7 Tips For Learning English

Many people think you need to live in a foreign country, have a close foreign friend, or spend long nights with your head buried in a boring grammar book, to master English…In fact, you can become a very successful learner of English if you follow some basic rules.

1. Relax and enjoy speaking
When you use English, don’t worry about making mistakes. The chances are you will always make small mistakes when speaking a foreign language. The important thing is to learn from the errors you make. Babies don’t learn to walk without falling over a lot!

2. Learn about how you learn
Recent research has shown that many of us have a preferred way of learning. If you are a visual learner, you can link language to pictures and images. Watch films with subtitles, try to visualise yourself in imaginary situations speaking English, fix words with pictures in your mind  If you have an auditory style, you have a ‘good ear’ for language and should listen to as much music as possible and watch movies in English. If you have an analytic style, then spend time studying grammar and comparing Vietnamese with English. A learner with an interactive style needs to spend as much time as possible speaking with others, discussing language and generally working in a team. A really good learner spends time on all these styles. Yet it is a sad fact that all over the world, many people are still taught in a traditional style that favours analytic and auditory learners

3. Learn memory techniques
There are plenty of books on how to improve your memory. It is a skill that the successful learners I know take very seriously.

4. Immerse yourself
I once visited the home of a Spanish student who was actually quite a successful businessman. His house was littered with those small pieces of yellow paper called post-it notes! Every time he went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, to the bathroom to shave or used the remote control to change channel, he looked at those words. Again and again and again. Once the word was fixed in his mind, he put the paper into a file that he looked through at the end of the week. This way, he learnt 10 words a day, seven days a week. Read, listen and speak English at every opportunity! The best musicians and football players practise their skill over and over. The skill of communicating in a foreign language is the same.

5. Get Connected
I recently met someone who three times a week leaves her small village outside Hanoi, travels 1 hour on a motorbike and when she arrives at her destination, speaks in English for two hours to her friends in Britain, Australia and the US.  Her destination?  An Internet Café with voice chat facilities in the nearest small town. When I met her, she had never spoken to a foreigner face to face before, but after only two months of practising, she could hold a conversation with me in English.
The Internet has brought so many benefits to language learners. You can find great sites for practising grammar, vocabulary, listening, pronunciation and now, most importantly of all, speaking.

6. Learn Vocabulary systematically
Remember that learning English is not just about learning grammar. When we speak, we express most of our ideas through our choice of vocabulary, through collocations and fixed expressions. Think carefully about how you organise your notebook, don’t just write a long list of new words! Try to divide your notebook into sections.

Here are some ideas…
subject pages; shopping, holidays, money verbs and nouns that go together; do your homework; make a cake expressions which use common words; overweight, to get over something, over the moon phrasal verbs; to grow up, to tell off, to look after fixed expressions; on the other hand, in my opinion, by the way idioms; once in a blue moon, to be over the moon, out of the blue expressions with prepositions; at night, at the weekend, in March, in 1988

And Finally….
7. Get motivated: don’t put off until tomorrow, what you can do today.
In London, I had a Thai friend who was attending university there, studying fashion design. Her English was excellent. She told me that when she was fifteen she decided that it was her dream to study fashion in the UK. She found out what IELTS score she needed and started studying right away. When she was nineteen and old enough to go, she was ready. Her early start was a smart move: when she returned to Thailand after a year, some of her friends were still studying English, waiting to go abroad to study. She is now fluent, well qualified and walked into a great job!

Source : http://www.britishcouncil.org/vietnam-for-newsletter-7-tips-for-english-learner.htm

Shendie Yarry
4EA15
Ekonomi Manajemen

The Noun Phrase

The Noun Phrase

Nouns

Nouns are naming words. Everything we can see or talk about is represented by a word which names it - that naming word is called a noun.

Sometimes a noun will be the name for something we can touch (e.g., lion, cake, computer), and sometimes a noun will be the name for something we cannot touch (e.g., bravery, mile, joy). Everything is represented by a word that lets us talk about it. That includes people (e.g., man, scientist), animals (e.g., dog, lizard), places (e.g., town, street), objects (e.g., vase, pencil), substances (e.g., copper, glass), qualities (e.g., heroism, sorrow), actions (e.g., swimming, dancing), and measures (e.g., inch, ounce)

Common Nouns

A common noun is the word used for a class of person, place or thing.

