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Dear all,

Ever wonder which level to study at ODE? Here are some descriptions of student abilities at each level. Do they describe you? Try the different levels and see which one fits you.

These descriptions are also available in the Podcast Archive (where all our lessons are located) - just roll your mouse/cursor over the level titles. They’ll also soon be on the Home Page as well.

Elementary (E)
An Elementary student can understand slow, simple questions about daily topics. They usually speak in short sentences, and make many errors. They still think in their first language when speaking English, and this affects both grammar and communication ability.

Lower Intermediate (LI)
A Lower Intermediate student can perform daily tasks in English. They can communicate with one native speaker at a time, but can’t understand groups of people. A Lower Intermediate student is willing to speak, but feels their vocabulary is limited. They can only communicate about simple ideas. Grammar mistakes are still frequent. They use email at work without many problems.

Upper Intermediate (UI)
Upper Intermediate students feel much more comfortable using English at work. Their listening skills are good, but different accents can give them trouble. These students can communicate in professional and social environments, in person or on the telephone. They can understand many idioms, but can’t use them accurately. Complex vocabulary is understood but still misused from time to time.

Advanced (A)
These students are very good speakers, but still lack many idiomatic expressions and have difficulty with slang. They feel comfortable communicating in groups. They can communicate in professional environments, but lack knowledge in specific areas (medical or engineering terms, for example). Misunderstandings are more the result of cultural differences than English ability.

Try the different levels out, and see for yourself.

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?

Copyright is a noun meaning “[t]he legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.” Thanks to The Free Dictionary by Farlex for the definition.

Copyright is another form of Intellectual Property law (blogged about here) that protects writers of books, photographers, song writers, etc., and helps them to keep control over the sale of their work. No one can copy their work without permission. Copyright used to be automatic, but these days it’s safer to write “Copyright Kris Fedorak, 2003-2006″ just to warn people who might copy your work. For a thorough but difficult to understand (very advanced English required) explanation of copyright in the U.S. see here. A very good article dealing with common misunderstandings of copyright can be found here.

I myself am not a big fan of copyright laws. I think they’re too restrictive and protect works for too long. Why must everything we create be about money, and commercial benefit? My main problem is with music. Live music (i.e. a concert) I’ll pay for. I’ll pay good money to see someone perform their music and enjoy music the way it’s supposed to be - live! Once “recorded”, the music is already just a copy - a copy of that singer’s voice, of that band’s music. Why pay for the stale and standardized sound of the music record companies? Pay for live music. However, this is just my opinion and not that of EnglishPod or On Demand Training.

To finish off, here are some common collocations to help you use this important business word:
protected by copyright
copyright law
a copyright agreement
copyright material
copyrighted material (used as a transitive verb here)
copyright infringement

Trademarks are symbols, pictures, marks, words or other characteristics that companies use to identify their products and services and distinguish them from others. We see trademarks everyday on the products we buy. Usually they have a ^TM or ® beside them. Trademarks cannot be generic terms. For example, if a company sells rice, they cannot simply call their product “Rice” because it doesn’t establish a difference between their product and the rice produced by other companies.

Trademark rights arise from the use and/or registration of the trademark. In British/American law, if a company commonly uses a trademark in the market, other companies are expected to refrain (stop themselves) from using that mark. A company can also register their trademark in a trademarks office/registry.

Trademark law gives the holders of a trademark the right to exclusive use of that mark. If another company uses that trademark, they have infringed on the trademark rights. There have been many famous cases of trademark infringement over the years, such as the ongoing battle between Lacoste and Crocodile International throughout Asia. A good example of a clear case of trademark infringement involved Starbucks and a competitor in China – see the China Law Blog for a description of the case. Trademark Law is an ever-growing area of IP Law – I even found a blog entirely about trademarks here.

Common collocations for “trademark”

trademark rights
trademark infringement
register a trademark
a registered trademark
trademark use

IP (one of those annoying acronyms I’ve complained about) stands for Intellectual Property.

