View Full Version : English thread (Improve your English)
I am starting a thread where members like me, who are not so good in English, can improve their English with the help of those who are from USA and England. Like grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes and word-meanings etc.........
I hope members from Asia, Africa and even from different parts of Europe would like this idea :bri:
So I am taking the start by asking the 1st question.
How can we use the word 'worth' properly?? I always face difficulty in adjusting it to my sentences :)
ukrainian_CA
09-10-2007, 22:23
How can we use the word 'worth' properly??]
First, you must use only one question mark at the end. just teasing...
You are not trust-worthy.
This is my 2 cent worth.
On a serious note, "that article was worth reading" is the most common usage of the word.
Blacktop
10-10-2007, 19:09
You really ought to improve your humility and tact (that is, if you even have any) first before improving your English, mzk.
You really ought to improve your humility and tact (that is, if you even have any) first before improving your English, mzk.
It would be better if we stay on topic and do not talk irrelivent things :rolleyes:
& Thanks alot ukrainian_CA, so nice of u :5ok:
irrelivent
close, but the correct spelling is irrelevant :)
As for the word 'worth', you can use it in most sentences when you are trying to express the value of an item or activity. Some examples:
How much is that worth?
I don't think that is worth much.
It is worth £50.
Is that shirt really worth that much?
That lesson was really worth doing.
It's not worth arguing about.
I'm sure other people can think of other ways to explain this, but i hope this helps a little. If you are ever unsure, use a dictionary (or an online dictionary) and that will help. Plus should you wish to learn new words, to widen your vocabulary, then use a thesarus (or online version).
BMW, i believe recently you were complaining about the incorrect use of the word should've, so i would have thought that this thread would have met with your approval.
I have another example, Zeekay. :)
It wasn't worth dying for.
First, you must use only one question mark at the end. just teasing...
You are not trust-worthy.
This is my 2 cent worth.
2 cents worth!
remote2book
12-10-2007, 12:10
You really ought to improve your humility and tact (that is, if you even have any) first before improving your English, mzk.
ok this is really uncessary ....
Kaka1899
12-10-2007, 13:20
I have another example, Zeekay. :)
It wasn't worth dying for.
is anything worth it mate?
Kaka1899
12-10-2007, 13:21
You really ought to improve your humility and tact (that is, if you even have any) first before improving your English, mzk.
whats the point in saying this?
what has Zeekay done wrong!? or are you just trying to start an argument :rolleyes:
remote2book
13-10-2007, 00:19
You really ought to improve your humility and tact (that is, if you even have any) first before improving your English, mzk.
i agree kak1899 wat has he done wrong? he opened a really good thread and for you to come on here and state something like this is really unfair..(dont start talking abt his attacks on dida) cuz this is a personal attack towards a member
lets not get this thread closed before it's had a chance to go anywhere, lets stick to the subject.
Anyone else have any questions about words or phrases in English?
Kaka1899
13-10-2007, 12:50
an intresting article i read in my Grandpas newspaper the other day taken from the Daily Mail
Well worth reading shows the hidden depth of English
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About three years ago I started researching a book, This Little Britain, about the various ways in which we Brits have a history of being the exception.
In areas such as law, government, economics, agriculture and science, we've often been a uniquely British exception to a general European rule.
Ditto, in such things as men's fashion, Victorian sewers, drunken yobbishness, and - not least - in the whole area of language and literature.
Take spellings. George Bernard Shaw famously commented that English spelling would allow you to write the word 'fish' as 'ghoti' - and it would sound the same (in the latter, the sound 'f' would be from 'gh', as in 'rough'; 'i' would be from 'o' in 'women' and 'sh' as in 'ti' from 'nation').
But he couldn't have been trying all that hard, if that was the best example he came up with. How about 'potato' as in 'ghoughbteighpteau'?
That's the sound 'p' as in hiccough, 'o' as in though, 't' as in debt, 'a' as in neighbour, 't' as in ptomaine, 'o' as in bureau. The fact is that with just 26 letters and 48 different sounds to cope with, there were always going to be problems.
