Train Your Accent

Good day, guys..

“When the need to succeed is as bad as the need to breathe, then you’ll be successful.” (Eric Thomas)

Well guys, I begin my review today with a quote, just to urge you to stay in the right path 😀 I mean, in the right path of learning motivation. If you are dreaming to succeed to speak English like a native speaker, you need to make sure you, yourself to have a balance effort with your dream.

If you are motivate enough to learn how to speak like a native speaker, continue to read this review. But if you are lack of motivation, please check your heart first. 😀

Well, I’m coming again with my 15th website review, the other marvelous website for you to learn how to speak English like a native speaker.

Here is the link of my 15th website http://www.trainyouraccent.com/

The purpose of this site is:

(1) improve students’ understanding of relaxed speech,

(2) reduce their accents to improve comprehensibility, and

(3) learn how relaxed speech is used with vocabulary and expressions in everyday language.

Keep in mind that pronunciation is an important thing in learning language, because the biggest goal of the learning process is to communicate effectively, so the student should be seriously concern to the pronunciation learning. In this site, which consists of plenty of lesson that will take you through the daily activities pronunciation, is the one of the best website to learn English pronunciation.

In the homepage there is a lesson menu which consist of a lot of lessons, they are: apartment rentals, clothing, exercise, job hunting, online shopping, train tickets, breakfast, dental care, family relationships, movie rental, restaurants, cell phones, driver’s education, lunch, online classes, and study abroad. The other menus are accent symbols and audio help.

This is the example from one of the lesson, this is about apartment rentals.

Here you can see, in the above there is an audio play, so you can listen to the audio. The audio will help you to know the pronunciation of the text. There is also a reduced speech in every lesson.

Well, the other menu is accent symbols; it focuses on the sound of word reductions, especially with the schwa sound (ə) that affects stress and rhythm. You can learn the use of schwa sound as in the articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, modals of advice, and modals of regret.

Well guys, have an enjoy learning ^_^

Emi Fitri Audina(F12112009)

knowing variety of English dialects and accents

Heloooo again !!!

Today I’m back with another website review (yay!) Today’s website is: (drumroll..)

http://www.bl.uk

Today’s website might be a little bit general

Okay, firstly, I want to tell you what is bl.uk.

Bl.uk is the official British library website which contains a lot of information about books and other literature.

One thing which makes me eager to review this website is because they have a unique service called “sounds familiar.”

Here’s the link:

What does it mean by unique, and why did I chose this website to be reviewed?

Well, I called it “unique” because it simply “unique” (joke.) It is because this website provides you something which you will never see in other “how to speak English websites.” bl.uk presents you recordings of 76 different accents in U.K. The reason I chose this website to be reviewed is because, it is better to not only learning “how to pronounce an English word” but we also need to know “how a word is pronounced differently between native speakers of English.”

Let’s take a look inside:

Okay that’s all the website review for today, see you on the next website review!

au revoir!!

by:

Dwi Purwanto

English Contraction with Truespokenenglish

Hi guys,

After several break time, I come back with another website to be reviewed.

Here is the website: http://truespokenenglish.com/

Do you have any difficulties in pronouncing a word in english?
Well some non-native speakers of English  often do such things. They intend to speak perwords and distract their fluency.

This website will teach you secrets to speak English. The website will teach you common pronunciation changes that English speakers make. These changes are informal and rarely taught to a person learning English. But these changes are made by almost all English speakers. By learning these changes, you’ll understand English more easily, and your English will sound more like a native speaker.

well let’s got to the website overview:
When you open the website you’ll be redirected to home menu, which you can get explainations about this website.

Here is the overview:

There are up to 22 lessons which you can get from this website. Let’s see how the lesson looks like (clicked it):

Here is the view of one of the lesson. In order to make viewers easier to understand it, TruespokenEnglish also provides a video along with the explanation. Not only that, it also provides some exercises which can help viewers to master the lesson.

That’s all my review of Truespokenenglish.com
I’ll be back with another website review

Ciao!!!!!

By:

Dwi Purwanto

Practice Speaking English with Robot Mike

Hi guys, how’s everything? I’m coming with my 14^th website review. The next website that I found as a marvelous website is ESL Fast website. Here is the link www.eslfast.com

Well guys, I recommend you to visit this website to learn how to speak English like a native speaker, because this website provides a lot of superiority which guides you to have a good English speaking skill. I would like to remind you that the only thing you need to master English speaking skill is ‘highly motivated’ and the other aspects will follow it. Are you still in a high motivation guys? I hope so 🙂

Eslfast.com is a really good website for you which provide one more interactive method to learn how to speak English like a native speaker. There a lot of advantages that you may get from this site. You can feel the different atmosphere of learning here. This website consist of six menus, they are: easy conversation, super easy reading, easy reading, 1.500 ESL/EFL conversation, sentence structure writing practice, and the last is 365 ESL short stories. Those menus will be explained in the following paragraph.

