Tdol's English Language Blog

There is a problem with the Contact Us form and the Submit a New Idiom.  Unfortunately, this couldn't have happened at a worse time as the webmaster has gone on holiday and is offline.   However, I am trying to get it fixed.  In the meantime, please send anything to info @ usingenglish.com (without the spaces).

Many apologies for the inconvenience.

For people using Firefox, there's a superb add-on Zotero to help you organise your research, create bibliographies, reference lists, etc, complete with a number of styles.

ESLJudge claims to be a site that 'allows ESL schools and teachers to resolve disputes professionally and fairly', which is a laudable aim.  However, it certainly does not live up to its lofty aims and is unlikely ever to do so.  It was launched far too early, which in itself is probably enough to strangle it at birth. 

We will delete any ESL job adverts that appear in our forum. Our forum is for language discussions and not a free place to advertise jobs.

Lingro is a site that offers a useful translation tool. Enter the URL of a site or page, then choose the language you want to translate words into and you can click on the words you don't know and bring up a pop-up box with a translation.

Over at the TeflTrade blog, Sandy McManus has received another legal demand for material critical of a school to be taken down from his site. This time, his blog host received a letter alleging defamation from Mr Paul Lowe of Windsor TEFL, who appeared in this blog here and also replied to what I said here. In the first case, Abbey College, Malvern demanded that a post that contained a critical description of their summer schools was removed. The original text had appeared on Dave's ESL Cafe and Sandy had reposted it after it was pulled from Dave's.

The language polls area of our site allows comments and they are displayed immediately without moderation. This does mean that we get some comments that are nonsensical or just plain rude. Having made it impossible to post links, we no longer get spam comments, but we do occasionally get someone who thinks that is funny to type random letters or rude words in the comments. We can check the list of latest comments and delete any nonsense we get.

When I was living in Japan, it was virtually impossible to avoid Nova advertising; they were all over the subway, in my newspaper and on TV. For the last few months, the company, the largest of the eikaiwa schools in Japan, has been in free-fall, ever since they got into trouble over their refund policies. The company now seems to be in its death throes.

The idioms section has had a display problem recently, with some html code appearing, so people may have seen entries with same strange bits using < >. Sorry for this; I have been going through and removing them.

Professor Mark Davies of the Brigham Young University set up a superb site to access the British National Corpus (BNC). Easy to use, fast, packed with features and intuitive, it is by far the best concordancer on the web in my opinion.