Examples:

• Car
  
• Man
  
• Bridge
  

Common nouns are further classified into:

• Abstract nouns – things you cannot see or touch (e.g., bravery, joy)
  
• Collective nouns – words to describe groups (e.g., team, choir)
  
• Compound nouns – nouns made up of more than one word (e.g., court-martial, pickpocket, water bottle)
  

Proper Nouns

A proper noun is the name of a person, place or thing (i.e., its own name). A proper noun always starts with a capital letter.

Collective Nouns

A collective noun is the word used for a group of people or things.

Examples:

• Choir
  
• Team
  
• Jury
  

The big question with collective nouns is whether they should be treated as singular or plural. The answer is: They can be treated as singular or plural depending on the sense of your sentence. This is covered in more depth in the lesson Collective Nouns – Singular or Plural? and in the Beware section on the right of this page.

Pronouns

A pronoun is a word used to replace a noun.

Pronouns are one of the eight parts of speech which are: adjectives, adverbs
conjunctions, interjections, nouns, prepositions, pronouns and verbs.

Verbal Nouns

Verbal nouns (also called gerunds) are formed from verbs. They end -ing. They are a type of common noun.

• I love swimming. (swimming – the name of an activity; it is formed from the verb to swim.)
  
• Lateral thinking is required to solve this problem. (thinking – the name of an activity; it is formed from the verb to think.)
  

Compound Nouns

Compound nouns are nouns made up of two or more words. Some compound nouns are hyphenated. Some are not, and some combine their words to form a single word. (This is covered in the lesson Hyphens in Compound Nouns.)

Examples:

• Mother-in-law
  
• Board of members
  
• Court-martial
  

Article + Noun
a. Indifinite Article + Noun
For Example : a girl an apple a university
b. Difinite Article + Noun
For Example : the house the book the boys the pens

Countable and Uncountable Nouns

The major division of English nouns is into "countable" and "uncountable".

Countable Nouns

Countable nouns are easy to recognize. They are things that we can count. For example: "pen". We can count pens. We can have one, two, three or more pens. Here are some more countable nouns:

• dog, cat, animal, man, person
  
• bottle, box, litre
  
• coin, note, dollar
  
• cup, plate, fork
  
• table, chair, suitcase, bag
  

Countable nouns can be singular or plural:

• My dog is playing.
  
• My dogs are hungry.
  

We can use the indefinite article a/an with countable nouns:

• A dog is an animal.
  

When a countable noun is singular, we must use a word like a/the/my/this with it:

• I want an orange. (not I want orange.)
  
• Where is my bottle? (not Where is bottle?)
  

We can use some and any with countable nouns:

• I've got some dollars.
  
• Have you got any pens?
  

We can use a few and many with countable nouns:

• I've got a few dollars.
  
• I haven't got many pens.
  

"People" is countable. "People" is the plural of "person". We can count people:

• There is one person here.
  
• There are three people here.
  

Uncountable Nouns

Uncountable nouns are substances, concepts etc that we cannot divide into separate elements. We cannot "count" them. For example, we cannot count "milk". We can count "bottles of milk" or "litres of milk", but we cannot count "milk" itself. Here are some more uncountable nouns:

• music, art, love, happiness
  
• advice, information, news
  
• furniture, luggage
  
• rice, sugar, butter, water
  
• electricity, gas, power
  
• money, currency
  

We usually treat uncountable nouns as singular. We use a singular verb. For example:

• This news is very important.
  
• Your luggage looks heavy.
  

We do not usually use the indefinite article a/an with uncountable nouns. We cannot say "an information" or "a music". But we can say a something of:

• a piece of news
  
• a bottle of water
  
• a grain of rice
  

We can use a little and much with uncountable nouns:

• I've got a little money.
  
• I haven't got much rice.
  

Uncountable nouns are also called "mass nouns"



Another Examples for Countable and Uncountable Noun :

• Don't forget to buy a bag of rice when you go shopping.
  
• Can I have one cup of coffee and two cups of tea.
  
• The police found some items of clothing scattered around the floor.
  
• I need a truck that will take at least three pieces of furniture.
  
• You'd think a tablespoon of honey would be more than enough.
  

Sumber :

- http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/nouns_different_types.htm

- http://www.really-learn-english.com/english-noun-phrases.html

- http://www.wordsmile.com/noun-phrase-introduction

- http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/nouns-un-countable_2.html

- http://dindarifiyani.blogspot.com/2012/11/about-noun-phrase.html

Shendie Yarry

4EA15

Ekonomi Manajemen