English | Getting Certified in a Foreign Language

Nowadays, watching any TV series on HBO or Netflix in original version is an opportunity everyone might have and it is a fun and useful way to learn English. It is important to get used to the different accents and it is also vital to improve our vocabulary.

There are loads of programs available but if you are preparing a Cambridge exams such as FCE, CAE or CPE.

DOWNTON ABBEY

Downton Abbey is a British drama television series set in the early 20th century. It is set in the fictional Yorkshire country estate of Downton Abbey between 1912 and 1926, depicts the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their domestic servants in the post-Edwardian era —with the great events in history having an effect on their lives and on the British social hierarchy.

SHERLOCK

Sherlock is a British crime drama television series based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective stories. The series is primarily filmed in Cardiff, Wales with North Gower Street in London used for exterior shots of Holmes and Watson’s 221B Baker Street residence.

GAME OF THRONES

Nine noble families fight for control over the mythical lands of Westeros, while an ancient enemy returns after being dormant for thousands of years.

It is an American adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire written by George R.R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels.

DOCTOR WHO

Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC since 1963. The programme depicts the adventures of a Time Lord called “the Doctor”, an extraterrestrial being, to all appearances human, from the planet Gallifrey. The Doctor explores the universe in a time-travellig space ship called the TARDIS.

THE HOUSE OF CARDS (UK)

House of Cards is a 1990 British political thriller television serial in four episodes, set after the end of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

PEAKY BLINDERS

Peaky Blinders is a British crime drama television series set in Birmingham, England after World War I. The series follows the exploits of the Shelby crime family. It was the first production to receive funding from the Yorkshire Content Fund, which in turn made certain the majority of the show was filmed in Yorkshire as part of the deal.

You might find hard to follow some of these TV series regarding the accent their characters speak. However, it is useful to practice some listening and some vocabulary and expressions which may appear in the exams.

Hope you find this blog interesting. Enjoy it!

15 Interesting facts about the English Language that will surprise you

Do you know what a pangram sentence is? Do you think Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is the longest word in English? Then you should keep reading!

English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world so it is not surprising that so many people want to learn how to speak English. Over 840 million people speak English as a first or second language, but what do we really know about English apart from the grammar and the vocabulary? It may seem simple, but it is not, English is full of crazy inventions, misinterpretations, strange words and needless words.

1. A new English word is added to the dictionary every two hours. So while you are reading this blog a new word is about to come out! During a year almost 4000 new words are added!
https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/how-a-word-enters-the-oxford-english-dictionary-html-1295707-2018-07-25

2. William Shakespeare added over a thousand new words to the English language. Do you want to know which ones? http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html

3. English used to have 29 letters instead of the current 26. Now it has 21 consonants and 5 vowels. Find out the story behind the letters:
https://nypost.com/2015/02/08/the-stories-behind-the-letters-of-our-alphabet/. There is only one word in English with 5 vowels in a row: ‘Queuing’. This is a great word to use when you are playing hangman! ”Abstemious’ and ‘‘facetious’ are the only words that have all the vowels in the right order. And 11% of the entire English language is just the letter E.

4. Do you know what is special about the following sentence? ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. This type of sentence is called a ‘pangram’ as it contains every letter in the language. Are there the 26 letters from the alphabet?

5. The word ‘set’ has the highest number of definitions: 25 different meanings!!

6. Not even one number from 0 to 999 contains the letter A: one, two, three, four, …

7. OMG! And I was thinking like…do you know like…do you use crutch words? Crutch words are those words that have not a meaning or value to a sentence. So like…er…do you think, like um, you can like find a crutch word here?

8. Due to a printing error, there was a word in the English dictionary from 1932 to 1940 which did not have a meaning. The word was ‘Dord’ and it became known as ‘ghost word’.
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/03/in-a-word-dord-the-word-that-wasnt/

9. ‘I’ has three first positions: it is the shortest, the oldest and the most commonly used word in English.

10. The original name for ‘butterfly’ was ‘flutterby’.

11. The word ‘Goodbye’ originally comes from an Old English phrase meaning ‘God be with you’.

12. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in not the longest word in English. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis is a type of disease caused by inhaling ash and dust. The word has 45 letters. Can you pronounce it? Try again! Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis.

13. The most difficult tongue twister is: ‘The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick’. It is part of the Guinness World Records.

14. Swims will be swims even when turned upside down. Such words are called ambigrams.

15. ‘Angry’ and ‘hungry’ are the only two English words that end with –gry.

English is the only major language that doesn’t have any organization guiding it. The organizations are responsible for controlling the evolution of their respective language in terms of usage, vocabulary and grammar but English does not have it, so there is total freedom!

Don’t forget that English is the official language of 67 countries and ¼ of the world’s population speaks at least some English so is never late to start! LOL (Did you know the world ‘lol’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011?)