“THE BEAUTIFUL THING ABOUT LEARNING IS THAT NOBODY CAN TAKE IT AWAY FROM YOU”. – B.B. KING

quote_B.B._King

When you acquire knowledge, what you’ve learned becomes a part of you. For this reason, nobody can detract it from you. It will always be yours. Of course, if you share your knowledge, be aware that more people will have what you have, which is not a bad thing ;-). So keep learning and continue to share your knowledge!

TO TAKE AWAY = to remove; to detract.

“To boast” – What does it mean?

To_boast

Examples from the web:

  • It is a fact that countries with high taxes cannot boast of any visible success in the fight against alcoholism.
  • “I’ve sold more paintings than you ever will,” the artist boasted.
  • The city boasts a fine cathedral.
  • He boasts that he can speak six languages.
  • In comparison to other European countries, Poland can boast of significant achievements in the field of environmental protection.

TO END vs TO FINISH – Collocations in English

To_end_vs_to_finishBased on: McCarthy, M. O’Dell, F. (2008), Collocations in use, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

TO END

  • To stop with a clear conclusion. We use it when there’s an important change.
    Example: World War II ended in 1945.
  • END can’t be followed by either the infinitive (to- form) or the -ing form.
    Example: Mark ended drying his hair. => This sentence isn’t correct!
    The correct sentence is: Mark finished drying his hair.

TO FINISH

  • To bring something to an end.
    Example: Are you sure you’ll finish your essay by Monday?
  • To eat, drink the last of something.
    Example: I’m sorry, I just finished the coffee.
  • It can be followed by the -ing form, but not by the infinitive.
    Example: They have finished to play. => This sentence is not correct!
    The correct sentence is: They have finished playing.

GET or BECOME?

GET_OR_BECOME_WEBSITEBased on: McCarthy, M. O’Dell, F. (2008), Collocations in use, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Examples from the web:

  • got interested in comic books at the age of 14.  (Informal)
  • I became interested in linguistics after high school. (formal)
  • Disabled people are becoming angry at the lack of attention that they get.
  • Because of Tom, Mary has become depressed.
  • During the military conflict in Darfur about 200 000 people have perished, and 2.5 million of the province’s people have become homeless.
  • The tickets sold out long before the team became popular.

Boost your vocabulary with translation in context

Some advice for you, before talking about translation in context and online corpus.
1. If you are learning English and you want to boost your vocabulary, I suggest that you write down every day all the new words you’ve learned. By doing so, it will be easier for you to quickly review all of them. If you don’t want to write them down, just use an online tool like Memrise (with this “tool” you can make quizzes with the words/sentences/expressions you want to learn) or Anki (if you want to make flashcards).
2. You should review every evening/morning all the words you’ve learned that day or the previous one. Then, on the weekend, you should review what you’ve learned during the week, and so on.

In my opinion, if you write only a list of terms, it won’t be possible for you to memorize them. You need to learn that term through context, with an example sentence. It’s way easier to remember a word meaning through context than by itself. Context is at the foundation of vocabulary acquisition.
Online there is a variety of free tools which you can use (ex. ReversoLinguee, or Glosbe). Remember that words rarely have just one meaning, so it will be frustrating for you to learn words from a list if you don’t write an example sentence for each one of them. What you need to do, if you haven’t done it yet, is to use words you want to learn in context. You need to write down the term and an example sentence.
It’s not just about remembering a word. You must be sure when you use a word that you are doing it right. Maybe you learned a word out of context and you are not sure about how and when to use it. In this case, translation in context would really help you. What you need to learn is how native people use the language; how they use the word you want to learn. It’s not just about grammar. You can say something that is grammatically correct, but are you sure that a native speaker would use the same term? Check it up! You need to learn which option is more common in speaking and which one is more common in writing. 

Practical examples:

REVERSO
Reverso_home_page
If you search “trunk” (English-Italian), this appears on your screen:

Trunk_-_Reverso_-_Eng-ItaLINGUEE (“trunk” English-French)
trunk_-_french_-_linguee

GLOSBE

Glosbe_homepageThis time, I chose the English-Spanish dictionary, and I looked for the term “home”:
home_-_spanish_-_glosbeGlosbe has also a picture dictionary:
glosbe_-_home
Scrolling down a little bit, you can find this:
Example_sentences_with_home_glosbe

For Intermediate students, another way to learn English terms is by using the online corpus.
BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS
Home_page_British_National_Corpus
As you can see, I looked up the word “trunk” (once again 😉 ). This is what I found out about it with this tool:

Trunk_-_bnc.bl.ukAs you can see, I found a lot of example sentences. By clicking on the words written in blue, you can find out where the sentence is from.
bncI found out about British National Corpus here: CORPORA4LEARNING

www.corpora4learning.net

Selecting “British English”:

Brithish_English_-_corpora4learning.netOf course, in the same website you can choose another corpus, like the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
You are allowed to select a filter (ex. spoken/fiction/newspaper/academic) which is amazing if you need to know if a word is used in a particular context. If you search “home”:
Corpus_of_contemporary_AEWikipedia has an online corpus too: http://corpus.byu.edu/wiki/.

The_wikipedia_corpus_-_trunktrunk_-_2_-_tha_wikipedia_corpus