How do I find complex expressions in a dictionary?

You may have experienced how difficult is trying to find out the meaning of a whole expression in a common dictionary. Most of the times, what you have came across is an idiom. On of the most complete dictionaries of idioms on the internet is Cambridge International Dictionary:

The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms explains over 7,000 idioms current in British, American and Australian English, helping learners to understand them and use them with confidence. The Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms, based on the 200 million words of American English text in the Cambridge International Corpus, unlocks the meaning of more than 5,000 idiomatic phrases used in contemporary American English. Full-sentence examples show how idioms are really used.

The Cambridge University Press is respected worldwide for its commitment to advancing knowledge, education, learning, and research. It was founded on a royal charter granted to the University by Henry VIII in 1534 and has been operating continuously as a printer and publisher since the first Press book was printed in 1584.

The free dictionary by Fairlex (http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/)

Your could access to part of the listed idioms either in the url mentioned or directly from the CUP website: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/results.asp?searchword=idioms&dict=I&sourceid=Mozilla-search

Remember that if you are using Firefox as default browser, you can also have it always on the upper right corner (http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=dictionaries). Just click on it and you'll have it as one of your firefox search engine extensions.

Here you are some websites with more information about idioms: http://delicious.com/mjordano/idioms

and you are some books: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/aegean/6720/

I hope this could help you to go on studying this subject!

Word order

Would like like to practice some practice for your second term exam? Click on the following url and follow the instructions to put all the words on a sentence in the right order. It could seem a very simple game, but it could become extremely useful for you to write good compositions in your exam.

Museums day

Picture taken by Caribb (Flicker)










As you may know, today is museum's day all around the world. Try to compare the initiatives suggested by the International Council of Museum with the ones put into practice in your own town, city and explain here if the initiatives taken by the museums where you live could be considered enough or not.

Collocations

Image by Hamed Saber via Flickr

Have you ever used a concordancer? Do you know what a corpus is? Try to use this link typing a single word in English and try to explain later here something about you experience.

http://www.stevebolton.net/tools/cobuild_search.php

Sleepinginairports.net

"For travellers who are REALLY on a budget and are looking for a way to skim a few bucks off their travel expenses, why not consider sleeping in an airport? Why spend money on a night in the airport hotel when an inflatable raft on the airport floor is free? Sure it may sound a little hard-core at first, but read-on and you'll soon discover a travel community, that for 13 years has been sharing airport reviews, travel advice and "how-to" tips for the uninitiated airport sleeper. Your friends and family may look at you funny when you return with your airport stories, but as you'll read here and on our blog, that's only part of the fun.

So now, sit back....get out your travel itinerary and read the latest airport reviews. You'll soon discover which airports you can sleep in and those which you should avoid altogether during your next trip. Airport Hotels will soon be an expense of the past!

Whether you sleep in an airport by choice or get stranded due to some airline mess-up, let sleepinginairports.com help you make your stay more enjoyable."

http://www.sleepinginairports.net/

A podcast to practice English for tourism dialogues

Look at the new site that I have just found:

http://mthomsen1776.podomatic.com/

It is a kind of blog that uses audio files apart from texts to publish its information. You will find here a good recollection of dialogs to listen and read at the same time so that they are perfect for you to practice the last unit of you book. What do you think? Did you like the idea?

I will also add a rrs link in order to read and listen to new updatings from our blog.

Synonyms and other with Thesaurus.com

It is a good to to learn English at the same time you practice the very first part of your exam. It is very simple to use. Just visit the link and type the word you don't know the meaning or the synonym. There is also a pretty useful toolbar to look up your words even faster that could be down loaded from here . Just try it and report in the comments options below your opinions ;)