Throw in other pronunciation changes and an appetite for foreign borrowings, and it's no surprise that English has some of the most dangerously unpredictable spellings in the world.
If our spellings are painful, however, our grammar has its blessedly simple side. French nouns are either masculine or feminine; French verbs vary with every puff of the syntactical breeze.
But French is a pretty simple language. Italian has 50 different forms for every verb, ancient Greek more than 300, modern Turkish an eye-popping two million.
English, by contrast, has just four verb forms (bark, barks, barking, barked), two noun forms (dog, dogs), and just one adjectival form (snappy), thus making our language about the least inflected in the world.
If that's a curious fact, the reason why is perhaps odder still. Back in Alfred the Great's England, two language communities - English and Danish - intermingled.
Each community could make out the basic words of the other language.
For example, the word 'horse' is 'hors' in Old English, 'hossit' in Old Norse. But all those tricksy little word endings would have made no sense at all. So they began to vanish.
Under pressure of trade, friendship and intermarriage, our ancient ancestors did away with inflections almost completely. Confusing at the time, no doubt, but a blessing for those who need to learn the language today.
And there are plenty of people learning it, of course.
With about one-and-a-half billion non-native speakers, English has become the world's own language - one that accounts for two-thirds of internet content, and a still larger proportion of the world's scientific and technical journals.
It's sometimes suggested that English has achieved its leadership because it's the language of Shakespeare, because of its unique and beautiful literature.
That's nonsense, of course. English dominates because the British Isles exported English speakers and gunboats in the 19th century, and because America exported Hollywood, GIs and hamburgers in the 20th.
If those Mayflower settlers had chanced to speak Ubykh (a Caucasian language with 81 consonants and three vowels) or Rotokas (a Papua New Guinea language with just six consonants and five vowels), the world would most likely be speaking those fine languages today.
Such dominance has its downside, of course. There are now about 6,800 languages left in the world, compared with perhaps twice that number back at the dawn of agriculture. The remaining languages are now dying at the rate of about one a fortnight.
English is big in other ways too. If you wanted to learn all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, you'd have to deal with about 500,000 of them (ending with zyxt, a splendid last word by any standards and an archaic Kentish term for thou seest).
Having done that, you'd probably be a bit taken aback to learn the equivalent American dictionary, Webster's, offers a further 450,000 words or so, of which only about half are to be found in the OED, suggesting a pooled total word count of about 750,000.
But there are lots of words that never get in to either dictionary. Flora and fauna are mostly out. So are most acronyms, slang and dialect. Total that lot up and you'd get to a million or so. Next, you'd need to deal with scientific and technological terms, adding another million or so words.
Other languages can't keep up. The official dictionary-based word count of German is fewer than 200,000. The French wordcount is fewer than 100,000. The scale of our vocabulary is impossible to explain, except by recognising that English users are reckless adopters and inventors.
In the cultural realm, however, mere size is hardly likely to In terms of Nobel Prizes for literature, the United Kingdom trots home in the bronze medal position (beaten by goldmedallist France, and the silvergongholder, the U.S.).
If, on the other hand, you were looking at the total amount of literature produced by the British Isles then we would come in level with France, with 13 prizes.
But perhaps that's to measure things the wrong way. If you look at Nobel Prizes by language, then English wins by a country mile (26 laureates vs 13 for France).
More to the point, the Nobel Prize Committee is just that: a committee. Wouldn't it be better to let the world's reading public determine which literature it favours? Alas, there are no reliable global sales figures available.
We do, however, have an index of which authors have written the most translated books. British authors romp home in four of the top five places: Agatha Christie in first, then Enid Blyton, Shakespeare and Barbara Cartland in third to fifth. (The one interloper, Frenchman Jules Verne, is in second place.)
Looking more broadly, British authors dominate the top 40, with some 14 authors on the list, compared with 11 for the United States, and 15 for the entire rest of the world put together.
The obvious conclusion: that we Brits have some natural affinity for words and literature, the way that the Germans 'do' music, or the French 'do' visual art.
