Aprendiendo Ingles

I can proudly say that i finally get my FCE mark : B level, which is not bad at all.

Whats next ? lets go for CAE !!!!

For me, the easiest part of the exam is writting a letter.

In this part you can take all the time you need to think what do you want to say and how to say it, so that makes it easier, becouse you dont have to look for a word or rewrite something in a determinated way.

But writting a letter needs practicing too. Why dont you try to write one to a friend telling him what you have done this holy week ? Which expressions are you going to use in an informal letter? Do you know which linking words to use ?

I will give you some resources real soon, but, for now on, try to write a letter for practicing.

Holidays its a quite difficult time to continue in improving english. You and your friends will probably have more time, and you won´t use it in study english, however, you should try to continue in contact with the language.

How ? Read english news, see tv shows in english and keep listening to radio, that will be enough to keep in shape.

I know i always start the post in the same way but… Grammar is, for me, the most difficult part of the FCE exam, becouse you have to be able to see an error and correct it and that, is not always simple.

To make this part even harder, i have to say that it´s very difficult to find any online excersises to improve in it, so, the only thing you can do is buying an English grammar book focused on FCE and train.

In the exam what you will have to do its to correct a text. The text is separated in sentences, and you have to find the mistake (usually an extra word) and correct it (if you need to correct).

The extra word usually is a short word: an article, a preposition, etc… that is not supposed to be there.

There is only one way to go through this part of the exam : practice, practice and practice.

Listening is quite difficult part of FCE exam, that is something i have alredy said, and i have given some tips and sites to improve your listening but, a few days ago, a find a very interesting resource page that can be used to improve our habilities in listening : ESLpod , also known as English as Second Language Podcast.

I find it quite interseting becouse he can find differents kinds of podcast to improve our listening : we have bussiness conversations, some in bars, relationships, etc…

Hope this site would be helpful

I ask my teacher how can i improve in using phrasal verbs and he gave me a not very helpful advice: read. But what to read?

He suggested me newspapers (or online newspapers better and cheaper) so i can get used to the most common phrasal verbs.

He also gave me a physicall newspaper : the guardian so i can read some longer articles.

Will it work ? Who knows…

Yesterday, finally, we made an exam for testing our habilities to face FCE in the academy.

It was not so difficult, but i was surprised by some exercises. For example, one of them is a text about something and you have to say if there is any unnecessary word in each of the senteces of the paragraph, which, if you are not used to, is quite difficult.

Listening was also a bit difficult, specially becouse sometimes you can´t understand what they are talking becouse they speak to fast and with a very close accent.

The results? Next week !!!

Listening is probably the most difficult part of the FCE exam. Sometimes they will talk to fast or, maybe, with a very closed accent, so improving your listening should be one of your main objetives.

Finding listening resources is quite difficult, becouse most of them don´t have any kind of subtitles, so I suggest to start, as i did yesterday with your reading skills, in the BBC site, specially a section called Watch & Listen where you can hear a lot of information from people, places, news or lifestyle.

My second choice will be CNN but, not the site, the television channel, becouse, even if they dont have subtitles, they speak English (American English) very slowly, so it is quite easy to follow any show broadcast in this channel.

There are more specifical listening, focused in the FCE exam like ExamEnglish.com or MansionIngles.com, but most of them just will give you the oportunity to take a look to a small part of the content they own without paying.

So, Which is the best solution? Probably watching your favourite tv show in English with subtitles. You an do that by buying the shows DVD or by downloading it. Watching tv shows is better, at least from my point of view, than watching films, becouse tv shows you can see the same characters talking in the same way during lots of hours and, in films, actors are always changing the way they talk, which make you to get used to the new voice in each film, instead of hearing a well known way of talking in a tv show.

One of the most important parts in the FCE exam is the reading paper, in wich you have to prove if you can understand short and long texts.

If you want to improve your reading skills the easiest way is surfing through internet, but, surely, you will find a problem : Lots of texts are write in an informal way, so, if you want to read a more formal english text here are some suggestions.

First of all, i will suggest to everybody the BBC website, where you can find international news but also, a place to improve your English trough games, quizzes and short lessons.

If you want to learn more about things of your own interest, not only about news, i suggest you the english Wikipedia, full of contents writed in a very good English.

Link words are a very important part of daily English, as its own name says, they are words used to link one sentence with another. The only way to learn the correct use of them is by using them in different phrases.

Today, at class, the teacher was teaching us different linking words to make comparisons and two of them were specially polemics : However and Nevertheless. If you look for these words in an English-Spanish dictionary you will find the same meaning for both : sin embargo. But, when do i have to use However and when nevertheless?

Our English teacher solved the problem :  We use nevertheless when are saying a quality of something and then we want to talk about that same thing in the opposite way.

Example : Spanish are very friendly, nevertheless when you meet them for the first time, they are very shy 

We were talking about a positive quality of the spanish (friendly) and then we want to talk about the opposite quality (shy), so we can use nevertheless.

When can i use however? Whenever you want. You can use it instead of nevertheless and you can use it to make comparisons in the other cases.