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Issue #047 -- Week 29/03/15-04/04/15
April 07, 2015
Hello,

Greetings and General Information

A warm welcome to our new subscribers! I wish you will find My English Club fun and instructive and I look forward to welcome you as a new valued member soon. Read, learn and communicate around the world!

Please feel free to contribute to these pages when you have a minute. They are meant to be a platform for exchanging ideas, stories and opinions - an ideal medium for practicing your English, which should be used to the full. Together, let's bring it alive, let's make it the welcoming community you wished for, when you joined. Use the Comments facility at the end of every page and start making friends worldwide.

You and your friends can always subscribe individually through the form on My English Club If anybody mentions to you that they are interested in receiving it, please tell them this, with thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on Back Issues for English Corner E-zine.

OK, having said that, let’s proceed with this week's lessons and we’ll have a little game at the end. Enjoy!

Month 8 ~ Lesson 31

We started studying three subjects back in September 2014: pronunciation and grammar for improving your communication skills, as well as website design and development, for applying your English in practice once you get skilful in English and website building.

Once we covered the basics of pronunciation, we started a new course in reading, which we finished a couple of weeks ago. Following some recent requests, we started a section on educational games, to add the fun into your learning. I do hope you like it - enjoy.

Until I'll have the time to write my e-books from these courses, you can enjoy our past lessons for free, as follows:

Pronunciation Lessons
Reading Lessons
Grammar Lessons
Website Design Lessons
Weekly Games

Grammar ~ Liking and Disliking

To express likes and dislikes, we use the verb ‘like’ and its synonyms – verbs such as love, enjoy, prefer, hate, dislike, etc. These can be followed by:

i) A to-infinitive clause, or by
ii) an -ing clause’, as well as by
iii) a noun phrase object.

Examples below:

My cousin from Chicago likes/loves/hates
i) to give parties. (i.e. She likes the idea of it…)
ii) giving parties (i.e. he likes it when she does it…)
iii) parties. (i.e. She likes them)

There is a slight difference between the infinitive clause, which expresses an ‘idea’ and the -ing clause, which expresses a fact (the action), but even native speakers do not care much about the grammatical rules strictly nowadays. However, it is useful for you to be aware of the difference and use these clauses correctly after verbs expressing likes and dislikes.

A note worth discussing here is that only the infinitive clause can be used when the main verb is hypothetical, or imaginary. In other words it expresses what you would like, if such and such conditions would be present. Look at this example:

(A) Would you like to have dinner now?
(B) No, I prefer to eat later.

You see, in this example the dinner hasn't happened and this conversation is only about something in the minds of the speakers; it's about what they would like to happen.

Another rule you need to apply diligently is that ‘enjoy’, ’dislike’ , and ’loathe’ ONLY TAKE -ing clauses:

He enjoys/ dislikes/loathes working

Website Design ~ Designing your Website [1]

After you registered your domain by now and you've decided the structure and the content of your website. To build it, you have two choices:

• use SBI!'s block-by-block SiteBuilder, or...
• use your own HTML Editor and upload your pages into the SBI! system.

The first option is for people like me, who don’t have the faintest idea of how to program a web page in HTML and the second one is for experienced webmasters and professionals who can.

I have confessed time and again that I am not a programmer and I don’t have the time (nor the inclination) to develop this skill. When I figured out one day that one can work on documents in Word and save them as HTML, I tried that. However, even that exercise ended up in disaster, so I gave up trying to program altogether! That's why I was so happy to find the SBI! system, that came with a course and all the tools of the trade one could dream of.

This course is for people like me, who have chosen to use the block-by-block SiteBuilder, which covers individual SBI! tools (ex., Home Page Builder, FooterBuilder, etc.).

Once you open the SBI system, using the username given in the email you receive on purchasing the system, your first actions will be to create your site's Look and Feel ("L&F") by designing a template. You have a choice of 285 templates, so there is something for any taste you could think of. You can choose from the following themes:

High Tech
Health & Beauty
Business & Finance
Marketing
Lifestyles
Sports & Recreation
Books and Art
Learning & Education
Food & Drink
Entertainment

Another section is the Custom Look & Feel - this means you make your own design, by using HTML programming.

Once you selected your style, you just need to download the design package that fits your theme the best from the Design section of SBI Resources... You can either use the chosen template "as is," or customize until you have it just the way you want it. You can also use any other 2-column or 3-column template you like, free or purchased.

Once you finalize your Look & Feel, you need to write the content for your home page content and then create the index.html file for it. At this point, you're off and running!

We shall look into this starting next time.

Game of the Week ~ Spelloween

If you’ve always been afraid of spelling, this is your chance to beat your fear – play Spelloween :

This is a fun game, to check your spelling both ways: you need to spot a word that’s spelt incorrectly during the first game and you will also need to correct a word from a list of 3 during the second game.

As always, you have the rules of the game before you start:

If you happen to spell a word incorrectly, you will be given the correct spelling, so nobody can complain that no learning is going on:

That was the first game; now let’s see how the reverse game works:

You make your selection, and then you’re given a new window in which you can type the word correctly:

At the end, you get the scores for each game together with the total score, and of course, the chance to play again! Enjoy, my friends.

Trust me… however boring these games look, compared to the Battlefield Hardline, or Mortal Kombat X, you will gain far more knowledge than your younger cousin sitting in his own bedroom, killing somebody on the other side of the world!

Who knows – you may even surprise your teacher pleasantly, by using some of these words correctly in your next essay :-)

This Is It, Folks!

I hope you find this information useful and not too confusing. Even though you're at the stage of building on it, have patience at this point in your learning and you'll be able to reap the fruit of your work later on, whichever aspect of our lessons you are concentrating on.

Please feel free to comment and suggest your ideas by replying to this email - I look forward to hearing from you. If you wish to chat either with me or with other members worldwide, go to My English Club .

Enjoy the rest of your week!
Have fun, as always.

Lucia da Vinci

Founder of My English Club

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