Ask Antimoon has been around for over a month (it launched on Feb 17). Here is a subjective list of my favorite questions:

• Should I use translations or definitions in SuperMemo?
• Are native speakers trustworthy sources of usage information?
• Getting stuck in a conversation – how to fill the gaps in my knowledge?
• Testing the corrections provided by the native speakers on lang-8.com
• Is it possible to learn English by listening only?
• Are pictures useful in a SuperMemo collection for learning a language?
• Introducing yourself and the name of your company over the phone
• Are songs always understood by native speakers?
• What is the most powerful way of practising pronunciation?
• English-language podcasts
• Does relying on translations lead to mistakes?
• How much output do you need to become fluent in English?
• similar vowel sounds /ə/ /ʌ/ /ʊ/
• The protocol regarding “How are you?”
• How do you show “three” with your hand?

In this article, I will argue that English classes simply do not give you enough input to speak English fluently, and that you need to get English input outside of the classroom if you want to be fluent. I will also give two other reasons to take things into your own hands and get English input on your own.

From my new article “Why you need to take charge of your English learning”.

A few years ago, I wrote a popular forum post that showed how to use Google to check the correctness of your English sentences. Here’s the gist of it:

Let’s suppose I’m wondering whether it is correct to write “to have a question for someone” or “to have a question to someone”. I can easily answer this question with Google by doing a search on “have a question to” and “have a question for” (note the quotes).

When I search for “have a question to”, Google displays sentences taken out of the pages which contained the phrase. In the first few results, I see phrases like “have a question to ask Richard”, which is not what I was interested in. So I change the original query to “have a question to you” and find 416 pages. I notice that the first few results are from ESL websites, so they are not reliable.

The search for “have a question for you” returns 28,600 pages.
I conclude that “have a question for someone” is the correct phrase.

Ask Antimoon user Johnny has recently shocked me by pointing out that the number of results given by Google is horribly inaccurate. For example, when you search for “open the books on page”, Google tells you there are 497,000 results. But when you take a closer look, you see that there are only 11 results (10 on the first page, 1 on the second page)! I was always aware that the figure is an estimate, but I had no idea it could be off by 4 orders of magnitude!

(If you’re getting different results due to changes in the Google index, check out this screenshot.)

It appears that the numbers given by Bing are much more accurate, so if you’ve been using Google to answer grammar questions, you would do well to switch to Bing. Added 26 Dec 2010: Bing appears to suffer from the same problem now.

I’ve updated my article with tips on what to read in English and added a new page with specific reading recommendations.

In my newest article, I try to estimate how much input is actually necessary to get from basic English skills to fluency.

Few people realize that learning a language fluently is a much more memory-intensive task than, say, learning organic chemistry or the history of Europe at an expert level.

Let’s consider the number of facts you need to know to produce correct English sentences with ease. Certainly you must know the meanings and pronunciations of something like 10,000 words and phrases — something like the contents of a medium-sized dictionary. But this is only half the picture. The other half are thousands upon thousands of little facts which tell you when to use different words and how to combine them with other words.

Read more…