Trang học Anh văn mới của tôi.

Trang học Anh văn mới của tôi.

Đã 6 năm kể từ khi blog này ra đời. Chúng tôi đã nhận được những bài viết chia sẻ kinh nghiệm rất hữu ích từ các tác giả, và sự ủng hộ nhiệt tình của các bạn.

Bây giờ, kinh nghiệm cũng đã kha khá, tôi mở một blog khác dành riêng cho các bài học tiếng Anh ngắn để mọi người cùng học tại https://hocanhvankhongkho.wordpress.com/. Các bạn cũng có thể tham gia cùng tôi trên facebook tại https://www.facebook.com/hocanhvankhongkho để có thể nhận được bài học ngay khi đang lướt facebook.

Rất mong các bạn sẽ ủng hộ cho blog mới này, và mong rằng blog sẽ giúp các bạn thêm hứng thú khi học tiếng Anh.

And you can follow the link to read what participating bloggers have to say about this proverb. A good reading practice 🙂

One of the commonly confused pair

The Daily Post

The distinction between “affect” and “effect” trips up lots of people, but with one or two little mnemonics, you can master this tricky pair in probably 95% of cases.

Effect is almost always used as a noun meaning “the result of some action.”

Affect is almost always used as a verb meaning “to influence or bring about change.”

Affect, which is an action (another word for “verb”), starts with an a, like action. There’s your first mnemonic. When something affects something else, it has an effect. The affect or verb happens first and the effect or noun second, just as affect comes first in the alphabet and effect second. There’s your second mnemonic.

My experience with mnemonics tends to be that once I’ve had to use them enough, I internalize the underlying grammar that they help me to remember so that I no longer have to remember…

View original post 149 more words

Minh Anh's place

We all know how a powerful vocabulary may improve our English proficiency. It makes us look smarter (seriously! 😉 ), helps us better explaining ourselves and understanding others. A common way to learn vocabulary for ESL students is to memorize words. However, I would say the best way is to invest some time in learning root words, prefixes and suffixes. These will help you guess the meaning of new words and memorize them easier (make sure you still look it up in a dictionary to get the precise meaning and any other implication it might have). They can even help you guess what a word you want might look like.

An excerpt from a post in VirtualSalt at http://www.virtualsalt.com/roots.htm will clarify my point:

“Many words are made up of a root (or base word) and a prefix. Some words also have a suffix. For example, the root word port…

View original post 195 more words

Most commonly misspelled words, even for native speaker.

The Daily Post

Courtesy, as pretty much always, of Bryan A. Garner, here’s a list of 25 of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language.

• accommodate
• committee
• consensus
• definitely
• embarrass
• expedite
• grammar
• harass
• hors d’oeuvre
• innovate
• inoculate
• lieu
• millennium
• minuscule
• misspelling
• noticeable
• occurrence
• pavilion
• persevere
• playwright
• receive
• restaurateur
• separate
• supersede
• ukulele

Commit these to memory, and should you ever find yourself needing to accommodate a ukulele player who wishes to receive an inoculation from a playwright while persevering at his art in a pavilion, you’ll be spared the embarrassment of making any innovative misspellings, whether minuscule or easily noticeable.

View original post

Minh Anh's place

Apart from the online resources I introduced a while ago in the two posts “Tiếng Anh dành cho người đã đi làm” and “Tiếng Anh dành cho người đã đi làm – Phần 2” in my other web blog, which includes a couple of journals and Vietnam voanews, today I would like to introduce you to some podcasts specified in business English.

1. Business English Pod. Here you will listen to conversations that happen in regular business meeting, such as how to mingle with colleagues, how to answer in interviews, and how to  present in a meeting, etc.

2. Video Vocab – Learn English vocabularies for business through short, cute, informative videos, which always end with a short practice for the words you have just learned. As an ESL learner, you may already know or hear of most of the terms, but are not sure about…

View original post 110 more words

Great explanation on the subtle differences between “can” and “may”

The Daily Post

Photo by Flickr user http://www.worththewhisk.com

I believe it’s generally known that “can” is the favored verb when asking about whether it’s physically or mentally possible to do a thing and “may” is favored when asking for permission, but there turn out to be some nuances that can be a little confusing. With the help of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (which I refer to often in these posts), I’ll outline some of the nuances.

