Think in English with Adah

I would like to share a great website where you could find meanings and origins of a staggering amount of English phrases with you. Here is the link to the index page: http://www.phrases.org.uk/index.html. You can discover that there are four columns on this index page:

1. Meaning and Origins (This sub-link is a free but powerful phrase finder engine spawning information of phrases as the title suggests: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/index.html. You could also browse phrases by the beginning letters of the first words of the phrases you are finding. The explanations you can find through this engine are fully studied and correct.)

2. The Phrase Thesaurus (A thesaurus is something like a dictionary with more synonyms. However, you need to subscribe and pay for this service before you use it.)

3. Bulletin Board (If you still couldn’t find the meanings and origins of the phrases from the first phrase finder engine, have a go on this bulletin board. If you click on the term ‘Discussion Forum’ included in this column, you will be steered to another searching engine powered by the database of Phrase Finder Archives: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/index.html. All the explanations that you can find through this engine came from the understanding of individuals, mostly native, on the meanings and the origins of the English phrases you are looking for. Please be sure to know that what you have found from this engine might not be the true definitions of the phrases. But this can allow you pick from different perpectives the most accurate meanings and origins. And you have to be really smart to tell the correct meanings or origins from the one-sided ones, which means you also need to use your brain in learning new phrases.)

4. A Phrase A Week (Learning one phrase a week should not be too demanding for all English learners. You can subscribe this for free by typing in your name and email address and the system will send you a phrase a week. )

When to use these phrase finder engines? 

It is a common experience of us that sometimes dictionaries does not tell you the meanings and origins of some phrases such as “go the whole nine yards”. What are you going to do if you are still self-driven to know the meaning of it? It is time for you to try these phrase finder engines! 

This phrase finder engine provides more than 70,000 previous postings on English phrases written by the general public, which might not be able to be located in both online and brick-and-mortal dictionaries. This can help us in getting to know difficult English phrases once we couldn’t find them in a dictionary.

Be smart when you use the third engine “Bulletin Board”.

This is just a reminder for those who are big fans of McDonald’s or KFC that hanburgers and sandwiches are two different types of food.

The thing that defines what a hamburger is is that there is a fried cake of ground BEEF and other ingredients in the middle of the two or more slices of bread. This is what a hamburger looks like:

A sandwich has the same appearance of a hamburger and its fillings include chicken, pork, fish, shrimps and a lot more except beef. Here is a picture of a chicken sandwich:

Finally here comes the latest shrimp sandwiches from KFC:

Yummy!

We have learned a lot of facial expressions and feelings that human beings would experience everyday. I am not confident in that all of you can still remember how to describe those complicated emotions that we have in ourselves every day. However, I do believe you can understand that the cycle of language learning that we introduced during one of our dialogue sessions involves 3 steps: “learning”, “memorizing” and “practising”. A cycle is so in that it is an ongoing process during which every step in it will recur once in a while. There is only one kind of raw materials which needs to be repeatedly used during all of the 3 steps in the learning cycle, which is language input, including new words, sentence patterns and new sound combinations.

An reflection on my own English learning experience also tells me that our human brain espeically an adult brain is heavily reliant on repeated language input when acquiring a foreign language. If you revisit our old training materials and practice those language points in them as often as possible, you will find out it is really worthwhile in doing so for you will become more familiar with the language terms we’ve learned in the past.

 Enough for the linguistic muttering! Let’s revisit those facial expressions and emotions shown in the following pictures:

We had a really great trip to Dalian last May during the Community Event of our company. Dalian seems to a dreamland for people from over-crowded cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong.  Known as a city famous for tourism, Dalian carries a bit romantic and exotic hue:  pointed rooftops in Russian style, roads curving along the coastlines, European villas upon hills and seaside, foreigners walking on the street with bare feet coming from a morning swimming in the sea… Even the Russian pop music on our shuffle bus brought us to this retired lifestyle of Dalian. 

But that is not all the elements that Dalian is made of. Restaurants have titles in Korean and Japanese characters where waiters and waitresses are dressed with the latest hairstyles. You could also discover that the splendid night views of the squares and busy shopping streets are exactly the same as the things that people in any other big cities live up to. All of those remind me we are in a city full of modern moves, just like Guangzhou or Shanghai.  

The sea in Dalian holds the most clean and cool water than any other seas I have ever been to. I could not resist the temptation of stealing a piece of the beautiful scenery home. Although feeling guilty, I picked some stones from the Silver Beach. Even glasses have been polished into a round shape by the blue water of the sea of Dalian.   

It has been nearly a month since the terrible catastrophe happened in Sichuan. It is a relief to know that our country has made great headway with rescuing all injured people and people whose lives are still at risk of floods or mudslides that might be caused by the recently formed lakes. The time had come for us to lament over the passing of the victims during the 3 days of mourning and more practically, the enire nation is exerting all efforts to condole and help the needy people in the disaster area. Most of the rescuer soldiers risked their own lives in order to save people they did not know. But all of us know that we share a same name “Chinese”, which is no longer born by a group of people who wore little caps with long braids but is a name of people with a whole new set of connotations - persistence, openness and nobleness.

Time will pass but in our life we will never forget what happened to us as both Chinese people and as a nation in the past few weeks. Let’s face the pains and deal with them by redoubling our efforts at work in the following weeks, months and years until this moment becomes one of the most touching experiences seared into the deepest memory of our lives.

We discussed about what should be the right preposition (small words such as ‘on’, ‘off’ and ‘out of’) to be used when we enter or leave transportation tools. We didn’t spend too much time in looking into this topic at class because we don’t want to turn our lively English training sessions into Medieval Latin school teaching grammar, do we? : )

So this entry may shed you some light on how to use these small but possibly important words properly. I have found some useful references and I have categorized them into the following types:

1. To get on/ off + transportation tools large in size

To get on/ off (as a phrasal verb) means - to enter/ leave a train, bus or aircraft (or any vehicle that is large in size) from “Cambridge advanced learner’s dictionary”.

E.g.
To get on/ off a plane

To get on/ off a bus

To get on/ off the train

2. To get on/ off + transportation tools that we ride above

E.g.
To get on/ off a bike

To get on/ off a horse

3. To get in/ out of + transportation tools small in size

E.g.
To get in/ out of a car

To get in/ out of a taxi

4. “You! Get off my car!!”

Sometimes you can also hear native speakers use this above sentence. This sentence in oral English means ‘Don’t touch my car/ Leave my car alone!” instead of “getting out of my car”.

If you are still interested in the difference between “to get off the car” and “to get out of the car”, why not do a little exploring at following link with a thorough discussion on this topic?

“Off the car of Out of the Car?” at http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic2657.html

I hope this post can bring you to the awareness of the importance of the details of English.