Old updates and news

If you have read my story, you know that adventure games were the first source of English input that I used outside of English classes. These games showed me how much fun I could have with English and opened my eyes to the power of reading English sentences on your own.

One of those games was The Secret of Monkey Island. I had played a few adventures before, but The Secret of Monkey Island I really enjoyed. The difficulty level was not too hard, you could not kill your character (no "Game Over" screen), and the game's premise (you are a young lad with a funny name who came to an island in the Caribbean to become a pirate) sucked me right in. Monkey Island had the right mix of originality, quirky humor and mystery to make it a cult classic and one my best childhood memories.

And now LucasArts has released a remake. They re-created the hand-drawn graphics, re-recorded the beautiful music, and added voice dialogue, while remaining 100% faithful to the original. Finally a way to experience the great adventure on modern computers with big screens. I bought the game on Steam (it's only €9!) and finished it in two days, but it could take you weeks if you have never played it before.

The Secret of Monkey Island is a great way to learn English, especially if you like video games and have the patience to solve some light-weight puzzles. The dialogue is clearer than what you hear in movies, there are subtitles (in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish), and you can run the game in a window, pause it, and look up words in your dictionary. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is available for PC, Xbox and iPhone. Take a look at the trailer and the official site.

Review of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th edition):

the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary is useful in those situations where you have reasons to doubt your regular dictionary (or dictionaries). If the EPD lists a pronunciation first, it is probably the most common one. If the EPD does not list a pronunciation, it is probably quite rare.

Review of the CD-ROM version:

If you're learning British pronunciation (RP), the exercises in the dictionary will help you learn the British sounds and their phonetic symbols. The dictionary will also give you easy access to British and American recordings and will let you practice imitating them with the voice recording feature.

I've finally posted my selection of the best Antimoon Forum topics of 2005. The list has 358 topics, which means that the forum had close to one useful topic per day. I see the glass half full :-)

For those of you who are short on time, here is a handful of topics that caught my eye as I was looking through the archive:

• Do you need a teacher to learn a language?
• Can an old dog learn new tricks?
• Should you learn phonetic transcription?
• How long to learn a language?
• Should you read quickly or carefully? (input theory)
• How to tell that you have made progress?
• Skill building versus comprehensible input
• What do English teenagers do for fun? (funny)
• Myth #1 - is it really a myth? (Is it true that the best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country?)
• How to create SuperMemo items?
• Should you talk like a native speaker?
• Differences Between American and Castilian Spanish

It took me ages to write it, but here it is. Probably the only (and certainly the best) comparative review of dictionaries for English learners on the Web. I've tested the following dictionaries:

• Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
• Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary (5th edition)
• Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictionary (6th edition)
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (5th edition, 2009)
• Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

Which dictionaries are best for serious English learners? Read the review to find out.

Sep 3: Updated review and scores based on the patch that Longman has published for the LDOCE.

If you are an English learner who has just started taking pronunciation seriously, should you learn American or British pronunciation? My latest article gives you some pointers and practical information that will hopefully help you answer this question for yourself. It also has recordings of some of the best American and British audiobook narrators.

In other news, I have discovered a couple great new websites with audio exercises to practice the pronunciation of English sounds:

• For American English: Rachel's English and Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary
• For British English: BBC Learning English

I have just launched version 2.0 of TypeIt, my popular online editor for typing foreign characters and IPA symbols. This overhauled version sports the following new features:

• Full keyboard support for Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome
• You can switch between languages while typing
• Boldface, italics and underlines in all editors
• You can choose the font face and size that looks good to you
• Easily type professional-looking “curly” quotes, apostrophes ― and nice long dashes, too!

The following editors are currently available: Czech, Danish (new), Dutch (new), Finnish (new), French, German, Hungarian, IPA (English), Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. If you write stuff in one of these languages or you use phonetic transcriptions in your study of English, I invite you to give TypeIt a try!

July 17 update: Russian keyboard added!