First, Garner allows that in speech and informal writing, the distinction is insisted upon only by the “insufferable precisian.” So when blogging informally, feel free to use “can” in place of “may.” In fact, among three caveats Garner offers is one suggesting that over-use of “may” can give your writing a prissy tone.

The other two caveats:

• Use of phrases like “mayn’t I” or “may I not” can be stilted, so it’s…

View original post 199 more words

Improve your listening and speaking via TV shows

If you like watching TV, then you’re like me. Watching TV is not only fun, but it can also be educational. While movies are most commonly used for us,  TV shows may be a better source to improve our speaking/listening skills, since they tend to speak clearer, usually slower, and much more often.

Today let us get to know a very famous Americam TV show.  This show was once very popular, still airing now. It is also popular amongst American English learner to improve their English and some aspect of the American culture. This is also the show that brought Jennifer Aniston to fame. As you can guess, it is “Friends”.

This show a group of friends and their eveyday life. As a result, the language here is mostly informal, used for casual conversations that happen amongst friends. You can find the entire series in some of the CD stores in Ho Chi Minh city.

Short reading – writing practice

I found an interesting topic on the Learning network of the NY times. This topic was partly mentioned a couple of years ago. But, as students never age, neither does this topic. It is “What have you done to earn money?”

Here is the first paragraph:

“Joshua Johnson tap dances on the New York City subways to pay for college. Cameron Stephens knew he was unlikely to find paid work in a poor economy, so he just worked at an Atlanta farmer’s market, free, until someone noticed — and started paying him. What have you done, at any point in your life, to earn a bit of money — or to gain valuable job skills, even if you worked with no pay?”

Before jumping on trying to answer this, let us see what are the structure we can learn from this short paragraph.

How to use preposition:
– tap dances on the subways (not in, not under!)
– work at a farmer market (not in a market)

A couple of ways to write english (phần dịch sau chỉ là thoát ý chứ không dịch từng từ một):
– làm việc để kiếm tiền đi học: do some job to pay for college
– nền kinh tế yếu kém: poor economy
– có lúc nào (trong cuộc sống): at any point in your life
– làm việc không ăn lương: work with no pay
– tích luỹ kinh nghiệm làm việc: gain valuable job skills

One step at a time

We all know the story of “Thanh Giong”. It was one of my favorite when I was a kid, and still one of my favorite now. The messages it delivers however, changes with time and with me growing up.

For me, it has two main messages, one of which we should keep at heart, and the other, forget. We should keep at heart that when anything happens to our country even a child can stand up and help, so do we. It shows our strength at one. What we should forget, is the other message, that a kid can grow up in just one day, go to war and win it. It delivers the wrong message, and make us think that we don’t need to train/study hard for most days; When the time comes we just need to focus, power up, then with some miracle and the genius we are within ourselves we’ll be able to tackle any obstacle (with the concrete example of studying English and passing the TOEFL or IELT test … 😉 ) Well, forget it. One needs to learn and practice from day-to-day. Learning is most of the time not very entertaining, even boring, but without it you’ll never get to your goal of a chance to study abroad.

So, today, let us enjoy an inspiring song by Jordin Sparks, One Step At A Time.

And One Step At A Time, win your English test 😉

Tragedy in Japan

I heard about it, but not only when my college friend post a note on facebook about his experience with the earthquake, as well as another friend update her status about how their lives have been affected, it hits me and feels so real…

And as if the largest recorded earthquake followed by a tsunami is not enough for them, now they are facing their worst nuclear accident, according to NY Times and VOA News. They are struggling to find food on empty shelves at the grocery stores, their houses and villages destroyed. International students and officers (like my friends) in Japan of course have the experience of their life.

Pray for Japan. And for my friends, I wish them well.

What’s your Six-Word Memoirs

So I came across my friend’s link on facebook: What’s Your Six-Word Love Story?, which is a part of  “What’s your Six-Word Memoirs” project.

Telling your story in six words is actually not easy. You have to get to the core of it, and choose words wisely. Both from the NY Times blog and the original Six-Word website you’ll find hilarious memoirs, serious memoirs, just western-style life memoirs (some of them are not suitable for U18!).

Right now, mine would be something like “Just do it. Till the end.”

What’s your Six-Word Memoir?

Failure

It’s the new year and everyone wants to talk success. However, no matter how much we wanted, last year ended with something we fail.

