Favourite English Quotes

They say there is a good way to remember difficult vocabulary: simply find a funny quotation that contains your troublesome word. My list of quotes might be useful for you:

• You can do anything, but not everything. — David Allen 
• When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat. -- George Carlin
• Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• You must be the change you wish to see in the world. —Gandhi
• The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking. — A. A. Milne 

The Most Popular Phrasal Verb is...

GET. Of course it's GET. And here goes the list of GET'S you need to know:

 

GET ABOUT

(intransitive) to go from place to place Mary gets about quite well without a car.

GET ACROSS

(separable) to communicate clearly or convincingly No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get the message across to her that I cared.

GET ACROSS

(intransitive) to be convincing or clear Max has trouble getting across to members of the opposite sex.

GET AHEAD

(intransitive) to make progress in becoming successful Max compliments his boss constantly in order to get ahead.

Prepositions

They say prepositions are the trickiest part of the English grammar. Let's unveil some of the secrets:

Now print it out, hide all the prepositions and write down your own versions. Compare with the original. Any mistakes?

Naive? Dramatic? Elegant?..

Test Your Vocab

If you really want to know how good your English vocabulary is in figures, you can try Test Your Vocabulary created by Oxford professors.
According to their data the average native English speaker possesses the vocabulary of 20.000-30.000 lexical units, whereas adults who speak English as their non-native language can boast 2.000 - 9.000 rich vocabulary.
Get comfortable and find out where your place among them is: Test Your Vocab.

Being Courteous

Everyone knows that it is extremely important to be polite and corteous when building rapport. It doesn't really matter whether we are talking about personal or business communications. 

Everyone knows this but only English people know why. Check it out:

... Divided by a Common Language

American English tends to subdue its "older brother". It's penetrated movies, songs, literature and weaves the web all over the world. It might be the case that one day the British won't be able to understand the Americans! Let's see what's going on there at the moment:

Which language do you speak?