Do you think you have a boredom activity on learning? Or you might be annoying to remind such billion of word in order to speak English well? If yes, it’s mean that you need to find another way to learn English, and I recommend you this site to help you to have an interesting learning process through interactive application. Well guys, here you can access a plenty of conversations. The first menu in this site is easy conversation. In this menu, you have 15 categories of the easy and basic conversation, such as about daily life, sport, job, food, and its line. For each categories are divided into some sub-categories—the number of sub-categories depends on the category itself. It’s actually a short conversation between two people. You can also listen to the audio of the conversation by clicking the sound icon.

The second and the third menu of this site are about reading. The second is easy reading which consists of a short story for beginner. You can also listen to the audio—as I told you by clicking the sound audio. In the bottom of the story you can find three menu, see on the picture bellow:

in the vocabulary menu, you can find the meaning of each difficult word that used in the story. For the cloze menu you can find an exercise named ‘gap-fill exercise’. What you need to do is filling all the gaps, then press “check” to check your answers. You can use the ‘hint’ to give you a free letter if you don’t remember the word, but you will lose your point if you use the hint. The last menu is sentence. Here, there are some exercises, what you need to do is to rearranging the sentences until it becomes good sentences. It’s easy, interesting, and knowledgeable.

Well, the fourth, this website provides you 25 topics of more than 1500 ESL/EFL conversations. You can learn by the conversation and listen to the audio—again by clicking the sound icon. By having a simulation (such conversation) so you don’t only learn new diction but also the way to use the words. It helps you very much in your speaking skill. Please read and listen the conversation here!

The fifth menu that I would like you to know is sentence structure writing practice. As the title of the menu, it must be consist of sentence structure. But here, you will learn the structure of the sentence through exercises. Here is the example of the exercise.

The last menu of this site is 365 ESL short stories. As same as with the easy reading, it also consists of short stories, but which makes it different is; it has a higher diction and longer stories as the easy reading. Just enjoy then 🙂

Well guys, I have told you about the six menus of this site. But I would like you to continue your reading of this website review, because I still have the core of this site that I would like to share to you. H ave you ever imagine learning with a robot? Here you go! You can practice your writing skill by practicing a conversation with ‘Robot Mike’.  Let me introduce you to Robot Mike. He is a smart robot, so you can ask everything with him and get the appropriate answers from him. He can answer your questions accurately and quickly. Noting different like a conversation in a chat room. Robot Mike is made to help learners to learn English through main tools. You can’t even realize that it is a robot, since you can talk everything through this application. So, what’s the advantage? You can talk with a native speaker, you learn from it, and the result is ‘you can speak like a native speaker’. You may try to imitate the way robot mike speak, at first. After that you can use the vocabulary or expression that he might use.

How to start to use this web?

The first is enter the fourth menu of this site; 1500⁺ ESL/EFL conversations on 25 topics. After that choose category and sub-category of each item you want to learn, after you really go to the conversation, read and listen to the conversation, and then click the above link ‘practice the conversation of this topic with mike’.

And then you can talk everything with robot mike.

Happy trying, happy learning guys 🙂

Loving you as always ^_^

 

Emi Fitri Audina (F12112009)

My English Page

http://www.myenglishpages.com

My English Page! What come to your mind after you read this phrase? The things to learn English? The whole English materials? Well, keep your curiosity and read my review of this website. 😀

Let me introduce you the author of this website, first. Rhalmi Mohammed is the author of this website. She is a teacher in a Moroccan high school, in the south of Morocco, in the province of Ouarzazate. She likes to travel a lot, and she learns many things from her journey especially about the customs. In 1997, she moved to the province of El Jaded a little bit in the north where she spent 13 years teaching English and started this website.  She is also working on the other websites and engage with many colleague also teacher with the web tools. Her aim is to remain open minded teachers and learners, and help both teachers and learners to learn English. Even though this website concern on English language teaching-learning, but she also provides the general issues related to the profession.

What can you find here?

1. Study page

In the study page there is grammar, reading, speaking, listening, vocabulary, phrasal verbs, idioms, exercises, Figures of speech, study skills, global tests, literature, holidays, site news, world news, studying in the USA, and visit the world.