You know that story about a box which said “see inside for opening instructions”? It was about Antimoon. You see, Antimoon tells you how to learn English effectively. But to understand Antimoon, you have to know English. Classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Of course some learners can understand the articles on Antimoon and the advice can help them take their English to the next level. But that does not change the fact that people need two things to benefit from Antimoon:

1. They need to find it.
2. They must be able to read and understand short articles in English.

Let's face it: These are significant barriers. Most beginner and intermediate learners are not in the habit of searching Google for English phrases like How to learn English — they search for phrases in their native languages and Antimoon never comes up in those searches. And even if they somehow come across this site, they do not have the skills or patience to read so much English text. The idea of reading in English arouses terror in many, if not most, learners.

Enter the Antimoon Translation Project. Thanks to the inspiration and cooperation of Eun-Deok Jin, an enthusiastic English learner from Korea, I have set up a wiki where anyone can post their translations of Antimoon articles. The goal is to bring effective learning methods to beginners all around the world.

If your native language is other than English and you can understand English well, you can contribute to the project by translating something — either a whole article or part of an article — into your native language. As in Wikipedia, anyone can add a page or edit an existing one.

So far, Jin has translated 10 articles into Korean and Michal Stanislaw Wojcik has translated 2 into Polish.

Of all the advice on Antimoon, “Do not make mistakes” is by far the most controversial. Hardly a month goes by without an e-mail or forum post from an angered English teacher, letting me know how stupid I am for telling learners to avoid mistakes. Don't I realize that mistakes are a necessary element of all learning? Haven't I heard the phrase "learn from your mistakes"? And why am I scaring learners into silence?

With this article, I hope to clear up the confusion once and for all.

Read more:
The role of mistakes in language learning

In July, I wrote that the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary had been dropped from the Collins product line. I have since found out that I was wrong. HarperCollins has partnered with an American educational company called Cengage to release a new (sixth) edition of this landmark dictionary. I suppose the complicated business relationship with Cengage is one reason why it is so hard to find any information on this edition on Collins' websites.

Anyway, I have installed the sixth edition on my PC and I must say it is the most bloated, slowest, buggiest software dictionary that I have ever used. Looking up a word takes 1-5 seconds on a fast machine, the dictionary takes up over 300 MB of memory, there are no phonetic transcriptions, and the recordings are of a quality that we used to have before CDs came along. It is painfully obvious that this product was written by incompetent programmers, tested by no one, and approved by managers who didn't care. Avoid like the plague!

If you want to buy a Collins COBUILD, get the previous (fifth) edition. It is a solid piece of software developed by a completely different company. It runs fast, has phonetic transcriptions and good-quality audio. It has been discontinued, but the Elearnaid store has enough copies to last a year. Best of all, you can get the CD-only version (who needs the giant book?) for just $10. The softcover + CD is $27 and the hardcover + CD is $29.

For more information, read the updated reviews of the Collins COBUILD Dictionary (book version and CD-ROM).

I've started playing computer games after a few years' break, and I've noticed the Polish videogame market has changed a great deal. When you walk around in a videogame store, all you see are boxes that proudly proclaim: Full Polish version! Featuring the voices of <insert names of well-known Polish actors>! It's almost as bad as in Germany, where every single product of American culture is translated and dubbed by an army of voice actors.

Needless to say, I was appalled when I found that this trend had reached Poland. "Don't they care about learning English?", I grumbled. "What about all the inaccuracies and stupid mistakes you get in translations? And what happened to getting the original experience as envisioned by the authors of the game?"

I was looking for a copy of Doom 3, so I asked the sales clerk about an English version. "Nope", he said, "There was an English version when the game first came out, but once the Polish version appeared, the English version was discontinued". He looked surprised that anyone would want an English version even though the clearly superior Polish version was available. Those customers, sometimes they want the weirdest things!

In the end, I bought the Polish version and downloaded the English version (God bless the Internet!), which I installed using the Polish version's CD key. Luckily it worked.