Such things run both deep and ancient. The vernacular literature of Alfred the Great's England was the most developed in Europe. It's perhaps not surprising that the same is arguably still true today.
ukrainian_CA
13-10-2007, 16:27
2 cents worth!
Nice catch! Keep doing your work, it is quite worthwhile.
ukrainian_CA
13-10-2007, 16:36
Next question:
How do you interpret the following:
"The more there is of mine the less there is of yours"?
Or this statement:
"Be what you would seem to be."
Does the latter have the same meaning as
"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise"?
slicknick
14-10-2007, 17:09
uncessary ....
Unnecessary :5ok:
I'd like to know the difference between the use of the words 'toward' and 'towards', please. :)
alirossonero
16-10-2007, 14:04
I'd like to know the difference between the use of the words 'toward' and 'towards', please. :)
In U.S. English, toward is the usual form but in British English towards is more common.
inter-1908
16-10-2007, 16:07
Well actually in canda more people say towards, but really it all depends, it can go either way. It can be used both ways and mean the same thing without being plural excuse me if im wrong, not to well with the grammar, just using examples on what i hear everyday.
alirossonero
17-10-2007, 00:38
Well actually in canda more people say towards, but really it all depends, it can go either way. It can be used both ways and mean the same thing without being plural excuse me if im wrong, not to well with the grammar, just using examples on what i hear everyday.
yea i think it has nothing to do with singular/plural subjects. both toward and towards have the same meaning and r used interchangeably.
alirossonero
17-10-2007, 00:44
ok now here's a question
is the word unpragmatic correct?
hany.Egypt
17-10-2007, 03:09
Good idea MZK, and excellent post Kaka1899.
I guess this thread is probably the most useful one in the forum, at least for people like as I am still learnning English and always have difficulties in both (spelling and Punctiation) , I guess its spelling is incorrect also.
My question is : When do we add extra latter to the word before adding the ING and when we dont? For example is it right to write learnning or learning ?
Kaka1899
17-10-2007, 05:19
Good idea MZK, and excellent post Kaka1899.
I guess this thread is probably the most useful one in the forum, at least for people like as I am still learnning English and always have difficulties in both (spelling and Punctiation) , I guess its spelling is incorrect also.
My question is : When do we add extra latter to the word before adding the ING and when we dont? For example is it right to write learnning or learning ?
if im wrong please correct me but you add "ing" to the end of a word when you doing somthing for example Walk becomes walking, Run becomes running
to learn becomes learning you get what i meen or have i misunderstood the question hopw it helps either way :)
hany.Egypt
17-10-2007, 05:35
My question is why did you wirte Running with ruNNing while you wrote Learning with only one n
Kaka1899
17-10-2007, 05:38
My question is why did you wirte Running with ruNNing while you wrote Learning with only one n
tbh i dont know the answer we are just taught that at school and never given a reason why but i will find out for you! :5ok:
hany.Egypt
17-10-2007, 05:42
Thanks mate
BTW what is the diffrence between Kill and murder?
Kaka1899
17-10-2007, 05:49
Thanks mate
BTW what is the diffrence between Kill and murder?
well murder is to kill with intent if you know what i meen to murder sombody meens you ment to kill them but i guess if you shoot an animal to eat i guess its murder but say sombody dies in a car accident that would be killed because they didnt meen to hit each other you get what i meen? just give me a shout if you want more explanations
hany.Egypt
17-10-2007, 06:01
Got what you mean, and here is another question which one is correct (in term of spelling ) mean or meen ?
Kaka1899
17-10-2007, 06:11
Got what you mean, and here is another question which one is correct (in term of spelling ) mean or meen ?
both they have different meanings
for meen you would use it for example "say that again i dont understand what you MEEN."
and for mean you would use it "Give back that child his toy that was MEAN taking it off him."
hany.Egypt
17-10-2007, 06:28
ohh my, God I thought that mean has two meanings and I have been using it for ages
and never used the right one, what a shame?!
both they have different meanings
for meen you would use it for example "say that again i dont understand what you MEEN."
and for mean you would use it "Give back that child his toy that was MEAN taking it off him."