As I mentioned before, in this menu consist of a lot of categories. I would like to emphasize the advantages of visit the speaking category. You are able to access a plenty of speaking material, begin with the easier material, such as greeting, until the advance material, such as high level conversation. You are truly learned here. Happy trying.

1. Teachers

There are resources, shared files, shared resources, and teaching materials. In the resources, you can find some lesson plans, teaching material, and many others that related to teaching. A lesson plan may help the teacher to conquer the class learning process. However, teacher still need to consider the unpredictable things that may be happen in the class room, since the student can give a various response of the learning process. In the teaching material, you as a teacher may also find a lot of materials which is helpful for your learning process as a teacher in a classroom. The teaching materials such as material about health, international organizations, and its line.

1. Learn English the fun way

This site is different with the other site, since it has a really interesting ways to learn English. They are; quotes, lyrics, and jokes.  To learn by a song and it’s lyric is one of a good method to learn English. Because we can learn the new vocabulary while we heard the song.

1. EFL and ESL community

There are also forums here, so you can discuss anything with the other learners.

 

Emi Fitri Audina

(F12112009)

Antimoon.com

Antimoon.com, created in 2001 by Tomasz P. Szynalski and Michal Ryszard Wojcik. Both of them are non-native speakers, but they learned impressively well less than 3 years. The result is they can speak fluently and almost as well as native speakers. Therefore, they build this site and shared their experiences of learning English. They live in Wroclaw Poland. Tom got his master degree as the business administrator. He is an English-Polish translator, a mathematics and English teacher. Since 2004 Tom already involved in managed this site.

The authors of this site have really big goals when build this site. The first is to tell people and make them understand how to learn English effectively. It’s imperative to know the effective ways to learn a language. Everybody is able to learn English, but in fact not every learning process lead to succeed. Sometimes, people need a long time to learn but they get nothing after the process. It’s caused of the wrong method, in this case the effective learning is needed to master the language. The second goal is to motivate people to learn English. Based on the authors noted, English is the best language that they’ve learned. Motivation is the main point of a learning process, which controlled the spirit and the willingness in learning is crucially needed. I do agree to the authors who want to motivate the people to learn English. The last goal from this site is; to explain the important things in English that you didn’t get it at school.

In this site, there are lots of advises in learning English. Their advises must be good because they’ve been in our situation, when they have poor English, lack of vocabulary, and so on. They’ve known the methods to learn English. They also proved it by sharing the method with their friends and their students. Undoubted! You should listen to their advises to enhance your speaking ability. Let me show much more my amazement of this precious site. This site contains of several amazing menus. Let see!

The first is ‘How to Learn English’. It covers pronunciation tips, dictionary, no mistakes, input, SRS, and the most worthy is motivation. I just realize the reason they placed motivation in the first range, it because the importance of the motivation itself. Succeed is the bunch of learning process within motivation. Through the learning process, you won’t pass it smoothly. Somehow, you’ll face some problems, even unpredictable problems. Only a high motivated person who will continue the process, do the best learning with the right method.

This side really concerns to motivate the readers as an English learner. From the first sight, we must be catch by the quote that they make;

You should read the motivation articles; it will change your life! Believe me^_^ .

In the pronunciation tips; you will find also the articles relate to pronunciation. Besides, you will find the sounds of phonetic and English sounds, phonetic transcription, American and British English, and its line. There is also ‘Learner Report. It contains the report from people who are learning English. You will find the way the learned—the success method to learn English, the technique, their motivation, and the challenges that they face. One of the learner who noted as the English learner with his success method is Krzysztof. He used to learn English by several methods that already resumed by the author.

The last but not least, I would like you to visit ‘resources’ menu. It contains; correct English search, free audio recordings, online IPA, keyboard, and the others. I hope you really feel your improvement after you visit this site, like what I did. ^_^

Happy trying!

Emi Fitri Audina (F12112009)

Speak English!

Emi Fitri Audina (F12112009)

http://www.speakenglish.co.uk/

Speak English! It is an awesome website that mostly uses British English. The goal of this website is to provide a high quality of adults who wish to learn English online.

Before you enjoy the menus those provide here, you need to sign up with your account first. If you don’t have any account yet, you need to make the new account. First, click ‘sign up’ in the right corner of the site. You will see the dialog box;

Fulfill all of the data that they need. Make sure that you give the appropriate information about yourself, for example; give your real name, your birthday, and the lines. They also ask you to write down your e-mail address, it’s really needed for your membership in Speak English. After you fulfill the data and write the secret code, you will get the notification in your e-mail, you can directly check your e-mail.

