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November 3, 2006

Review Materials improvements

Good news,

We’re now able to provide the rollover for collocations and phrases. Go to the Review Materials for each new lesson and find the rollover works not only for individual words, but also commonly used collocations or phrases whose meanings are not obvious from the words that make them up.

This new feature is part of our overall philosophy - that language learning is not about learning words, but useable “chunks” or blocks of English. These chunks are more than one word, but they’re not whole sentences. They are natural combinations of different words that form ideas. Learning collocations and phrases helps us discover that we “take a seat” or “have a seat.” If you learn the word ‘take’ by itself, it has too many possible meanings and uses - we need to learn it in context and as part of natural combinations with other words (in this case, take is a verb, and it is used naturally with many nouns and some adverbs). Otherwise, you will end up speaking Chinese-English or Italian-English, etc., mixing up parts of your native language (and it’s grammar - particularly word order and collocations) with English.

We hope you enjoy this new feature. I’m confident it makes Englishpod a better product. Step by step we’re getting better. Any thoughts on how we can improve more?

2 Comments »

  1. Hi everybody.
    I’m iranian. AND I live in IRAN / TEHRAN
    I hope finde a new girl friend, because i want to learn english, so please call me.
    by

    Comment by ALI SALIMI — January 9, 2007 @ 10:48 pm

  2. Hi everybody.
    I’m iranian. AND I live in IRAN / TEHRAN
    I hope finde a new girl friend, because i want to learn english, so please call me.
    My mobil phone : 0912-4038959
    by

    Comment by ALI SALIMI — January 9, 2007 @ 10:49 pm

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