I have since looked around and asked around, and what I've found out is that sometimes you get full Polish voices (the aforementioned Doom 3), sometimes you get English voices with Polish subtitles (Company of Heroes), and sometimes you get to choose between English and Polish versions (BioShock). In general, you have to be very careful because information about the English versions is not always shown on the box. Obviously it's considered unimportant to the majority of customers.

I guess this trend towards "localization" is due to the growing affluence of the Polish consumer and the increasing marketing prowess of Polish game distributors, who are looking for new ways to compete with each other. The sad thing is that Polish gamers are getting used to receiving American and British entertainment that's stripped of the English language. When Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC came out this month, there was an outcry from many Polish gamers disappointed at the lack of a Polish-language version. Of course, in a few years, many of the same people who are now avoiding English like the plague will be paying for expensive language courses in Britain in order to immerse themselves in English.

Or will they demand that the English come with Polish subtitles?

If you've been having problems running PerfectPronunciation on Windows Vista or on limited (non-administrator) accounts on Windows XP, there is a new installer which should solve the problem. Here's what you should do:

1. Write to the e-mail address listed here with your purchase details (name, order number, or some other piece of information that will help me identify you). I will send you the updated installer.
2. If you have PerfectPronunciation installed, uninstall it (go to Start/Programs/PerfectPronunciation/Uninstall).
3. Run the new installer.

After writing the updated story of how I learned English, I started thinking about the differences between my experience and the situation of today's learners. I was learning English in the Nineties — a barbaric time without the Internet, downloadable movies, Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, not to mention mobile phones and DVDs. I only had access to two small bookstores and a library with English books, three English-language channels on cable TV, and limited contact with native speakers. (If I had been learning English 10 years earlier, I would not have had even that, so I'm not complaining.)

How about you? You, my friend, can download thousands of movies and series in English using your broadband connection, with or without English subtitles. You can read websites about any topic that interests you, be it politics, computer games, dieting, Harry Potter or Metallica. You can research your shopping with Google and fill in gaps in your knowledge with Wikipedia. If you are interested in something, you can read and watch things that you're interested in and use them to improve your English skills. If you have no real interests, that's not a problem, either. You can just entertain yourself on Digg and YouTube, and still pick up a lot of English.

I have written a lot, but all I'm trying to say is that if you live in 2008 and your English is still poor, there is obviously something wrong with you. Good day!

Read more on this topic: How I learned English in the pre-Internet age and why you can do it faster

Believe it or not, it has been almost 15 years since I began learning English in high school. Give it another 15 years, and the whole experience may become just a blur in my memory. So, I have decided to rewrite my story in the Successful English learners section while I still remember what I did and how it worked out. The result is a longer, more honest, and more detailed account of how I learned English.

In 1993, I got into the best high school in Wroclaw. It was a special program with a lot of English classes and certain classes (like math and physics) taught in English. I owe a lot to the people I met there, both students and teachers. My first two years in high school were very important for my English. At first, I thought I would do well without any serious effort. After all, I had gotten the highest score in class on the initial placement test and, until then, had been the top student in every English class that I had attended.

Read more...

I have posted an updated version of my old article "Learning English with adventure games". I added some information about recent games (not much, because adventure games are almost dead in the 21st century), some information about playing old games, and some screenshots.

Last month I wrote about VocabUsage.info, a search engine which gives you example sentences for English words. I have since discovered a few other useful sites in this category. The British National Corpus has nice examples from a wide range of sources (both written and spoken). Unfortunately, the free search is a bit slow and only includes British sources. The Corpus of Contemporary American English is a free, large corpus of American sentences, if you don't mind the complex interface.

No, the man on the left is not Charlie Sheen. It is Piotr Wozniak, inventor of the SuperMemo method, who, after years of relative obscurity, recently became the subject of an extensive article in Wired Magazine.