When you check the mail from Speak English, you probably guided to the link of the site, here you already accepted as the member, and you can enjoy all of the menus that provided.

What makes it different?

It’s completed with the sound that recorded with the highest quality by the native speakers.

There are two main categories of this site that help you to speak English fluently, they are; phrases and vocabulary. If you want to listen to the sounds of both phrases and vocabulary, just click on any phrases or word in this site.

Phrases! It’s the category of Speak English; providing you the basic phrases that commonly used in the daily life of English speaking country. You can find lots of phrases in the daily life, for example: phrases related to hotels and accommodation, leisure time and entertainment, around town, and the lines. It’s really help you guys, when you want to go abroad, you may meet the foreign people so by learning the daily phrases you will understand how to communicate effectively with the foreigners. The phrases deliver with the understandable words, so no need to be worry, you will easily master it. Just by clicking the phrase ‘let us know’ you may also give suggestions and correction of the phrases if you find any mistake there.

The vocabulary menu also provides the daily vocabulary. It’s truly useful for you, without takes a long time to open the dictionary and differentiate the vocabulary; you’ve already found the vocabulary based on each category here, in this site. 🙂

Here you can discuss with the other people all over the world. There are three main forums in this site; English Language Forum, UK and Ireland culture and travel forum, USA and Canada culture and travel forum. The most appropriate forum for us is English Language Forum. Before you start to discuss something, please register or login first (it’s free). After you login, you may discuss everything. Just post your idea, wait for a minute and everybody will give the responses.

Speak English website also connected to Speak Language! 😀

Above all, I hope you enjoy the site. 🙂

EnglishClub

Emi Fitri Audina (F12112009)

EnglishClub, is the learners club which gives us freedom in this club. It comes from England, and written in mostly British English. However, this website provides the other varieties of English, such as American or Canadian. It’s a free and independent club.

What interesting things that can you do through this EnglishClub?

1. You can make your own blogs, photos, videos, music, groups and friends.
2. Level test and English grammar.
3. Lessons; Grammar, Vocabulary, and Pronunciation.
4. English games and English quizzes.
5. Chatting; with students and teachers.
6. School information (Learn at home or abroad)

There are several interesting things in this website that make it become an awesome website. What is that?

The first is from the menu. You can see here!

In the menu you can choose the ‘learn English’, ‘Teach English’, or ‘My Englishclub’. Each menu delivers lots of sub-menus and categories. For the Learn English menu you can master the four English skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The first skill is listening. The importance of mastering English listening skill is not only to help you understand what the speakers talk about, but also to helps you learn how to pronounce the words, also how to use appropriate intonation. Undoubted that this skill will help you to speak fluently. You can listen to many files here, or download it before you listen.

In the second skill is speaking. Speaking may be a different skill among the four skills. You can listen to the  music alone, you can read the book alone, even you can write alone, but you can’t really speak alone or you will judged as a crazy man. 😀 Without a doubt, you need a lot more afford, friends and appropriate place to practice speaking. Somehow, it’s difficult to start practicing this skill, moreover for the one who has a bad English speaking skill. So, for the first step is LEARN. Learn how to speak well, how to produce the sounds, and all the guidance you’ll find in EnglishClub. The third skill is reading, it also requires the speaking skill. You can read out loud, so then you can pronounce the word appropriately. The last skill is writing. Which you can practice by yourself, this website provides you the guidance to write. You can find also English Grammar, Pronunciation, and vocabulary.

The other AWESOME thing from this website is, you can Teach English. I mean, you can learn how to teach English. The menu Teach English provides teaching tips, teacher forums, inter-school projects, ESL jobs, and the others. For you who want to be a teacher, it’s your place to learn. The third menu is MyEnglishClub. You can post and share everything here, also it’s allowed for discussing.

Well guys, above all, you never know how marvelous this website if you don’t try it. Happy trying ^__^

 

English at Home

Emi Fitri Audina (F12112009)

http://www.english-at-home.com

English at home! Since its launch in 1999, English-at-home.com has grown to become one of the premier sites to learn English. More than 350,000 visitors a month come to the site to learn English, generating more than 700,000 monthly page views. This is the other marvelous website about speaking that will help you to speak fluently. I would like to emphasize the importance of having a good English speaking skill that is to make you speak English confidently and also communicate effectively. this website provides you eight main menu, they are; Speaking English, English Grammar, Vocabulary and idioms, English reading, Real life English, English Lessons, Games and Quizzes, and the last is English Course.