Do you know that there are many quotes about failure? They are inspiring and mainly tell us to never give up. Here are some of them:

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” – Sven Goran Eriksson

“The only real failure in life is the failure to try.”

“There are no failures – just experiences and your reaction to them.” – Tom Kraus

“There are no secret to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” – Colin Powell

“Life’s real failure is when you do not realize how close you were to success when you gave up.”

“Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.” – Stephen Kaggwa

And you can find similar ones at many sites about quotations, one of which is http://thinkexist.com/quotations/

So, it’s time to stand up and continue trying, to a better day 🙂

VEF Fellowship Application Forms OPENED

Dear all,

I have just received this email and would like to share it with you. If you are interested in please apply for this scholarship, it will be a great learning experience 🙂

**********************************************

Dear friends,

Warm greetings and best wishes for a prosperous New Year from all of us at the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF)!

We are pleased to inform you that we have opened the online application forms for the VEF Fellowship Program, Process B for Cohort 2011 and Process A for Cohort 2012. Please visit our website at www.vef.gov to access these application forms. Here below are the application timelines of the two processes.

1. 1. Fellowship Program, Cohort 2011, Process B:

Application Timeline

From 8:00 am, February 10, 2011 to 8:00 am March 10, 2011 (Vietnam Time)

1. 1. Fellowship Program, Cohort 2012, Process A:

Application Timeline

From 8:00 am, February 10, 2011 to 8:00 am April 10, 2011 (Vietnam Time)

Please help pass this email on to your friends, colleagues or others who may be interested in the VEF Fellowship Program.
Thank you for your continued support to VEF in this past year. Wish you and your family Happiness, Health, Luck and Prosperity in the Year of the Cat.  Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!

Best regards,
The VEF Team
—————————————————————————————————————————

Các bạn thân mến,
Xin được gửi tới các bạn lời chào nồng nhiệt và lời chúc tốt đẹp nhất cho một năm mới thịnh vượng từ Quỹ Giáo dục Việt Nam (VEF)!

Chúng tôi xin vui mừng thông báo về việc hồ sơ đăng ký trực tuyến của Chương trình Học bổng VEF, Quy trình B, năm học 2011 và Quy trình A, năm học 2012 đã được mở. Xin vui lòng ghé thăm trang web của VEF tại địa chỉ www.vef.gov để  truy cập hồ sơ đăng ký trực tuyến của hai quy trình này. Dưới đây là thời hạn nộp hồ sơ của cả hai quy trình.

1. 1. Chương trình Học bổng, Năm học 2011, Quy trình B:

Thời hạn nộp hồ sơ

Từ 8:00 sáng, ngày 10 tháng 2 năm 2011 đến 8:00 sáng ngày 10 tháng 3 năm 2011 (Theo giờ Việt Nam)

1. 1. Chương trình Học bổng, Năm học 2012, Quy trình A:

Thời hạn nộp hồ sơ

Từ 8:00 sáng, ngày 10 tháng 2 năm 2011 đến 8:00 sáng ngày 10 tháng 4 năm 2011 (Theo giờ Việt Nam)

Xin hãy chuyển email này đến bạn bè, đồng nghiệp và những ai quan tâm tới Chương trình Học bổng VEF.

Chúng tôi chân thành cảm ơn sự giúp đỡ của các bạn trong năm qua. Một lần nữa, xin được gửi lời chúc Hạnh Phúc, Sức Khỏe, May Mắn và Thịnh Vượng trong năm Tân Mão tới tất cả các bạn và gia đình!

Trân trọng,
Nhóm thực hiện chương trình VEF

 

Listening practice for the TOEFL test

Yes the test is getting harder. When I took it, it was still paper-based, when I had a chance to glance quickly at the answers first, have an idea what they will be talking about and what might be the question, and focus on it. Now with computer-based test, unfortunately you lost that opportunity 😦

However, there is still something you can do. And it was what I did back then, too. For the long talk, we all know that it will be a lecture about something, geography, science, history, … . So if you have some previous knowledge about it, even if you don’t catch everything they say, you can still guess the answer, since it is just a common knowledge 😉

So you can do some more reading, listen more on the subjects that might be on the test. And believe me, it will be helpful for your own good later 😉

I would suggest you trying NPR for this kind of listening, VOA (Voice of America) is good too, but they don’t talk much about science.