In case you hadn’t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you’re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you’re saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)’s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? You know?

I thought you might enjoy this typographically animated version of “Totally like whatever, you know?”, a poem by Taylor Mali (text version here). The poem satirizes the use of like, you know, and the rising, “questiony” intonation at the ends of a sentences, which are found in the speech of many young people in the United States.

Have you ever wondered how many English words you know? The question is not very precise — what does it mean to ‘know’ a word? is teacup a word or a combination of two words? how about tick off? is game (something you play) a different word from game (wild animals)? Nevertheless, it feels good to put some kind of number on your vocabulary.

Testyourvocab.com will estimate the size of your passive English vocabulary (the words that you can understand; not necessarily use in a sentence) by showing you a sample of words from a dictionary to determine your general level, and then another sample to get a more precise measurement. You can then compare your result with native speakers and non-native speakers of various ages.

The authors have also published some interesting charts based on the data they’ve collected.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, my score was 26,400.

For those of you wondering why you cannot access Ask Antimoon anymore, here’s the deal: Ask Antimoon was on a server that was set to expire on Monday. (By the way, I would like to thank Fog Creek Software for hosting the site free of charge for almost 2 years.)

For the past two weeks, I’ve been working on setting up a clone of Ask Antimoon on my own server. I made dozens of UI customizations to make the new site behave in roughly the same way as the old site (which I was generally happy with). When I finally got around to the problem of getting the actual data from the old site to the new site, it turned out that this doesn’t work. There are bugs and missing features to deal with. Yes, the data import should have been the first thing that I tested, but I was an idiot.

To make things worse, I will be mostly unavailable for the next 10 days or so, so it might take a while before the site is back up.

If you want to learn fluent English, you should probably get about 6 hours of spoken input a week. This usually means that you need a constant supply of interesting audio/video content to listen to/watch at home.

It is not always easy to find new sources of input every week, so it is a good idea to watch and listen to episodic content. That way, rather than wonder “What movie am I going to watch today?”, you can just tune in to your favorite show regularly and get your dose of English.

With this in mind, I have decided to publish a list of episodic content (TV shows, podcasts, etc.) that I have found exceptionally entertaining or informative. I will add to this list as I discover new shows, so check back in a while.

[Read more →]

Thanks to the great people at Comedy Central, everyone can now watch full episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report online for free! (That is, everyone except people in a few countries, like the UK, in which these shows are aired on TV.)

As you know, I am a big fan of watching TV series and shows because they are a constant source of input that gives you the intensity you need to build your English. So if you have a sense of humor and you are at all interested in US politics, follow these shows for some excellent English practice.

(You probably know that you can watch all the South Park episodes online, but here’s a link just in case.)