Learning. Such an important thing (nowadays more than ever), it is a subject that fascinates me. As I grow older, I have come to realize the importance of planning and organizing the study as something special and capital on learning.
Thinking about things to post on this e-notebook, I went into considering what are the areas one should focus on when studying by him/herself. It turned out that what people might be lacking *personal point of view on* 'home vocabulary'. By this I mean tools to comunicate every-day simple things, often left aside on english courses. For example, what do the salt containers on restaurant are called, how to describe food flavours and textures, how to nickname a pet or to make jokes. I got to that through thinking on the profile of people who need to improve their english, but already have studied it for a time. These people already, I think, got handle of specific, career-linked vocabulary. Therefore the formal structure of the language is already something of a familiar ground to them (us). The big gap yet to be filled (besides, in some cases, literary vocab) is the language one use outside the walls of the laboratory/office/library. *personal point of view off*
People, I promise I will cut out the meta-discussions, it just happens that I like them ... a lot ...
1 comment:
Hey the meta-discussions are nice! In my opinion you can keep on posting them...we can learn writing skills from them. How to organize arguments, maybe some linkers, and so on...
^^
Well, your post brought out a couple questions. I've made a little bit of research and found some answers.
The salt container is named salt cellar or saltshaker (US)
But, in a daily situation you may say something like Can you pass me the salt please? and people will understand you.
Oh! I've found a cool expression, which involves salt too.
"be the salt of the earth"
If someone is the salt of the earth, they are a very cool and honest person.
This is what I found up to now.
About the other quesions...I see the point of studying the "home vocabulary" and the way of saying daily stuff. However, I think that the type of situation in which you may have to use these kind of knowledge allows you to employ an informal language.I meant, you can explain what you want to say. I'm pretty sure that everybody would prefer to know beforehand how to describe food flavours or how to make jokes. But English isn't our mother tongue, and outside the business environment, people will certainly be patient enough to listen to you and help you to say what you want to say!
Well...it isn't easy to describe food flavours in Portugese either.
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