A number of videos to help you work on your pronunciation will show up.

Practice Vocabulary and Help End World Hunger

Does studying English all day make you feel selfish sometimes? Maybe you don't have the time to spend with your family because you are running off to English class. Maybe you cancel plans with your significant other because you have to spend the weekend preparing for the TOEFL exam. But now there is a way to practice your vocabulary and help feed the needy by going to the Free Rice web site. Here you will be given a word and asked to choose its meaning. If you are correct, they will donate 10 grains of rice to the poor through the United Nations.

It may seem like a little, but you can "play" all you like. Yesterday, for example, 48,720,340 grains of rice were donated. Watch your bowl fill as you play to give you an idea of the difference you are making.

Check it out, learn some vocabulary, and do something for you while helping others!

Free Online English Lessons

English lessons can be expensive. Or maybe you don't have time to attend a class due to a crazy work or school schedule. The Internet has opened up countless opportunities for people like you who want to learn English for free or in the comfort of your own home.

Free English lessons at Learn English Online.
Englishbaby has a new English lesson every day.
English at Home has many features, such as a forum and grammar activities. And it also has a sister site where you can improve your business communication skills.

Chat with a Robot and Practice Your English

Do you want someone to chat with who has perfect English, is willing to chat at any time of the day and will never get tired of your questions? Try Dave E.S.L. Bot, a service that will give you a month of unlimited chat time for only $10. Dave's the perfect English partner to talk to and has tens of thousands of words in his vocabulary bank. (Remember to always check a web site before paying for a product - this one has not been tested by us. Still, it is a neat idea!)

There are other free robot chats online. Rong-chang.com has one. Oliverbot is free also. Splotchy is a bit quirky but will talk to you if your computer is set up properly. And jabberwacky will "learn" conversations and responses the more you use him, thus getting more and more intelligent as you chat. You can even choose his emotions and taint his reactions!

One added plus: you won't be able to make lifelong friends with these robots, but you never have to worry about cyber safety issues.

Online Crossword Puzzles

We've compiled a list of crossword puzzles for those of you who like to play games in English.

The human body: From the BBC "Learning English" web site. You can send them an email and request a crossword puzzle based on a theme you like, too!

Past tense verbs: Practice the past tense of common verbs. There are plenty more on this site, like Animal sounds.
Or try something a bit more challenging, like Phrases with Make or Collective Nouns.

Maybe you are into something Business related? Or short but difficult?

Want to try an authentic crossword puzzle (one made for English speakers and not students)? Here's the Washington Post's, USA Today's, and Newsday's.

Maybe a designer crossword? Here's one which features clues Martha Stewart wrote.

Or something that can satisfy not only your love of words but also your soul?

If you are serious about crossword puzzle solving, you may need a crossword dictionary. At the very least you could use an online dictionary to help out with those clues you don't know the answer to.

Once you get good at the puzzles, why not try and create a few of your own?
This crossword puzzle creator is user-friendly and free! This one allows you to save PDF files of your creation (you have to register to the site). Here is another.

Have fun exploring these sites. Happy "puzzling"!

Cartoons for English Language Learners

Like to read cartoons? The British Council site has a cartoon-of-the-week feature. The cartoons are adapted for English language learners and often focus on a play on words. You can go into their archives for theme-related cartoons, on topics as diverse as animals, restaurants, and sports.

Customized wallpaper

Here is a fun web site where you can build your own reef, then save it and download it as a wallpaper for your desktop. It starts out empty, like this:

You add fish, sea turtles, different kinds of reefs, bubbles, color, etc.

Here is an example of what you can do.

Download Free E-books for More English Practice

Want to read in English but English books are too expensive? Well, if you haven't been using the Internet already, do so! On the Internet you have access to news items, entertainment news, and just about anything you could possibly want. Most of the information on the web is non-fiction, however, and it might seem difficult to find fiction in English. There are a number of web sites that offer free fiction e-books, many of them classics, that you can download to your computer. Try these:

• Classic Bookshelf
• The Gutemberg Project
• The Online Books Page
  

English News Web Site for English Language Learners

Practice your listening and reading skills, as well as increase your vocabulary, by reading and listening to articles at Simple English News. This web site offers a variety of news in simple, easier language than that found in a regular English newspaper. There are unusual news features, words in the news, entertainment & sports news, and even polls asking opinions for everything from "Would you like to travel in space?" to "What kind of cola do you drink when you are thirsty?".
Have fun exploring the site!

Free Study Tips: TOEFL and TOEIC

Studying to take the TOEFL exam? Need to work on your TOEFL-specific vocabulary, brush up on your punctuation and writing skills, or check out some study tips? ESL-Pro has a list of free, downloadable e-books that can help with with anything from tricky elements of English punctuation to tips for summarizing and paraphrasing. You must sign-up (free) for the service, and the site does try to sell other study guides and software, but for those of you looking for some free advice for studying for the TOEFL or TOEIC, this web site may help.
Good luck!

Music Videos for Kids (and Beginners!)

Little kids will get a kick out of these videos made especially for them! Beginner adults may also like them. Best of all, there are Mac and PC versions. You can save the podcast on your own computer, too. Learn about colors, parts of the body, greetings, and the names of countries in English.
Have fun!

Online Dictionaries

Dictionaries can be expensive to buy. They are heavy, cumbersome, and inconvenient at times. But there are a number of online dictionaries that you can use.

• dictionary.com: a free online dictionary complete with thesaurus, games, and even featuring languages other than English
• Merriam Webster Online: click on the speaker icon next to the word and hear the correct pronunciation, play a word game, do the daily crossword, or learn a new word each day. Lots of stuff here!
• Cambridge Dictionaries Online: Here you can search the various Cambridge University Press dictionaries, including the Learner, which has graded language and clear examples of how the word is used.
• Yourdictionary.com: get links to dictionaries for other languages, as well as an acronym finder
• alphadictionary: play word games, find instant translators, sign up for the word of the day, take your chance at a virtual spelling bee, learn the most common false cognates in English, learn where the slang you hear is coming from, read a funny language joke, and much more.

Improve your Pronunciation

Oxford University Press has a site for students who want to practice their pronunciation. Practice vowels, consonants, diphthongs (2 vowels or consonants that make one sound), regular past tense endings, and more. Hear the British pronunciation of the words by clicking on the word or icon. Repeat until you feel comfortable saying the sound. Play Stress Monsters - which is set up like a real video game, to practice syllable stress.
Have fun!