"Playing" With Consonants and Vowels

[Linguistics Post]

Studying consonants and vowels? Check out two posts from my linguistics blog:

The University of Iowa's Flash-based explanations are excellent: http://cute-2011-linguistics.blogspot.tw/2011/09/consonants-place-manner-of-articulation.html

Another excellent site is Sammy, which shows you what all of the IPA consonant symbols mean: http://cute-2011-linguistics.blogspot.tw/2011/09/place-and-manner-of-articulation.html

In Chinese society, "play" is something that small children do. After you become a teenager, you are supposed to be "serious" and stop playing. This is a serious mistake. Playing (if done correctly) is an excellent way to learn. I hope that all of my students will PLAY with these two websites.

Below this screenshot is a video explaining how "play" makes you smart:

Screenshot from Stuart Brown's TED talk on the importance of play.

(EFL) Learn to Read English Better: Also Learn to Draw with DRAWSPACE.COM (Brenda Hoddinott)

Brenda Hoddinott is a very generous teacher and artist who runs a website at www.drawspace.com. On her website Brenda lets people download many many free PDFs. These PDFs will teach you how to draw. If you want to, you can also join art classes on this website.

There more than 200 FREE lessons you can download here

If English is not your own language, maybe some of the words and sentences in these PDFs are not easy. Copy some difficult sentences and paste them into Google Translate. Computer translation makes many mistakes, but Google can give you a little help.

Interesting facts about Central America & the Caribbean (geography and history)

觀光產業英文必看

If you interact with tourists from other countries, you should know something about their countries. Let's learn a little about Central America, Mexico and Cuba. What do you think of these countries? Which country do you find most interesting? Would you like to visit any of them? Why/Why not? Please leave comments at the bottom.

Where Is That Country? Geography Software

English is a wonderful tool for meeting people from abroad. Free geography software can help us learn what other countries look like (shape, size) and who their neighbors are.

Owl and Mouse Educational Software provide several such programs. They are easy to use and lots of fun. You can either play online or download the programs to play on your own computer. I prefer to download the software because sometimes the internet is down or it is very slow. If you put the software on a USB drive, you can play anywhere, even on a public computer.

Please download these 3 puzzles: Central America, the Middle East and Europe.
Play by yourself or (even better) play with your friends. Have fun!

There are several small countries here. Some of them are very special. Find out why.