The article has inspired me to write a short, personal essay about the man behind SuperMemo and how I see him after many years of e-mail correspondence:

The list of Piotr's optimizations (or, if you prefer, eccentricities) is very long indeed. Even though he lives in Poland, he will speak only English to anyone who can understand it, including his Polish wife and closest friends. At university, he would shock his professors by refusing to speak Polish during oral examinations. His SuperMemo collection contains hundreds of thousands of items and he spends many hours a day reviewing them. His day is divided into "time slots" (SuperMemo, creativity, sports, etc.) to which he sticks religiously.

Read more...

VocabUsage.info is a new site which wants to help you learn English words. You can type in any English word (including phrasal verbs) and VocabUsage will show you a list of authentic example sentences gathered from the Web.

Are the examples as good as what you'll find in a learner's dictionary? Certainly not. Because VocabUsage relies on news sites (rather than, say, discussion forums, which could contain poor English), most examples are written in typical newspaper style, often being more complicated than is necessary to show the usage of a word. By contrast, examples in learner's dictionaries are hand-picked by editors and usually simplified to remove unnecessary words.

Another issue with VocabUsage is that it sometimes does not give examples for all the major meanings of a word. For example, I couldn't find any examples for go out in the sense to date someone.

However, VocabUsage excels in the sheer number of sentences (especially for rare words like hirsute or halcyon) and it is certainly better than searching for examples on Google. It wouldn't be my first choice for learning a new English word, but is a great supplement to a good learner's dictionary. After all, example sentences program your brain and the more you see, the easier it is for you to write and speak in English.

You have probably noticed that Antimoon has gotten a facelift. What you may have not noticed is that every page now has a special print stylesheet. You can go to an article (e.g. this one), select File | Print Preview in your browser and you will see a nice printer-friendly version without all the navigation, advertisements, etc. In Firefox, you will even get a two-column layout, which is very easy on the eyes.

I have also updated the printable phonetic alphabets reference sheet. It is now a PDF file that works in all recent versions of Adobe Reader, FoxIt Reader and Sumatra.

The learner-friendly Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary (CCED) has been dropped from the Collins product line! Instead, Collins currently offers the Collins Cobuild Student's Dictionary, which is much smaller than the CCED. On the plus side, Collins has developed pretty cheap ($14) versions of this small dictionary for virtually every platform, including Windows, Mac, Symbian, Palm and Pocket PC. There are example sentences and phonetic transcriptions, but no recordings.

The CCED is still available from Elearnaid and Amazon.co.uk. I have updated the review of the paper COBUILD to include some information on the 5th edition (published in 2006), which is almost identical to the 4th edition (2003).

A new, improved version of SuperMemo for Pocket PC has come out with a much-awaited feature. You can now add new items to a simple text file on your PC, and then import the file to your PDA. This is of course a lot faster than using your stylus to add items. We have an updated review of this software.

SuperMemo 2006 for Windows has also been released since I last updated this site. Our manual "Using SuperMemo to learn English" is now compatible with this new version.

Hello English learners! This year's update is a review of SuperMemo for Pocket PC.

With SuperMemo for Pocket PC, you can learn English wherever you are, whenever you have a few minutes of free time — e.g. when waiting for a train, between classes, etc. What's more, this is the easiest-to-use version of SuperMemo, much simpler than SuperMemo for Windows. It would be a dream if you could add items on your PC, with a real keyboard. Unfortunately, you have to use the stylus on your PDA, which is impossibly slow.

Review of the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary CD-ROM — a huge dictionary of American English with phonetic transcriptions and recordings, available for $7.00 + shipping.

Elearnaid has reduced its prices on Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English dictionaries. You can now get the hardcover + CD for $26, the paperback + CD for $19, the CD for only $10, and the Resource Pack on CD (includes the dictionary and thesaurus) for $29.

More information

The Antimoon Forum is back and now has two subforums: One for discussing English and one for discussing languages in general.

Why your input should be fun: Want to make real progress with your English? Thrilling, enjoyable and/or funny content is the key.

What to read: Suppose you want to read in English. What kind of texts should you choose to maximize your progress?

