Hi! In the first of the promised updates, I take another look at the fact that English uses different sounds than your native language. It turns out that learning to distinguish between the sounds of English is not just something which helps you understand spoken English and to be understood when you speak. If your brain is not phonetically trained, you’re not using your English input fully.

The article includes audio examples and a brief explanation of why certain sounds seem different while others seem similar.

Read more in “Why it’s important to learn about the sounds of English”

Hello Readers! I’ve recently gotten around to making a few much-needed technical updates to Antimoon. Here’s the list of the most important changes:

• Click / tap / point cursor at any highlighted words to get a pop-up explanation (with additional links to online dictionaries). (Try it right now!)
• Select any word or phrase to get a popup with links to the best online dictionaries, enabling you to quickly look it up. (Try selecting something.)
• Completely new audio links and audio player code built around HTML5 and SoundManager — does not require Flash, works great on mobile devices. (Examples of new audio links and new audio player)
• Wider layout for more comfortable reading of articles. More space for sidenotes (of which there are many) and large images.
• Responsive layout for mobile devices (including blog, forum and wiki pages). Antimoon now works pretty damn well on tablets – in fact, probably the best way to read this site is sitting in an armchair, holding a tablet. As for smaller devices like smartphones… well, it works as well as it can. You’re not going to get great reading experience on a 5-inch screen anyway.
• Much faster performance on blog pages and translation wiki, thanks to: optimized templates with fewer HTTP requests, optimized image size, database tuning, PHP cache & updated software.
• A bunch of audio files have been re-recorded on new equipment for better quality.

New articles coming soon.

I’m still trying to get over a message I received from Santiago Madrigal, a user from Colombia, who wrote in to share some news about the Antimoon Translation wiki, the part of Antimoon where users contribute their translations of selected Antimoon content. Santiago was disappointed to see that the Spanish section of the wiki had only four articles and a half, so he made himself a large cup of presumably Colombian coffee and translated 96½ more – a number that any reasonable person would consider a misprint. I can, however, confirm that the total for the Spanish wiki is now 101 – an absolutely unreasonable number which is five times the figure for the next biggest wiki language, Portuguese. In today’s Twitter-dominated world, merely reading a hundred articles could be considered an achievement worthy of a trophy and a commemorative plaque, but Santiago not only read them (hopefully), but also rendered them in Spanish. I’m usually the last to suggest violent solutions, but I’m beginning to think the rest of humanity should find a way to discreetly get rid of Santiago because he makes us all look lazy. I mean, who does he think he is?

Anyway, if you have Spanish-speaking amigos who keep asking you “¿Cómo aprender inglés?“, do them a favor and point them to the Spanish wiki.