In the Speaking English menu, there are lots of important article related to English speaking skill. One of the awesome articles is ‘Better English Speaking skill’. This article explained the ways to have a better English speaking skill, the main point of this article are; practice speaking where you can and when you can, build your confidence, experiment with the English that you know, try to respond what people say to you, try not to translate, do what native speakers do all time, don’t speak to fast and the last is trying to relax. You can imagine how wonderful this website within plenty others article. The articles not only about speaking tips, but also the materials that might you need to have a better English speaking skill, such as; the polite sentence in English, how to make a request, English conversation, and many others.

We can’t deny that English Grammar often become something scary for English learners. Perhaps, it’s because of the boredom and the difficulty of the grammar itself. However, the way we learn English grammar is also determine the result of our learning process. It’s mean that, English Grammar might not be as that difficult if we have the right method to master it. One of the methods is by using E-learning, that is learning through online. This website—English at home, trains you to master English grammar easily, using clear but short explanations and examples.

The other important part of this website is ‘Vocabulary and Idioms’, WOW, it’s my favorite lesson ‘Idiom’. By mastering the idioms and vocabulary, you’ll have thousands good diction and idioms, finally you look cleverer with a great speaking skill. In order to enhance your English speaking skill, you need to master the vocabulary as much as possible. Having a great English vocabulary doesn’t just mean that you can understand lots of words and phrases: it also means that you can use these words and phrases and that you can remember them when you need them. But, how can you master it if you don’t know the method? Or perhaps you do a boring method regularly, it’s the answer guys! Here you can drill you, yourself to master the vocabulary—not by memorizing. You will master the vocabulary and idioms through enjoyable methods and feel the improvement in your English-speaking skill! You may also read the articles in ‘English Reading’ to help enhance your vocabulary.

Sometimes, in learning process we need exercises, games, and quizzes to learn English you also can find it here. Please try! For the other serious learning, you may visit the English Course, it’s free guys! 😀 These lessons review some of the most essential grammar and speaking phrases in English. The level of the course is approximately A2, or Elementary level. But it’s also useful for you if you have a higher level of English but want to review your English. Don’t miss the weekly course of English Course!

It’s a friendly site, and you can meet lots of people from different countries, join in the forums, and make new friends!

5 Minutes English

As the second language learners, we often feel unsatisfied of our English speaking progress. We’ve learned English a long time, but still hard to communicate in English. Furthermore, it’s the real problem that we can’t express our self better in English. To realize that we still stag in a basic level, it’s imperative to have an intensive English speaking learning. Even the native speakers, they still need to learn and improve their speaking skill in order to communicate effectively. So guys, do you have enough motivation for every day learn? I do hope you are in a good spirit, today, tomorrow, and as long as you alive. 😀 KEEP S.P.I.R.I.T guys.

Ok. Let’s directly go to the website that I would like you to know. Here is the link www.5minuteenglish.com. You can guess the title from the link, yeah! It’s ‘Five Minute English’ website. What make it different with the other website? Well these are the answers.It contains 4 amazing menus

1. I can say these are amazing menus, because they rarely find in the other website, the menus are; lesson, ESL School, ESL Books, and ESL Programs. For the lesson menus, there are six categories; Grammar, Reading, Vocabulary, Listening, Pronunciation, and Slangs/Idioms. Special for you, who need intensive English learning you can visit ESL school, ESL books, and ESL programs. They recommended a plenty of school related to English as a Second Language (ESL), such as ASPECT International Language Academic (Sydney), Access English (Toronto), and St. Georges English School (London). It guides you to have world knowledge of English, and is a guidance to study abroad. ESL books are providing with a different method. You don’t need to buy and read a thick book, or to wait them to arrive in the e-mail. Only by downloading the file in ‘audible.com’ you can listen to the English book where ever you are :D.

2. A complete English Lesson

As I have mention before, there are six categories within Lessons menu; Grammar, Reading, Vocabulary, Listening, Pronunciation, and Slangs/Idioms. The six categories explain clearly, with the simple and understandable example. For example in the Pronunciation category, you can learn the way native speakers produce sounds, the intonation, stress words, linking words, contractions, and many others.

3. Links to study abroad

Study abroad is a big dream of every foreign language learners, moreover for the free one—scholarship. 😀 . However, to study abroad and live in a foreign country is not always favorable. You may face many problems, sickness, that caused many students go home earlier than expected. So, before it happens to you, you must know the advantages and disadvantages of study abroad. You will find it in this website.

After all, for you guys, without a doubt to visit this awesome website. Enjoy it!

 

Emi Fitri Audina (F12112009)