This week's update is a real hit: Tom explains how people normally read and why this way of reading is not optimal for English learners. He also shows, with plenty of examples, how you should read if you want to super-charge your grammar.

How to read English texts if you're learning English

Why you need to start reading in English on your own:

"In this article, I will show why reading English texts on your own is the way to go. The arguments will fall into three categories: Intensity, Motivation and Authenticity (...)"

Seventh article in our popular series "Language learning: Myths and facts": "Studying pronunciation is not important".

We have updated our user-friendly SuperMemo manual ("Using SuperMemo to learn English") to describe SuperMemo 2004.

This time we have something for those of our readers who use SuperMemo to learn English (or other languages): an updated version of our introduction to sentence items with a more thorough discussion of their advantages over standard definition-word items.

By the way, SuperMemo 2004 for Windows has just been released. Congratulations SuperMemo World on this new release!

How many times have you heard that "If you didn't learn a foreign language as a child, you will never be fully proficient in its grammar"? This week's article explains why this statement is unjustified.

"You are a foreigner, therefore you will always have a foreign accent" — this line is often used to discourage learners from studying pronunciation seriously. Our new article in the "Language learning: Myths and facts" series proves it is not true.

Two more language learning myths:

3. "It is OK to make mistakes"
4. "As a beginner, you're bound to make a lot of mistakes"

Probably the most frequently repeated piece of advice for language learners is that the best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it. We discuss this statement in the second article in our series on the myths of language learning.

In the coming weeks, we will be publishing a series of short articles about the most widespread and most harmful myths of language learning. We've named the series "Language learning: Myths and facts".

The first myth we're going to discuss says that the best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country. Is going to America or Britain really the best way to learn English? Read the article to find out!

Tom has developed an online editor which lets you type IPA-based phonetic transcriptions of English words. You can type phonetic symbols with buttons and keyboard shortcuts, and then copy your transcriptions to your word processor.

If you're an English teacher, this is the easiest way to add IPA-based pronunciations to your handouts.

Learn why publishers are unable to develop a really good software dictionary and why HarperCollins made a new edition of its software dictionary that is worse than the previous one.

Updated versions of our popular table with English sounds and the introduction to phonetic transcription. Now even more informative and accurate.

Other news: Previously, if you lived in the European Union and bought PerfectPronunciation, you had to pay up to 25% Value Added Tax (VAT). Now you can get a 20% discount, so that you pay about the same price as customers in other countries.

• What's new in the 4th edition of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary?
• Updated review of the dictionary
• Updated review of the CD-ROM

The best of Antimoon Forum in 2003: 390 most interesting discussions that occurred in our forum in the past year. Most of the topics fall into these three categories:

• English grammar/vocabulary questions
• Discussions on pronunciation and accents (including accent samples from our readers)
• Advice for learners of English and other languages

Find answers to your questions with our terrific new search engine (SWISH-E) which lets you search all of Antimoon, including every single forum discussion since February 2002. That's 2,372 pages of language-related information!

In other news, the Netscape 4.x browser is no longer supported. In exchange, the source code is much cleaner, the site works even faster than before, and looks perfect in Internet Explorer, Mozilla-based browsers, and Opera.

Why are we all here? What is the meaning of life? Why do people sign up for English classes? Tom has been thinking about these three important philosophical questions, and came up with an answer to the third one.

If you haven't been interested in the example sentences in your dictionary, you should read our brand-new article which shows why example sentences are more important than definitions and how they can give your English a huge boost.

Review of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary CD-ROM. The software offers quick access to a great number of transcriptions and recorded (British) pronunciations, exercises for learners of British pronunciation, and the ability to search for words containing a given sound.

Check out our new article on phonemic transcription and a new version of our introduction to phonetic transcription to learn about different types of phonetic transcription — where they are used and how they work.

In our new article, we review the latest edition of the legendary English Pronouncing Dictionary, a specialized dictionary with 215,000 pronunciations of English words, including proper names and inflected forms.

