Tag: Fluency

“To dispense” – What does it mean?

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To_dispense You can download or share this mind map also from biggerplate: http://www.biggerplate.com/mindmaps/AmtxUlrq/to-dispense .

In “My Reverie” , a 1938 popular song, you can hear “dispense with”.

This is the lyrics:

Our love is a dream, but in my reverie
I can see that this love was meant for me

Only a poor fool never schooled in the whirlpool
Of romance could be so cruel as you are to me
My dreams are as worthless as tin to me

Without you life will never begin to be
So love me as I love you in my reverie
Make my dream a reality
Let’s dispense with formality
Come to me in my reverie

Our love is a dream, but in my reverie
I can see that this love was meant for me
Only a poor fool never schooled in the whirlpool
Of romance could be so cruel as you are to me

My dreams are as worthless as tin to me
Without you life will never begin to be

So love me as I love you in my reverie
Make my dream a reality
Let’s dispense with formality
Come to me in my reverie
My reverie

Here you can find other examples: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ .

In this song, you can hear how to pronounce “to dispense with”:

I can see that this love was meant for me
Only a poor fool never schooled in the whirlpool
Of romance could be so cruel as you are to me
My dreams are as worthless as tin to me
Without you life will never begin to be
So love me as I love you in my reverie
Make my dream a reality
Let’s dispense with formality
Come to me in my reverie

Lingro

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If you are English students and you want to improve your vocabulary/comprehension skills I suggest that you try this website. Lingro is an amazing resource if you want to read a blog, an online newspaper, etc. You just have to write the link of what you want to read (number one in the picture below). You can select a dictionary (as you can see, I marked “English dictionary” with a red rectangle, but it’s not the only one, there are also English-Spanish, Spanish-English, English-French, English-Italian, etc.).
This is the homepage:

lingro_home_pageLink: http://lingro.com/

For example, you want to read an article on the website http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ . Firstly, you have to find an article you like, for instance, I decided to read this one: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150406-california-drought-snowpack-map-water-science/

national_geographic_articleThen, you have to copy the article’s link. Done that, from within the lingro’s website, you can enter the URL.
It’ll appear like this:

article_with_lingroYou can notice that I selected (I clicked the left mouse button) “warming” and “scarcity” .
Afterwards, you can study the words you didn’t know. There’s the possibility to create wordlists:

Word_list

You can also play with flashcards:

flashcards flash_cards flash_cards_2

“News in Levels”

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I just came across this website and I think it’s amazing. In “News in Levels” -as the title suggests- you can read leveled news articles. This website’s purpose is to help readers master the English language. Thesame news/story is presented in three levels 1 (the easiest), 2 and 3 and there are different sections: news, sport, nature, history, interesting, funny, information, exercises. An online dictionary assist you if you don’t know the meaning of a word.
You can use “News in Levels” if you want to improve your vocabulary skills, comprehension or fluency.

This is the link: http://www.newsinlevels.com/