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.

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

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.

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 (Cyrillic) keyboard added!