You can now listen to recordings of Tom's and Michal's English pronunciation in Tom's and Michal's stories in the "Successful English learners" section.

What is necessary to learn English well? Our new article looks into the psychology of learning English as a foreign language and tries to answer the question "Why do some learners succeed and others don't?".

Three biggest challenges facing an English learner: What is most difficult about learning English as a foreign language? Read our latest article to find out!

We're very excited to announce PerfectPronunciation — Antimoon's software for learning English pronunciation. PerfectPronunciation has 500 audio exercises which teach you to properly pronounce the most frequently used English words.

The best of Antimoon Forum in 2002 is online. This is the archive of the best discussions that occurred in the forum in the past year. It includes tips on how to learn English, answers to questions, and a few interesting discussions about accents.

We have published a large sample from Krzysztof Cichy's SuperMemo collection. We believe it is a good inspiration for people who want to learn English by making their own SuperMemo items.

Also, you can now view Michal's demo collection in your browser.

Special offer: You can get the Antimoon Starter Collection for free if you buy SuperMemo 2002 or 2000. This new collection has 100 pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary items showing many different ways to learn English with SuperMemo.

Our new article, "Why you shouldn't learn English by grammar rules" explains why we think grammar rules are evil and why you don't need them to learn English.

For the first 30 years of his life, Robert Boydell couldn't speak or write. He could just listen and read. At 30 years old, he wrote the first English sentences in his life. And they were all written in perfect English! Boydell's case shows that input is enough to learn English well.

Input is the difference between you and a native speaker. Input can give you natural, fluent, correct English. Input should be your new religion. What is input and why you need it to learn English well — read all about it in our new update!

We continue the "Learn English without mistakes" section with a new article: "How to avoid making mistakes in English". Last week's article explained why you should avoid mistakes. This article tells you how to do it. Yes, you too can learn English without mistakes!

We have added a new section of "How to learn English" titled "Learn English without mistakes". It contains our new article which explains how you can damage your English by writing or speaking and why you should never make mistakes.

We're giving our report "Free Recordings for English Learners on the Web" to anyone who will take our survey.

Complete the survey now to tell us more about you and get access to the best ESL recordings on the Web!

To help you learn English pronunciation, we have created a special printable phonetic alphabets chart. It shows all the symbols of the IPA and ASCII phonetic alphabets, fits nicely on one sheet of paper, and looks really good, too!

A special gift to our readers from Antimoon and the English Teaching Forum magazine — 10 "Shaggy Dog Stories" and two other recordings in mp3 format.

These are short, funny stories in clear American English. When we were in high school, we would listen to them every day to learn American pronunciation. Now we're sharing them with you.

Me and SuperMemo: Tom writes about his 9-year experience with SuperMemo, the software he used to learn English in high school. He talks about his motivation for using SuperMemo and his excellent results.

Sentence items are perhaps the best way to learn English with SuperMemo. In our new article, we explain how to make sentence items, how to repeat them, and what are their advantages. We present many examples.

To get an e-mail message when we publish a new update, please subscribe to the Antimoon Updates mailing list. The list is 100% spam-free and you will never receive more than one message per week.

Did you know you can improve your English writing in 5 minutes by spelling words correctly and using correct punctuation?

Our first product is here! The Pronunciation 500 is a tool which teaches you the pronunciation of 500 basic English words.

Does "law" rhyme with "low"? Do "foot" and "food" have the same vowel sound? The Pronunciation 500 will tell you the answers to such questions, help you say English words with more confidence, and become fluent in reading phonetic transcription.

Are you worried because you understand many more English words than you use? Our article "Don't worry about your active vocabulary" may convince you to stop worrying.

Suppose you want to speak pure British English. Should you study American pronunciation, too? We discuss this problem in a new version of our article "How to learn English pronunciation".

Our SuperMemo manual for beginners ("Using SuperMemo to learn English") has a new part: "Memorizing and repeating knowledge in SuperMemo".