There are 3 kinds of property:
-Real Property (land, houses)
-Personal Property (your watch, car, clothes)
-Intellectual Property

IP is really the ownership of your ideas. Ideas can be powerful, and they can make money.
For example, if you write a book, but someone steals your idea and sells a million copies of it, it’s unfair, right? So how can we protect ourselves from IP theft? There are several tools: Trademarks, Patents, Copyright and Licensing.

Anyone know what each of these tools are and how to use them in a sentence? Check back here soon and I’ll post more blogs about them.

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the first “word of the week”, though it may happen more often than just once a week.

Today’s word is bankrupt, normally used as a noun or as an adjective. We’ll also look at the general noun bankruptcy.
The meaning according to the Free Online Dictionary (a great resource) is:

Noun
-a debtor that, upon voluntary petition or one invoked by the debtor’s creditors, is judged legally insolvent. The debtor’s remaining property is then administered for the creditors or is distributed among them.

Adj.
a. Having been legally declared financially insolvent.
b. Financially ruined; impoverished.

What does all this mean? It means a person or company doesn’t have enough money to pay its debts (money it owes to people called “creditors”). So if you owe a bank lots of money but your job doesn’t pay you enough to give you the ability to pay the bank back (= you’re insolvent), you can declare yourself “bankrupt.” When you do this the court appoints a person to control your finances, selling much of your property and paying the people you owe money to. In the end you won’t have much, but your finances will be in order and your old creditors can no longer claim money from you. For practical advice on bankruptcies (and some reading practice) see this website.

After declaring “bankruptcy”, the general noun for this idea, it is more difficult to get bank loans or credit cards (financial institutions won’t trust you as much). However, many famous people have filed for bankruptcy (including Rembrandt, Mark Twain, Henry Ford, Walt Disney) and many have become successful afterwards. In America, the federal law regulating bankruptcy is divided into chapters, so you will often hear or read references to “Chapter 11″ or “Chapter 7.”

Ways to use it: sentences
He is bankrupt.
He is nearly bankrupt.
The company went bankrupt 10 years ago.
They will declare bankruptcy tomorrow.
She filed for bankruptcy.
She filed for Chapter 11.
There were many bankruptcies last month.

Ways to use it: collocations:
be bankrupt
become bankrupt
go bankrupt
declare someone bankrupt
almost bankrupt
nearly bankrupt
personal bankruptcy
face bankruptcy
be close to bankruptcy
be forced into bankruptcy
file for bankruptcy
be saved from bankruptcy
bankruptcy order
the threat of bankruptcy

Ok, that’s enough for bankrupt I think. If you have any questions, follow the links or comment here and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Kris

Here’s an example of collocations for a common and important word in English: money
These are fairly set pairs of words - the trick is to find out which verbs and adjectives are used with which nouns.

Money - with verbs
spend money
save money
make money
earn money
lose money
exchange money
put money in the bank
deposit money in the bank
take money out of the bank
withdraw money from the bank

Money - with adjectives
fake money
extra money

Add to my list with your own!
Try some collocation quizes (some are very hard!)

In case you don’t know, collocations are EXTREMELY important for learning languages, at least the ones I’ve tried. They are particularly important for English… so first, let’s tell you what they are. The following definitions and examples have been taken (and modified) from The Free Dictionary by Farlex.

Collocation, collocate (noun)
- a language unit, linguistic unit - one of the natural units into which linguistic messages can be analyzed
Collocate (verb)
- the act of positioning two or more objects together

Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as ‘weird’ if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching.

Some examples for collocates of ‘bank’ are: central, account, manager, merchant, money, deposits, lending.
It is easy to see how the meaning of ‘bank’ is partly expressed through the choice of collocates.

Ok, so basically stated, collocations are ‘language chunks’. They are usually two words, sometimes with prepositions, articles or pronouns between them, that form an idea. Collocations usually consist of verbs and nouns, or adjectives and nouns. In this way they form language pairs, that fit together naturally. So using the example above, you may say ‘central bank’, but you cannot say ‘middle bank’. The meaning is sometimes understandable and the grammar is fine, but it sounds awkward and unnatural. Collocations have developed over hundreds of years, so they can not always be guessed, they must be learned through example and experience.