You must be jesting!
I was surprised reading what you just wrote, so I had to check it out with dictionary.com and it naturally it said "mean" is used for both those examples you provided.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mean
"Meen" on the other hand... Here is the result for that: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meen
following the link you can see that it is a acronym for Mechanical engineering, but have no other meaning.
Kaka1899
17-10-2007, 09:24
Kris im glad you have pointed this out as iv been doing it wrong for 17 years
hany.Egypt, as Kris said the word 'mean' is always spelt with an 'a' and never with a second 'e'. That spelling does not exist.
Not to confuse things but the word 'mean' also has a third meaning, one of a mathematical nature.
All right. Thx for the help on my question. Just so I get it right, you are allowed to use both 'toward' and 'towards' in all sentences? :)
hany.Egypt
17-10-2007, 09:46
Hmmm, and what is the meaning of jesting?
P.S. when you feel tired of my questions tell me so that I ask them later.
inter-1908
17-10-2007, 16:13
Hmmm, and what is the meaning of jesting?
P.S. when you feel tired of my questions tell me so that I ask them later.
according to dictionary.com it has 4 meanings:
A playful or amusing act; a prank. See Synonyms at joke.
A frolicsome or frivolous mood: spoken in jest.
An object of ridicule; a laughingstock.
A witty remark.
Hmmm, and what is the meaning of jesting?
jest (verb) - to say something intended to amuse
It is one of the synonyms for "joke" and is used in a similar way.
Kris im glad you have pointed this out as iv been doing it wrong for 17 years
First when I read your posts I was thinking "he is from England he must be right" :D But since I never seen someone use "meen" (including numerous of books I read) I had to check it to be sure.
ukrainian_CA
19-10-2007, 02:00
tbh i dont know the answer we are just taught that at school and never given a reason why but i will find out for you! :5ok:
Nope, you merely forgot. my 10 y old had to remember this rule last year in cali private school.
Jim,could you recall this rule? travelling is an exception (l or ll), spelled differently in he UK and the US
ukrainian_CA
19-10-2007, 02:07
hany.Egypt, as Kris said the word 'mean' is always spelt with an 'a' and never with a second 'e'. That spelling does not exist.
Not to confuse things but the word 'mean' also has a third meaning, one of a mathematical nature.
I was about to write (wrote and erased "right") - i know 3 meanings of "mean".
BTW, guys how many of you here (Jim is excused from this) do write "loose" i.t.o (instead of) "lose"? lose- lost-lost = verb; loose-looser-loosest=adj.
BTW, guys how many of you here (Jim is excused from this) do write "loose" i.t.o (instead of) "lose"?
Not me :grinser:
As for that rule about adding 'ing' to the end of a word, i'm the wrong person to ask. My school days were a loooooong time ago :delol:
alirossonero
19-10-2007, 09:29
Not me :grinser:
As for that rule about adding 'ing' to the end of a word, i'm the wrong person to ask. My school days were a loooooong time ago :delol:
here's what i remember
when the second last letter in a verb is a vowel then we double the ending letter before the ing
examples
rUn : rUnning
but when we have a verb ending with "e" we just drop the e and don't double the last letter
example
write
e is dropped
writ and ing is added
writing
Kaka1899
19-10-2007, 10:55
Nope, you merely forgot. my 10 y old had to remember this rule last year in cali private school.
Jim,could you recall this rule? travelling is an exception (l or ll), spelled differently in he UK and the US
from what i know the education systems are different in the Uk to the Usa mate :)
ukrainian_CA
19-10-2007, 19:06
from what i know the education systems are different in the Uk to the Usa mate :)
And your point was ... ?
Yeah, of course they are different. And an aircraft moves differently from a boat, doesn't it.
Read, write, read, write...
The secret path to improve your English is that easy.
And that monotonous.
here's what i remember
when the second last letter in a verb is a vowel then we double the ending letter before the ing
examples
rUn : rUnning
That does not explain words such as the following:
eAt - eAting
sAy - sAying
knOw - knOwing
ruIn - ruIning
cleAr - cleAring
etc
hany.Egypt
24-10-2007, 10:03
i like being spoiled...