It explains the rules of learning with SuperMemo, shows the steps taken when you repeat a piece of knowledge, and tells you how to grade yourself. Includes screenshots from SuperMemo 2000.

Big day today: the Antimoon Forum is online!

If you want to ask a question, present your opinion on an article, or discuss English with other people, then post a message to our forum.

Update in the "Using SuperMemo to learn English" series: How to make pronunciation items. Pronunciation items help you learn the pronunciation of English words.

The "How to learn English" section has a new front page.

Many readers have asked us to write about software (electronic) dictionaries. Now we have something for them: Our review of the "Collins COBUILD on CD-ROM" — the software version of the excellent "Collins COBUILD Dictionary for Advanced Learners".

A reader has sent us a letter about why she thinks pronunciation is important and about her experiences in learning it.

The "Using SuperMemo to learn English" series now has a new page about creating gap-filling items.

Michal is learning Norwegian as an experiment. He wants to test our methods for learning English. He also wants to better understand the situation of English learners. You can read about this project on his site: "Antimoon / Norsk Experiment".

Read our new page about the English sound [@] (the vowel in "cat" or the first sound in "act"). The page has mp3 recordings of seven words with the sound in four different versions.

Our review of the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary now lets you look at two example pages from the dictionary.

Our new page shows how to make word-definition items in SuperMemo. The page is part of our manual "Using SuperMemo to learn English".

A reader has sent us an interesting comment on why learning pronunciation is important. The reader writes that pronunciation is like singing.

Part 3 of our manual "Using SuperMemo to learn English" discusses ways of making items for English learning in SuperMemo. Each type of item will get a separate page.

So far, there is one page about "definition-word items". In these items, you see a definition and you have to say a word which matches it.

Read our review of the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. Learn why we recommend the dictionary!

In her story, Marta Wlodarczak tells how she managed to learn English successfully using our methods:

"I have been using these techniques for four years, and in my opinion, I have achieved pretty good results. I find it easy to read books in English (...), which gives me pleasure and satisfaction. I don't have much difficulty writing in English. (...) My pronunciation has markedly improved."

Amazon.co.uk now has the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary in paperback. It costs 13.59 pounds, which is only 19 dollars. (The hardcover edition costs $25).

Krzysztof Cichy sent us his opinion on the new Collins COBUILD English Dictionary, which he recently bought.

Joanna Wlodarczak disagrees with our article "Why we don't like English classes". She reminds us that we attended a good class in high school (Tom writes about it in his story). She also writes that classes create competition between students, which improves their motivation to learn English.

A few people have told us that Antimoon looks like a site which exists to sell commercial products. We have written a short article which explains why we are recommending products in some of our articles.

In our new article, you can learn why reading is much easier than listening, and what this means for the English learner. The article has a short demonstration with sound.

The new Collins COBUILD English Dictionary is finally available at Amazon.co.uk! You can get it for 18.39 pounds (about $25).

Every serious learner should have a good dictionary. The Collins Cobuild is the best dictionary that we've used. (You can learn more about English dictionaries and the Collins Cobuild in one of our articles.)

Does your teacher tell you: "you should practice your writing"? Well, maybe you shouldn't listen to your teacher. In our new article, we explain why your English can get worse because of writing.

Michal has written a short story for those who say: "I don't have to learn English pronunciation; I just want to communicate in English".

We have a new section, which will contain explanations of terms related to the English language. For now, you can learn the meaning of 7 words: "noun", "verb", "adjective", "adverb", "ESL", "American English", and "British English".

More reader comments: Teruko Fukuya has sent us an interesting message about the pronunciation of foreigners living in the USA and their ability to communicate in English.

Marta Sokolowska has e-mailed us her comments on two of our articles. She tells us the opinion of her professor: "If you learn only five English words a day, you will know almost 2,000 after a year". We disagree with the opinion.

Marta also writes about her good experience with English classes. We discuss tests and reading in class.

