LearnSomething

Writing about everything under the sun!

[sanjuthegreatest]

nice.

Nice if you smile Nicer if you smile through the crap Nice if you obey Nicer if you obey without question Nice if can take a joke Nicer if it is an off-colour one I’m not nice You shouldn’t be either I’m not nice I feel it, then I show it I question…everyone knows it I cannot take a joke I don’t care if I don’t seem ‘woke’ Nice if we pretend Nicer if we stayed true ourselves

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[sanjuthegreatest]

Play Vocabulary Games With Albert Learning

Play word games, duel in vocabulary challenges and much more on our FunZone! Welcome to your first ‘Word of the Week’ series! We’ll give a new word each week, with its history an…

Words Never Looked This Good!

[sanjuthegreatest]

English Question Types

◆ Description: Question types in English usually begin with 'Who' 'What' 'When' 'Where' 'Why' 'How' and 'Which'. Learn how to use each of these correctly for...

[sanjuthegreatest]

Learn French With Song Lyrics

By Sanjana Shukla Shake shake shake Shake your booty… …is exactly what you want to do after listening to a song you particularly like, don’t you? Bopping your head, tapping your feet, swingin…

Wanna learn French? Read this article!

[sanjuthegreatest]

Common Mistakes in English (Contd.) – Future Simple Tense

In the previous blog I talked about the Present and Past Simple Tenses mistakes. In this post we’ll see how easy it is to get confused when using the Future Simple Tense. As you know (from my previ…

[sanjuthegreatest]

Learn English With These 10 Punderful Puns

By Sanjana Shukla. A hilarious play on words and one of the best ways to lighten up a sombre article or post, puns can also be used as a testing tool for people learning English. It is said …

Puns can help you learn too! Read the above article to find out how...

[sanjuthegreatest]

Stuff We Say In English

Angry with someone but can't describe it? Try using synonyms. This is video 5 of our 'Fun With English Synonyms' series. For more online language lessons, please visit our website.

[sanjuthegreatest]

Fun with English Synonyms-part 4

◆ Description: Here's video 4 of our 'Fun With Synonyms' series, learn more words to describe food. For more online English lessons please visit our website ...

[sanjuthegreatest]

Synonyms Can Be Fun Too!

[sanjuthegreatest]

Pick up your kid’s/little sister’s/little brother’s book and start learning English today.

[womenoflibraryhistory]

Librarian and writer Adele Fasick revisits the life of bookseller, publisher, and librarian Elizabeth Peabody, who opened the first American kindergarten.

Librarian and writer Adele Fasick revisits the life of bookseller, publisher, and librarian Elizabeth Peabody, who opened the first American kindergarten.

From her post (which also explains Peabody’s connections ot the Transcendentalists):

We have no picture of Elizabeth Peabody as a young woman, although she was well-known in Boston. As her biographer, Megan Marshall, explains, Elizabeth’s portrait was painted in 1828 by Chester Harding, a well-known portrait artist in Boston. Elizabeth was 24 years old at the time and teaching at a school she had started for girls. Instead of being pleased by the portrait, her parents were scandalized. Women of that time did not have pictures of themselves mounted on walls and displayed to others. Unlike men, women were supposed to live lives that were private and hidden from everyone except their families. Despite the prevailing customs, however, Elizabeth was destined to become a well-known figure in Boston and elsewhere during her long life.

[sanjuthegreatest]

False Friends

Imagine your joy when, while learning a new language, you stumble across a word that is the same as your native language. You know the meaning of this word! Or do you?

Unfortunately, not all words that look/sound the same necessarily mean the same thing.

Why then, do they occur?

Called ‘false friends’ in English, these words occur because while they might have had a common origin a long time ago, their meanings changed over time to become something completely different.

Some common ‘false friends’ to avoid making an embarrassing mistake:

1- Gift: Oh, how we love this word! And what it means! In German, however, this word could be quite dangerous, because it means ‘poison’! Imagine saying, “I want a gift for my birthday”, and receiving poison! Scary, right?

2- Pain: While this looks exactly like the English word ‘pain’, it means ‘bread’ in French.

3- Brat: Meaning ‘brother’ in Russian, it is a very fitting example on this list. So the next time you call your brother a brat, just pretend you are learning Russian!

4- LOL: As any teenager will tell you, this means ‘Laugh Out Loud’ in internet slang. In Dutch, however, it means ‘fun’. Appropriate, no?

5- Rest: Use it in French and it means ‘to stay’, use it in English and it means ‘to rest’. There might only be a small difference, but look at the image to see the trouble it could cause!

6- Douche: Say it in French, and the meaning changes from an insult to ‘shower’.

7- Say: While it means ‘to speak’ in English, it means ‘I know’ in Spanish.

8- Nova: When cars named ‘Opal Nova’ were launched in Spain, there were hardly any buyers. ‘No va’ means ‘It doesn’t go’ in Spanish. (It means ‘a star that suddenly becomes thousands of times brighter and then gradually fades to its original intensity’ in English.)

9- Scum/Skum: Although the words don’t sound exactly the way you would expect, not many English-speaking natives would want a shower gel called ‘Bad Skum’. However, the words actually translate to ‘bath foam’!

So, ‘bad’ means ‘bath’ and ‘skum’ is ‘foam’ in Swedish.

Do you know of any such ‘false friends’? Let me know what they are in the comments section below.

Visit Albert Learning for many more topics like this!

[sanjuthegreatest]

4 Reasons Why Learning French Can Help You Learn Spanish (And Vice-Versa)

Do you speak French? Or Spanish? Or both? If this is the case, consider yourself fortunate. Because unlike those people (the ones that probably live under rocks) who have never even heard these languages been spoken, you have a distinct advantage when it comes time to learn these languages. Plenty of words (and sometimes phrases) in these languages look and sound similar enough to confuse even an intermediate speaker. Similarities? How come? Well... Some important reasons for the similarities are: 1- Origins…

[prideprejudce]

tbh nothing frustrates me more then when people brush off classics like pride and prejudice or jane eyre because they don’t fit into today’s modern standards of feminism and social justice etc.

remember that these novels were published in the 19th century. and that some of the things that were written in these books may seem trivial to us today but would have absolutely fucking shook readers in the victorian era

like,,,,,elizabeth rejecting mr collins because she doesn’t love him even though it would have been considered her duty in her family to marry him? or jane eyre not agreeing to marry mr rochester unless it was on her own terms? hell even anne brontë wrote a lesser known novel about a wife leaving her abusive husband with her five year old son to live a better life?? do y’all realize how unheard of that would be in the 1800′s?? where women were considered more of a commodity than actual human beings??

even though they might not be up to todays standards of modern feminism and romance, they were still HUGE building blocks for equality for that time period. so if you’re a reader who says to themselves ‘I read classics with modern standards applied and I can’t get past that’ then you are most likely going to be disappointed when reading classics and not fully understand their significance to that time period 

[cutekittensarefun]

First trip to the vet

[sanjuthegreatest]

Learning French has never been this easy!

[linguisticalities]

How language shapes the way we think

There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."