Blog de Cristina

 I don’t like this idiom , the only reason being the rodent in it… yes, I am that girlie!! 

Now and then, and as part of the continuous asssessment, I ask my students to write something at home to be marked later  and very often and mainly when it is writing about a celebrity, a book or a film they nick from the Internet. Setting this task when I know pretty well they won’t be able to resist the temptation of copy-pasting from the Internet is a bit of a wicked of me ,to put it midly ,but life is hard , isn’t it?

To smell  a rat= you know instinctively that something is wrong or that someone is lying to you.

So when I start reading essays and some words trigger all my sirens  , then this is the tool I use to catch you red-handed.

It’s called Plagium

Playing? Working? Teaching?Let’s not beat about the bush and call a spade a spade …yes , I am playing , playing with images . It is my firm conviction that when you see something you remember it better. That’s why , once again,  I have used the same tool I used when teaching Food and Cooking : PimPamPum . This is a version  called Bookr , and as its name suggests it creates photobooks  using Flikr images. The photobooks are very simple to create, you just need to type in a key word to find the images you want and then drag them onto the pages and add what you need to be taught and illustrated.

I think this a nice way to teach parts of the animals and I’ve also added  some idioms containing animals that need to be studied. The pity with Wordpress is that it doesn’t allow  “embedding”, so the only way for you to see it would be by clicking on “animals by Cristina” or on the picture.

Animals by Cristina

Related entries:

Wordle: Creating “word clouds”

And yet another way to improve your vocabulary

Food and cooking

Well, this person you are going to see in the video is ,without doubts, crazy about cats. This is what would happen to me if I had to live with even one cat , let alone 130 as this lady… no wonder she’s called the crazy cat lady. Hey!  No offence meant  I’m just repeating what everybody seems to think about her.Honestly speaking, I admire what she does and I only wish I had the guts to do the same with my beloved dogs.

Now watch the video and if you fancy answering some questions about it. Click here .

 And as we are on the subject , how about learning some idioms containing ” cat and/or dog” ?

From the popular ” it’s raining cats and dogs” there’s a wide range of idioms containing these two words. I’m just going to write the ones easy to remember and whose meaning can easily be inferred from context, but bear in mind there are plenty of others.

• The 32-year-old actress spent a large proportion of the week playing cat and mouse with the press

• We were planning a surprise birthday party but Jack let the cat out of the bag and now she knows about it

• I had a dog’s life at school: I was always being beaten.

• After years of neglect, the old artist’s work was recognised and honoured: every dog has his day.

Related Links

How do you say 2010?

Word of the Day: Ditto

The Englishlanguage  does not have a Real Academia de la Lengua

Do yu espic inglish?

Now that you have a certain skill at mastering new structures it’s time to improve your vocabulary. There is no point in learning a new word unless you know how to use it and it is also important to understand how words are used.

So here is a cool site you can enjoy. It is called WORDIA. What is this and what are they? I quote “We’re a team of language enthusiasts and general word nuts who have joined forces to create a new kind of dictionary - a democratic ‘visual dictionary’. A place where anyone with a video, webcam or mobile phone can define the words that matter to them in their life.”

As anyone can record words , it goes without saying that I accept no  responsibility for anything incorrect, improper, wrong  … you name it.

Click on the image and try it.

You can also get  a new video sent to you everyday, just by adding your email address to the subscription field and each day you will be sent a link to the newest word.

Related links:

Confusing Words

Converting Text into Speech

From London with Love

Food! Food!! Food for thought! Always nice to learn something so useful. Nive way to teach too when it is as funny as doing it using this amazing tool which borrows pictures from Flickr and  allows users to input sentences, phrases or even entire paragraphs and then turn them into illustrated slide shows .

Why don’t you try your own images and share them? Have a look at what I’ve done.

Ways of cooking

http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=17840

Kitchen equipment

http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=17841

 Taste:

http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=17844

What’s the difference between Sour and Bitter?