This is from a different thread, I dont understand what he/she means exactly with spoiled?
This is from a different thread, I dont understand what he/she means exactly with spoiled?
When you are spoiled, you get whatever you want as a kid. Say you wanted a toy car from your mum but your mum refused. You cried and cried and your mum said, "Alright... whatver" and bought you one.
Some Milan fans are, obviously, spoiled as they expect Milan to win every single game as they take it for granted.
You are spoiled: Present Passive
You are being spoiled: Present Continuous Passive
hany.Egypt
25-10-2007, 03:52
Thanks jeff, I know that I am asking lots of questions but you know, I just wish to improve my language.
hany, if you spoil someone you are excessively indulging them. So if you gave a girlfriend lots of nice things, bought them lots of gifts, gave them treats, etc, etc ... you would be spoiling them.
You can also say 'I'm spoilt for choice'. This is when you have so many choices you don't know which one to choose. For example, Milan are spoilt for choice at left-back because we have Jankulovski, Kaladze, Favalli, Serginho and Maldini who can all play there.
hany.Egypt
25-10-2007, 05:17
Thanks Jim, BTW does any one know sth that can help me in improving my spelling?
Hany, try the bbc language section.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
hope this helps
Thanks jeff, I know that I am asking lots of questions but you know, I just wish to improve my language.
That should be want to improve my English! For spelling just use Microsoft Words spell checker with the English (UK) dictionary, not the English (US) dictionary. After all if you want to learn to spell you want to learn properly:)
hany, if you spoil someone you are excessively indulging them. So if you gave a girlfriend lots of nice things, bought them lots of gifts, gave them treats, etc, etc ... you would be spoiling them.
Hence the expression spoilt brat. I'm sure many of you have seen the Bratz dolls? The name Bratz is a play on spolit brat.
Is this sentence grammatically correct?
'He stands no chance of qualification in front of her'
it is grammatically correct...
but I think this sentence would be better:
"He Stands no chance of qualifying against her"
I'd like someone to explain me the following thing: what is the correct expression between "team of AC Milan" and "AC Milan team" ??
I think both are good in this case, but when do I have to use one and when do I have to use the other one more generally ??
Thanks !! :D
they are both the same...
they both refer to the players of Ac Milan...
but if u want to refer to AC Milan as a Club, you say AC Milan FC, but then, Milan is not only a Football club so.. i dont know..
PS: my answers are never 100% coreect so never rely on me :P
Actually, it was only an example ... in the same way, what is the best between "team players" and "players of the team", ummmh I don't know what else, there are plenty examples possible (and not only in football).
"firm workers" or "workers of the firm" ?
etc etc etc ...
I just want to know when using one or other, not only in the case of "Milan team"/"team of Milan" lol ...
its the same meaning mate ;)
and u gave an example and i gave you an example, we used same sentence.. lol :D
Actually, it was only an example ... in the same way, what is the best between "team players" and "players of the team", ummmh I don't know what else, there are plenty examples possible (and not only in football).
"firm workers" or "workers of the firm" ?
etc etc etc ...
I just want to know when using one or other, not only in the case of "Milan team"/"team of Milan" lol ...
Sometimes they mean the same thing, eg:
employees of the company
company employees
But they're not always interchangeable, ie:
workers of the firm - people who work in the firm
firm workers - uh... people who are firm in what they're doing
Also, "team players" can mean 1) people in the team and 2) people in the team who work as a team.
So it depends on context.
Sometimes they mean the same thing, eg:
employees of the company
company employees
But they're not always interchangeable, ie:
workers of the firm - people who work in the firm
firm workers - uh... people who are firm in what they're doing
Also, "team players" can mean 1) people in the team and 2) people in the team who work as a team.
So it depends on context.
My suggestion is that if the two different forms are the same, always always always use the more parsimonious (i.e., shorter) form.
Of course, if the meanings associated with the two different forms are different, then you should be well aware of that and use them accordingly.
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