Language

This language section is where the peculiarities of the English language are pondered, including tongue twisters, as well as testing your foreign language vocabulary.

The English language

First of all there's a contemplation of the bizarre and confusing irregularities of the English language, with some of its many traps to fool the unwary. Never complain about learning a foreign language again. Secondly we provide a few English tips for foreign language speakers attempting to come to grips with English.

Tongue twisters

A light-hearted look at some difficult-to-say tongue twisters, in both English and German.

Jokes

The "geek humour" section, including little cartoons and quips on the subject of language, whose humour value is decidedly subjective.

Foreign vocab

For those learning a foreign language, the vocab section includes a fun multiple-choice tester game for German, Polish and now also Welsh words.

The Welsh language

For those intrigued about the language of Wales, and wanting to learn more, here's an experiment. Audio files as mp3s, together with subtitle files. So you can simultaneously hear the Welsh as it sounds, and see how it's written. Hopefully this will help make the learning more effective, by building more connections between sounds and words. Try it out yourself in the Welsh section.

Excellent stuff for you to read

For those looking for a good read, there's a host of world-class reading material available online, of all strands and flavours, and it won't cost you a penny. Forget about buying "digital books" in obscure formats from the internet, just download a plain text file for free, and do what you want with it. Put it on your palmtop to read on the train, print it out and read it in the park, search it, cut and paste it, whatever. And once you've done that, you can join the queue for the eventual arrival of readable electronic paper, the ideal medium for this stuff.

So what is this free library? It's called Project Gutenberg, it's run by volunteers, it's got hundreds of classics available for immediate download, and because all the copyrights have expired (or the texts were never copyrighted), it's all free and all above board. You won't find any of the latest bestsellers, but you can get all those great works of literature you always thought you should read, like for example William Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Lewis Carroll, maybe some Oscar Wilde or Sherlock Holmes or ... the list goes on. There's a host of excellent stuff on there, just have a look at their site.

Another good source of information and material is the excellent Wikipedia, from which for example you can find a host of public domain books, short story authors, or just search Wikipedia for other authors or books.

Language // English // English tips // Tongue Twisters // Jokes // Vocab // Welsh