Read our new article in "How to learn English" — "Watching movies in English". It tells you why films help you learn English and what you should do to learn from them effectively.

Can you communicate in English? Should you study English pronunciation? If you want to find out, take a look at version 2.0 of our article "Why you should study English pronunciation".

Good news, folks! Raymond Weschler of ESLnotes.com (the fantastic site with movie guides for English learners) has placed a link to Antimoon, calling us "the greatest ESL students in all of Poland". We can die now. :-)

What is good English pronunciation? What does it mean to speak good English? You can find the answer in our latest short article.

Part 2 of our SuperMemo 2000 manual ("Using SuperMemo to learn English") is ready. It explains how to start your first SuperMemo collection.

Our article "Reading — the most important way to learn English" is now expanded with a new page. The page has two stories of learners who completely changed their English because of reading.

"Why learn English", "English makes you feel good", and our new article — "Why we don't like English classes" — are now in the "Other interesting articles" section.

You can find out why we don't like English classes in our new article. 99% of English learners go to English classes. They spend a lot of time, their English doesn't improve, but they still do it. Why? We don't know. We think English classes are a terrible way to learn.

A demo of the phonetic transcription system is available. The demo shows how phonetic transcription works. You can listen to some English words and read their phonetic transcriptions.

The people at Web English Teacher, a directory of English teaching resources, have given us their award (see the logo of the award).

We have started writing a SuperMemo 2000 manual in the "How to learn English" section. The manual is called "Using SuperMemo to learn English", and we have completed its first part: "Getting, installing, and uninstalling SuperMemo".

Michal Wojcik's story in "Successful English learners" now has a photo of Michal.

There's a new article in the "How to learn English" section — "Reading — the most important way to learn English". You can learn why reading is absolutely important in English learning. Also in the article: why you don't need grammar books, what is "grammar intuition", and what is the best way to read.

He says his English is far from perfect. We don't agree. That's why you can read his story on Antimoon. Meet Krzysztof Cichy, a 20-year-old successful student of business administration. In his story, he tells how his interests (science, sports, and rock music) motivated him to learn English.

The Collins COBUILD English Dictionary is, in our opinion, currently the best learner's dictionary in the world. You can now take a look at an example page from this dictionary. (Warning: this is a large GIF file, 130 KB in size.)

If you would like to see the possible ways of adding English words to your SuperMemo collection, download Michal's free demo collection from the SuperMemo Library. (You can read about the learning software SuperMemo in one of our articles.)

A photo of Tom is now added to Tom's story in the "Successful English learners" section.

Antimoon has received the Lightspan StudyWeb Academic Excellence Award! StudyWeb's editors have decided that we are one of the best educational sites on the Web. Take a look at the logo of the award.

There is a new article which updates our introduction to English pronunciation: Good English pronunciation — why it is important. It explains why you should concentrate on pronunciation when you begin learning English.

Michal Wojcik's story is posted in the "Successful English learners" section. In the story, our webmaster tells about his experience with learning English: how he learned it, and what it gave him. You have to read this one!

Read our new, fascinating article about SuperMemo — a modern computer program which is great for learning English vocabulary. SuperMemo was our secret tool for years; now you can read about it on Antimoon.

Yes, we really think that playing adventure games on your computer is a great way to improve your English. Read our new article about adventure games in the "How to learn English" section.

Our English learning program, "How to learn English" is growing. We have added a new article which teaches the basics of English pronunciation and the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Artur Pajkert has commented on the article "English makes you feel good". In his short story, he tells how he helped two English speakers in Poland, and impressed his girlfriend.

After six months of work, the big moment is here. We finally present Antimoon.com to English learners around the world.

Why did we start this site? Because we have something to say. We have ideas on how to learn English, and we want to share them with other people. We hope we will help you, and perhaps you will help us improve our ideas, too.

We have spent much time on creating what you see now, but this is just the beginning. We will be working on lots of new content in the following months. Right now, you can influence the future of Antimoon by giving us your comments. Thanks!