Como dizer "quem tem boca vai à Roma" em inglês?

Something about countable and uncountable nouns.

Well, you have to teach countable and uncountable nouns in English today, right? Good luck with it; it is going to be quite difficult if your students are Brazilians. And why is that? Well, because in Portuguese, they can count bread, meat, and fruit, but in English, they cannot.

They will probably use the interlanguage -- the type of language produced by second- and foreign- language learners who are in the process of learning a language.

Some correct answers will depend on the context or on what you really want to say.

Everybody knows that ‘egg’ is countable, isn’t that right?

‘I bought two eggs at the supermarket yesterday’ is an example of a correct sentence. However, ‘egg’ will be uncountable in ‘I have egg in my T-shirt’.

We have to remember that SOME words that are both countable and uncountable nouns in English, but with differences in meaning.

Here there is a list of the most common ones.

Accommodation:

Uncountable: a place to live in or stay at.

Countable: an agreement between opposing people or organizations.

Aid:

Uncountable: money or help given to those who need it.

Countable: something that helps you to do something.

Sugar:

Uncountable: sweet crystals added to drinks like tea and coffee.

Countable: one teaspoon of sugar, or a particular type of sugar.

Sport:

Uncountable: physical activities in which players compete individually or in teams.

Countable: a particular kind of sport.

Silence:

Uncountable: total quiet, or no sound at all.

Countable: a period of time when nobody's speaking.

Room:

Uncountable: the space needed for something.

Countable: a space inside a building with walls, a floor and a ceiling.

Love:

Uncountable: a strong affection for someone.

Countable: a person, thing or activity that you love.

Ice cream:

Uncountable: a sweet frozen food made from milk.

Countable: a small amount of ice cream on a stick, in a cone, or in a small container.

Grammar:

Uncountable: the rules of a language.

Countable: a book that describes the rules of a language.

Gossip:

Uncountable: stories about other people's private lives, often untrue or exaggerated.

Countable: a person who likes telling and hearing gossip.

Freedom:

Uncountable: the state of being free to do what you want.

Countable: the right to do what you want to do.

Time:

Uncountable: duration as measured by clocks.

Countable: a particular occasion or time when something happened.

Smoke:

Uncountable: clouds that rise from fires, chimneys, etc.

Countable: a cigarette, or the act of smoking.

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Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 25, 2012

The Gray Matter column on bilingualism last Sunday misspelled the name of a university in Spain. It is Pompeu Fabra, not Pompea Fabra.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?_r=0

My poop talk about questions in the absence of context - Part I (I don't know if I'll be writing a part II).

Have ever had the feeling that you had been teaching something but in the end of the lesson, you get sad (or upset) just because nothing went the way you planned?

Well, there are so many things I would like to talk about here, but I guess that focusing only on grammar now would be enough.

I’m not trying to write something based on science (research or something like that) but I’d like to focus on my own experience. It pains me to tell you guys (it pains me more to tell myself), but it was not always that I had to use textbooks that I had chosen. That is, many times I had to teach English as a second language using materials with lack of features such as questions without context. Yes, I mean context.

Lately, I have been reading a lot about EFL and I am concerned about my beliefs now. Question like “Can communicative methodologies or free practice activities (somehow) encourage fossilization?” have come into my mind very recently (that’s another topic that I will certainly be talking about in the future). Oh, gosh, and what if I had been doing this wrong? Well, it is never late to learn a thing or two, right?

I reckon that we are all familiar with the experience of being asked the meaning of a word (or a sentence) and having to reply with the “but what’s the context?”

That’s right, a student asked me the, say, meaning of “he’s reading a book”. This one students is still starting her journey on language learning, but I had the feeling that I had to provide her with an (simple) answer in that moment. That student is one of the leaners that knows more than what she really thinks she does.

I said “he’s reading a book” can mean a lot of thing, but I do not know if that was the best response. She then just looked at me and asked, “Can you be more clear?” (Elementary student, remember?).

I just said yes and then I continued with this “maybe the boy is reading the book right now, but you can imagine that tomorrow afternoon he will be reading the book at home. Or that he never wears his glasses when he is reading a book, or maybe he is reading a book every day now because he has a lot of free time”. (too much information for beginners, but anyway…).

She looked at me, but I am quite sure that she didn’t get ‘the big picture’, so I had to explained it in Portuguese, which took me more than five minutes. As you folks can remember this one student is still an elementary level student and she didn’t study the Present Continuous Tense yet because she started joined this group coming from the placement test.

But what is this fuss what about? Well, I realized how difficult it is to teach grammar topics, even if you say you set the context (well, the book says it) and blah, blah, blah.

What really happens in the classroom is that we deal with sentences (most part of the time) in isolation and that’s not the way people speak outside the classroom. In fact, I real-life communication there aren’t too many rules. Nobody really cares if you used the auxiliary verb ‘do’ or ‘does’ correctly, for instance.

In addition, when we decontextualize the grammar, the result is always the bunch, if I can say that, of practice exercise that are of doubtful value.  

These ‘choose-the-correct-form-of-the-verb-like activities’ and ‘which-of-these-sentences-are-grammatically-correct-like tasks’ are quite often in the absence of context and a great deal of time might be wasted in the classroom.

In other words, questions in the absence of context misrepresent the way the language is really spoken (used in this case) in real-life situation. Moreover, those kind of questions give us, language speakers, slightly unreal air.

I will be writing about some EFL topics from now on, my hairy-palmed friends. I’m a little tired of posting topics about English but written in Portuguese (it has never made any f-word sense to me). I am not bluffing; this is the beginning of new kinds of entries. If you guys never come back here again, I’m really sorry, but it means that you’re not my audience.

Thanks for your time and let the new (blogging) era begin. Let’s stop the poop talk and wait for the next entry, shall we?

Cheers.  

Is beautiful the only option?

Good evening, folks!

I am writing this entry here just to show you that there are many ways of saying BEAUTIFUL in English. This one focus only on a feminine beauty – at least when talking about people – I promise you girls that I‘ll try to publish one about the masculine beauty someday.

 Look at this picture:

We can say that she is beautiful. Good. Almost every learner (elementary level) knows how to say that in English, right? However, when it comes to say that someone is good-looking in English, there are many other options.

She’s:

 Cute;

Adorable;

Attractive;

Good-looking;

Beautiful;

Pretty;

Gorgeous;

Lovely;

Exquisite;

Stunning,

Foxy;

Radiant;

Sexy;

Hot;

Babe;

Taking Jennifer Aniston as a role model, we can say that she is cute, adorable, attractive, good-looking, beautiful, pretty, gorgeous, lovely, exquisite, stunning, foxy, radiant, sexy, hot,  babe…

Many years ago, a friend of mine told me that English is 'a language with a very limited vocabulary’. Thank God, he teaches Portuguese now.  

It is a long list already, right? Is that all? Not really. There are more options to say ‘beautiful’ in English. If you can remember more, please feel free to write on the comments here.  

I hope you liked it. See you around!

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.

Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!

Did you spot a typo?

Do you have any tips or examples to improve this page?

Do you disagree with something on this page?

Use one of your social-media accounts to share this page:

Como dizer em inglês "Quem vê cara, não vê coração"?