1.Take a drink of Vinegar : This would be sour or so considered to be.
2.Take a bite of Real pure dark chocolate: This would considered bitter

1.A Grannysmith green cooking apple would be sour
2.Coffee without sugar or cream would be bitter
Sour lemons and limes, or unripe fruit before it becomes sweet.

Vegetables

http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=17846

Enjoy your meal!!

Lately I’ve stumbling about how to say 2010. If you think for a while you’ll see that ,so far, we have been saying 1900 as nineteen hundred and 1908 as nineteen oh eight or eighteen hundred and eight.
The question, then, is: if the year 1800 is eighteen hundred, how do you account for the year 2000 being two thousand and not twenty hundred? (Ok, let’s say that some people say twenty hundred but the vast majority don’t and we’re certainly sticking with the majority,)
So, what about 2010? Even though it is coming soon, it is still somewhat unclear whether the English speaking world will tend to call it twenty ten or two thousand ten.

I’ve done some research and found that people say different things:

2010= twenty ten
2010= two thousand (and) ten
2010 = oh ten

Some of the people favouring twenty ten argue that it sounds more natural and others even say that people are lazy so, as twenty ten has only three syllables, this is certainly the favourite one.

I bumped into this word  and my first thought was: Gosh!! I have so many things to learn. So, here it is. I wouldn’t dare not sharing it with you.

“Ditto”, what a strange word to be used in English!. In fact, you can use so many other expressions with the same meaning as Ditto , that that must have been the reason why I’ve never felt the need to use it.

But let’s not ramble and get to the point, the point being the meaning of this word .

You use it ,informally, to agree with what someone has just said.

A: What a nice teacher!  B: Ditto

Or as stated in the cartoon to avoid repetition.

Everyone knows that the most common meaning of the adjective dead is “not alive”, “deprived of life ; of an emotion (now that Valentine’s day is coming) ” no longer felt” : a dead passion, dead affections.

It is my firm belief that you can never learn too much. But if you feel this is too much or if you are under 18 , stop reading right now. 

Perhaps one of the most interesting and colourful words in the English language today is the word FUCK. It is the one magical word which, just by its sound, can describe pain, pleasure,love and hate. In language “fuck” falls into many grammatical categories.It can be used as a verb , both transitive and intransitive (I’m not going to give you an example , in case my mother ever reads this), as an adverb ( Mary is fucking interested in John), and as a noun ( also ,and for the same reason above I am not going to give you an example) and as an adjective ( Mary is fucking beautiful). As you can see, there are very few words with the versatility of “fuck”.

Beside its sexual connotations , this incredible word can be used to describe many situations:

• Greetings               How the fuck are you?

• Fraud                      I got fucked by the car dealer

• Dismay                   Oh, fuck it

• Trouble                  Well, I guess I’m fucked now

• Aggression            Fuck you!

• Disgust                   Fuck me

• Confusion              What the fuck…?

• Difficulty                I don’t understand this fucking business

• Despair                  Fucked again

• Incompetence     He fucks up everything

• Displeasure          What the fuck is going on here?

• Disbelief                Unfuckingbelievable

• It can be used in an anatomical description - He is a fucking asshole

• It can be maternal - as in motherfucker

• It can be used to tell the time- it’s five fucking thirty

• It can be used in business- How did I wind up with this fucking job?

• It can be political - Fuck George Bush

And never forget General Custer’s last words: “Where did all these fucking Indians come from?”

And the famous last words of the Major of Hiroshima:”What the fuck was that?”

And last but not least , the Captain of the Titanic: “Where is all this fucking water coming from?”

How can anyone be offended when you say FUCK? Use it frequently in your daily speech; it will add to your prestige.

Today , say to someone- “FUCK YOU”

Wriiten English and spoken English are sometimes different.

When we speak, we use different vocabulary, different grammar, and different pronunciation than what is in textbooks.                              

Here’s one example.  In most textbooks, you might find a sentence like this:
“The theater sold all the tickets”

However, in normal speech, we would usually say,
“They sold out“.

“Sold out” is a two-word verb– also called a “phrasal verb”.  

Adapted from Christopher Moses