Hi everyone, my name is Alessandro, I am from Brazil. I would like to get to know more about you, your country, culture, food, costumes, etc. You can write in English or in your native language, if you aren’t a native English speaker. By the way, tell us how to say “welcome” in your native language.

To join, just use the comments to send text. On the English Experts blog you can use the comments form to get in touch with other learners from around the world.

Thank you in advance for your kind answer.

See you soon!

According to professor Michael Jacobs, anyone can learn English in 1.200 hours of instruction. This doesn’t depend on intelligence or special talents, just a good measure of wanting to.

The calculation is simple. If you study 3 hours weekly, normally 2 sessions of one and a half hours each, which is usual in language schools, see.

1.200 / 3 = 400

That is 400 weeks of study, which is, when all is said and done, approximately 8 years. I don’t want to wait this long to be fluent in English, do you?

The only alternative then, is to increase the hours of study per week: listening to music, the radio, films, reading books, talking. You have to pay attention to everything; otherwise It will not be effective and your brain will not assimilate the new knowledge. There is a proverb that says: no pain no gain.

Let’s do a new calculation. Let’s say that you study 2 hours per day, then we would have:

1200 / 2 = 600

In this case, 600 days, less than 2 years. See? There are no miracles, don’t believe in speed courses that promise fluency in 3 months. This is charlatanism. Remember no pain, no gain.

That’s all folks.

Best regards.

ps.: This post is dedicated to Turkish friends.

Translated by Mary Ziller (native English speaker) and Alessandro

When you are beginning to study English, everything is new: your day to day progress is noticeable. in this phase everything motivates you: the new words, sentences, the grammar rules and so on. After a while the initial motivation fades, you can’t learn at the same speed as before. This leads you to believe that your studies are not worth it, and causes you to give up.

However, this lessening of the pace is totally normal and has a scientific explanation. It is called a learning plateau.The learning plateau is actually the time that your brain spends consolidating what you have already learned. The feeling of being at standstill is temporary and an illusion, If you persist, soon you will move onto the next higher level. You are actually learning during this period, but just don’t realize it.

One way to overcome the learning plateaus is by setting small goals. For instance: trying to master the vocabulary of a complicated text, periodically taking tests to see the progress you’ve made, keeping a journal of your difficulties and consulting it periodically.

This is pretty interesting. So, now that you know about it, don’t make yourself crazy like the Crazy Frog, “don’t die on the Plateau”.

Keep in touch.

Thanks to: Mary Ziller

Hi people, I frequently access Channel 9, the site produced by the employees of Microsoft. The technologies that will be part of our lives in the future are presented there. Frequently I see an Indian giving interviews, never a Brazilian. India has become one of the countries with the most investments in software development, Microsoft has built research centers in that country. Know why? They speak English.

Is Google taking over the world? I can’t confirm this, but it is without a doubt the predominating force on the internet. Its ads are everywhere and everybody wants to earn money with “Google AdSense”.The company founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brim, has become a major player in the online search market in the few years that it has been in existence. The brand name has become so famous that it has become a verb; the term has been included in the Oxford English dictionary, one of the major references for the English language. Take a look at this:

Mary Googled for Wikipedia references.
Mary procurou no Google por referências da Wikipedia.

It’s important to remember that the verb has to be capitalized. Now we will move on to the subject matter of how to learn English using Google search as a tool.

Tip 1 – If you are in doubt regarding the correct usage of a particular expression, all you have to do is test the two possibilities in Google, always putting the expression in “quotation” marks. Example:

“The Brazil is a big country” – (1 occurrences)
“Brazil is a big country” – (336 occurrences)

The second search string has a great deal more chances of being correct, therefore, use it. In the worst case scenario, you will be committing the same error as the more than 336 sites on the internet. If your search comes up empty, you can be sure that you have made a mistake.

Tip 2 – If you are in doubt about the about how a particular word should be used in a sentence, you can use the wildcard character “*” placed between quotation marks. See:

“He * there for seven years”

Applying the results, I found out that some words can be used in the sentence, they are: stayed, lived, worked e remained. Therefore, choose the one that makes sense to you.

Tip 3 – We saved the best for last. Googlefight is a web site that compares two expressions and informs us which of them is more often cited on the web. The link is: http://www.googlefight.com.

Did you enjoy these tips? Tell me in the comments how it helped you.

I hope that helps.

See ya!

Collaborator: Mary Ziller