Best FREE websites to learn English alone | Canguro English

today I am studying alone at home just like a lot of you and I also know that a lot of you don't have access to an English teacher now self-study is great but sometimes you have questions that you really want to ask an English teacher like for example teacher which word is more common this one or this one or teacher which words go more naturally with with this word or teacher what are some fashionable and cool and new words in English at first it might seem like the only person who can answer those types of questions is an English teacher or maybe a native speaker but today I am going to show you seven websites that can answer exactly those types of questions and they're all completely free and they will enable you to be really effective at self studying at home so first I'm going to show you three websites where you can learn new vocabulary and the first one is the Oxford dictionary's blog so every week on the Oxford dictionary's blog they publish something called weekly word watch where they choose three or four words that are exploding in popularity now there are lots of other websites which contain like a new and fashionable vocabulary but the difference here is that they are curated by the Oxford Dictionary they are words that are not likely to disappear they are words that are popular enough to come to the attention of oxford dictionaries so they posted last week three new words which were snapchats dysmorphia salon check air a hot house and firenado they are four great words they have excellent definitions for each word and it's just a sort of fun and interesting way to just add some new words to your vocabulary every week the second website is the online etymology dictionary now personally I really remember words if I learn their origins to me the origins of words are always so fascinating and the websites great so I can type in a word like let's have a look at the etymology of avocado actually let's look at a different word let's look at the word clue so if we look at the word clue it actually comes from a ball of thread or yarn that that makes absolute sense so when you are going somewhere you have your ball of yarn and you can leave a trail so you know where you came from you leave a clue now that's going to make it much easier for me to remember the word if I know the story the next website isn't actually a website at all it's a plugin for browsers and it's available for Chrome and Firefox and it's called word ology and what it does is it allows you to turn any website in the world into a vocabulary learning tool so it's really simple to use you install the plug-in and then I've decided I want to learn more vocabulary about Taylor Swift Taytay so I found this interview with Taylor Swift on the Irish Times website and it's full of English vocabulary and when I turn on the word ology plug-in what it does is it makes all of the words read and if I know the word I can click on the word add the translation so I know that Taylor is Taylor's name and Swift is also Taylor Swift's name but then here I have this word clever hmm now maybe I don't know what the word clever means it's the first time I've seen this word so I click on it and I press the button that says look up and then it's taken me immediately to my favorite dictionary you can set your own dictionary in in the settings of the plug-in ah so now I know that clever means list oh great so now I can go back and type in lists oh and add it to my dictionary and now that's also green and as you continue to add words to your dictionary more and more of every page on the Internet becomes green and then you can visually see you're learning and words that you don't know and words that you do know I think it's a really incredible plug-in and it's completely free now the next three websites are not to learn vocabulary they are to find out information about vocabulary and we're going to start with the Google books Ngram viewer so basically Google have scanned millions of books millions of books and we can go and search all of those books to find out information about English vocabulary so imagine if you want to know which word is more common sad or unhappy so basically I type in unhappy comma sad and then I press search and then it shows me on a graph which one is more popular and I can see that in the 1800s unhappy was way more popular than sad and then in the 80 in the middle of the 1800's it crossed over the sad became really popular and then today I can see that sad is still more popular and unhappy has really decreased in popularity hmm fascinating but we can also ask more detailed questions like for example is it normal to use good as an adverb because really we should use well as an adverb like you are studying well not you are studying good so what I can do is I can type in good underscore a DV a DV for adverb and then I can press search and I can see that wow it's actually more popular to use good as an adverb now than it was in the 1800s fascinating and now I can make a comparison again by using a comma I can make a comparison between good is an adverb and well as an adverb so well underscore adverb and search Wow so immediately I can see that good is way down the bottom of the chart it's basically non-existent as an adverb compared to well now imagine if you want to know about other parts of speech you want to know about words that can be used as adverbs or adjectives or or nouns so I can choose a word like start start and then I can put under store underscore asterisk and then when I press search it shows me start as a verb start as a noun start as an adjective and it shows the popularity over time so it allows you to so quite complicated and deep questions about the usage of words and the popularity of words okay but what if you want to know which words go naturally together for example you want to know which words modify hot that's when we need our next website which is scale the sketch engine for language learning now here on this website I can type in the word hot and I can search and the first result from the search shows me the word in context so I can look at some sentences which contain the word hot okay great but the next button is the most incredible up here we have this button word sketch when I click on that it shows me all of the details of this word it's it blows my mind it shows me which words go together with hot to modify them which nouns are modified with hot which verbs go with hot which other words go with hot it's just an incredible tool and at the top here I can switch to look at it as an adverb or as a noun there's another switch to look at it in context this website will will change your life now what if there was a way to learn and practice vocabulary in context that was really fun let me introduce you to close master this website is just incredible so first here at the top I choose my native language so I'm going to pretend that I'm Spanish and then I choose that I'm learning English and when I click immediately it takes me into the game and what I have to do is I have to choose from one of the words here to put in the sentence in context and below it has the translation in Spanish now there are lots of differ variations of the game you can play you can create an account if you want to save your progress but it's not necessary it's just such a fantastic tool for learning vocabulary like in context the way that you should now the final website is actually a way that you can practice your pronunciation and check that your pronunciation is correct on your own at home completely for free and you can do it using Google Docs voice to text so basically you if you have a Google account you go to Google Docs and create a new document and then here in tools you have voice typing and then when I click the microphone to speak everything that I say it will type now if I pronounce the word really badly it's going to type it wrong so it's a great way to practice minimal pairs like sheep and ship or cat and cut so let me show you click on the microphone I cut my finger when I was playing with the cat today okay very good Christian very good newline kangaroo English is the best place in the world to learn English I love you Google so by doing this on your own at home you will know if you're pronouncing words well or badly and you'll know exactly which words you're having problems with well I hope you found this class interesting and I really hope that these websites will help you to self study really effectively and to know that you don't always need a teacher to answer these types of questions the Internet has given us incredible power to learn English they really are no excuses I'm Christian this is kangaroo English I'm not gonna [Music] know I gave you one good wasn't it for me [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 176,696

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Id: XbjGZHeLUn8

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 15 2018