Fun Ways to Learn English

A brilliant video on the History of English language. Concise and fun. Saves you a lot of reading. Must watch!

Understanding different British accents can sometimes be tricky. You can no familiarize yourself with them in this informative video!

There are times when we are required to come up with a professional sounding text in our jobs or studies, and we feel our mind is numb. No problem! Smart people have found the solution to problems like this. Try one of the Bullshit Generator websites! I'll give you a few very good exaples here: The Corporate Bullshit Generator Marketing Bullshit Generator Web Economy Bullshit Generator How about a gem like this one: "Flexible and/or measurable solutions deepen a pyramid" Or just try to "productize magnetic interfaces" or "empower seamless mindshare" and there you are: with a beautifully constructed phrase, the meaning of which very few people will dare to question. What's more, it is a great vocabulary training tool to play around with!

Writing poetry seems quite difficult for English learners. But here's a fun way to do it: using Google's autocomplete feature. When you start typing into the Google search box, a couple of suggestions will come up. These are based on previous searches from other people. Now the trick is: start to think of these lines as a poem. Many times it's grotesque, shockingly deep or just sounds very artistic. It's a lot of fun to play around with, and you'll learn a lot of words and expressions unconsciously while experimenting. When you find something you like, you can take a screenshot of your "poem" and share it. You can also upload them to the Google Poetics page, where there is a nice collecion of the best ones.

People speak a little different English in different parts of the world. This guy does a great job demonstating the most common accents:

The best way to learn a foreign language is to be immersed in it. But we do not always have the option to stay in a native speaking country. Well, Google has a solution: the language immersion tool . All you have to do is have it turned on while surfing English language pages and you'll get immersed in the selected language (unfortunately it does not work the other way around). How much? You choose: there are five levels from novice to fluent. It is a Chrome extension, so it does not work with other browsers. Here is an example: I set the language to German, intermediate level. You can see how much of the text is shown in German under these settings. The context makes it easy and natural to figure out the meaning. When clicking on a word, it will change back to Eglish. One more click and it turns into German again. You can make it speak, too! I have found it a very effective and fun way of learning a new language.