Here are some cooking vocabulary that you may find useful:
St. Valentine’s Day!
Today’s lesson is about St. Valentine’s Day! This will help you learn about American culture while increasing your English vocabulary at the same time.
Weather slang in English
Weather Idioms!
Learn Weather in English!
Here’s more basic vocabulary to learn in English – weather phrases. For this post I’ll stick to the basics, but tomorrow I’ll add some weather slang!
Vocabulary:
The weather is beautiful – This means the sun is shing and the the tempature is great!
It’s windy – The wind is blowing pretty strongly.
It’s sunny – The sun is out shining with very few clouds.
It’s cloudy – Lots of clouds out.
It’s hot!
It’s cold!
It’s warm.
It’s cool.
Activity:
Here’s a fun and easy activity you can do in order to reinforce the vocabulary you just learned. Double click on the picture and print out the weather symbols. Then cut out the boxes and now you have instant weather flashcards for you to practice with!
Times of the day in English
Do you want to learn the times of the day in English?
Whether is midnight, noontime, afternoon, morning, mid-morning, it is helpful to know what words apply to what times. These times are not in stone and some people may think differently, it’s just something to help you visualilze.
early Morning – 4am to 7am
morning – 7am – 10am
mid-morning – 10am – 12pm
noontime – 12pm – 1pm
noon – 12pm
afternoon – 1pm – 3pm
mid-afternoon – 3pm – 6pm
evening – 6pm-9pm
night – 9pm until 4am or so.
midnight – 12am
You don’t have to know all of the ‘mid’ times, but they can be helpful to remember as some people might use them.
Read this dialog that took place on the telephone and answer the questions afterwards…
Fred – Hi Betty! How are you doing? Do you wanna go to the park today for a picnic?
Betty – Sure Fred. That’s really nice of you to invite me. What time do you wanna go?
Fred – How about noon?
Betty – That’s a bit early for me. Can we go in the mid-afternoon? Say 3pm?
Fred – I don’t think I can. I have a doctor’s appointment at that time.
Betty – What about in the evening when the sun has set? We can meet for a late dinner at 6pm.
Fred – That sounds great, but I can’t stay out until midnight because I need to go to bed early.
Betty – No problem, we’ll keep it on the short side.
Fred – See you then, bye!
Betty – bye.
Questions:
1. What time of day did Betty and Fred decide to meet?
2. Why couldn’t Fred meet at 3pm?
3. Why are they meeting at the park?
4. When did Fred want to meet in the beginning.
5. What time a day is 12pm?
Answers:
1. 6pm
2. He had a doctor’s appointment.
3. To have a picnic.
4. 12pm
5. noon or noontime
Learning Face/Head words in English
Family words in English
Learning the names of different relatives is useful in English. You can practice this by making your own family tree and then telling yourself or a friend (if you have one 😉 ) the relationships between the people in your family.
Here are some useful words to learn:
father
mother
sister
brother
cousin
aunt
uncle
grandmother
grandfather
grandchild
niece
nephew
God-mother
God-father
God-daughter
God-son
Below is a diagram of a pretend family tree. See if you can answer the questions about the family tree.1. Who is Peter’s Wife?
2. Matthew is Brian’s _______.
3. Doug is Samatha’s _______.
4. Who is Brian’s Grandfather?
5. Who is Matthew’s sister?
Answers…
1. Pauline
2. Uncle
3. Husband
4. Peter
5. Samantha
Greetings in English!
There are so many different ways to greet people in English. There is the simple “Hello.” The friendly, “Hi!” or the extremely casual “Hey!” Then you can go to the opposite spectrum and say, “How do you do?” A lot of Americans would look at you funny if said that. Most would probably say in response, “I’m fine, thanks.” However, the correct response is “How do you do?” I guess that shows that Americans don’t use that greeting very much.
Other phrases you can use are, “What’s up?”, “Waz up?” or “How’s it going?” These are used with people you know pretty well. With people you don’t know as well, you can ask, “How are you doing?”
And for saying “Good-bye”, you can say that or, “bye”, “see ya”, “see you later” or to really young kids you can say, “bye-bye.” If you have close friends you can say, “later” or “laters.”
As you can see, there are tons of options in Enlish for greetings and for saying goodbye. Just be careful not to tell your grandma, “Waz up?”
Not sure where to start learning English????
If you have access to some international cable TV stations that is a great start to start listening to various accents and increase your vocabulary. While watching, you can soak up a lot of American (or British) culture.
If you don’t have access to international television, then you can go out on the web and find some great stuff to watch as well. Youtube.com is a wonderful site you can go to to view old or new videos. Just type in what you want to watch and search for it. You can search for old American shows like Dallas or 90210 or you can search for more recent shows like Desperate Housewives or Ugly Betty.
Welcome!
Welcome to My Learning English blog! Here you will find tips to learning English, video lessons and worksheets. If you have any requests for specific lessons or topics, just add a comment and let me know and I’ll design a lesson just for you!