Collocations are the building blocks (not words and not sentences) from which natural spoken English is made. I have far too many students who study thousands of words and understand their meanings, but have no idea about how to use them in sentences. Using collocations can improve your ‘active vocabulary’ and limit the number of awkward phrases or sentences that you say or write.

Oxford has an entire dictionary just for collocations, though most good dictionaries (the books, not the electronic ones) will give a couple in the sample sentences they provide.

This is the one most important piece of language learning advice I can give students and teachers: learn, practice and use collocations. I have never seen them used in any systematic way in any language learning book or online resource, and I’ve looked at and used many.

Try them out, see if you agree.

I really hate the out of control use of acronyms and abbreviations. In these days of instant messaging and chat rooms, acronyms and abbreviations are becoming all too common.

They’re not just annoying, but slow to read and awkward to say (do we say the letters, like in BBS, or pronounce it like a word, as in AIDS). There are plenty of people who agree with me. A great deal of writers, professors, language purists and old prudes like me (I’m not yet 30 if you’re checking) can’t stand them. I would link to them, but most of the blogs and comments I’ve seen are maybe, er, not appropriate (very strong language).

What makes it even worse is that many people learning English adopt acronyms and abbreviations quite quickly. I’m not sure why. I’ve had students use them in class and I didn’t know what they were saying. The students would give me a confused look like - “how can you not know this?”. Then I had to explain what they’re using is often slang or jargon. These students, who have a vocabualry about 1/20th the size of mine, are using this stuff. Often it’s from work - they have jobs where acronyms or abbreviations are often used in the workplace or that particular field of business. But the rest of the English speaking world doesn’t know them or use them.

Let’s get this straight. Acronyms and abbreviations do not make you sound intelligent, and they are not, in general, much faster to say. I can see how it makes sense to use them in writing sometimes, but only if they’re high-use, well-known ones that your readers will know. There’s nothing more frustrating than not understanding a piece of text or what someone is saying because they use too many acronyms and abbreviations.

I admit, I use them here at EnglishPod - we have our own little language of acronyms and abbreviations - but I wouldn’t use them with outsiders because I wouldn’t expect them to be understood. So to everyone out there, please limit their use - make yourself clear, stop the confusion.

For all those who need help understanding acronyms and abbreviations, go here to find out what possible meanings they might have.

Today I was wondering about learning languages and about the topics that are necessary/interesting to learn. I am both a student and teacher of languages, but I must admit I don’t have all the answers yet about what to learn and when to learn it.

Oviously at the lower levels the basics of communication are vital: talking about numbers, especially price, finding out where things are, and directions for how to get there, how to say what you like and don’t like… Describing people and objects is also key. Most of the textbooks I’ve used concentrate on topics like hobbies and jobs. Talking about your hobbies, families and what you do in your free time is alright, but not a necessary skill, and it’s a bit vague to be of much help. Given that EnglishPod’s structure allows us 10-15 minutes to discuss a topic, each individual hobby could be a topic.

Let’s think about what people ask you and what you want to know when you meet someone who speaks English. The typical American will ask you:

What’s your name? = introductions
How are you? = feelings
Where are you from? = talking about your hometown
Great weather today. = talking about the weather
What do you do = jobs/school

Howeverm, some websites and textbooks just dont get it. The topics taught are either irrelevant, useless or both. A prominent English language website for kids has topics like “Aztecs” - something the student will probably never use in their life. Other topics include “volcanoes”, “monsters”, “dinosaurs”, “polar animals”, “snow travel”, “haunted houses”, and the “circus”. Some of these topics are for kids, and that’s fine, but even “haunted house” is really only useful when living in cultures that actually have this concept.

Other websites and textbooks have great topics, useful language and teach things that can be used immediately and throughout one’s life. Check out the BBC’s street language topics including work, moods, sport, food, money here.

More advanced learners need topics that are more developed and specific. But we’ll get into that another time. Any suggestions out there for topics you’d like to learn about?