5 Fun and Free Online Grammar Games

This guest post by Maria Rainier.

Whether you’re a gram­mar nerd or learn­ing Eng­lish as a new lan­guage, we all know that prac­tice makes per­fect. Not all of us have the time to prac­tice gram­mar ins and outs, because our sched­ules keep us con­stantly on the go. But what bet­ter way to get in some Eng­lish gram­mar prac­tice once in a while than with an addic­tive, and portable, online game? Next time you have a few min­utes to spare or become bored with you lat­est attempt to con­quer Words with Friends, try out one of these sim­ple and addic­tive gram­mar games avail­able online.

1. Word Chal­lenge
This is a cool one. It’s addic­tive because it’s timed. Ques­tions mainly cover vocab­u­lary and word usage. Get the app here.

2. Gram­mar Up
This was designed based on com­mon areas cov­ered by the TOEIC Eng­lish pro­fi­ciency test and is geared toward busi­ness usage and vocab­u­lary. There are ten dif­fer­ent gram­mar cat­e­gories, and stu­dents can choose games based on those cat­e­gories. It’s a fun way to pass the time, great for ESL stu­dents, and a good refresher for native Eng­lish speak­ers. Check it out here.

3. The Gram­mar Goril­las
This is a cute game where play­ers iden­tify parts of speech in order to get bananas for gorilla friends. There are begin­ner and advanced set­tings. Try it free here.

4. Sink or Swim
The object of the game is to stay above water. If you make a mis­take, you will sink fur­ther below the sur­face; cor­rect answers keep you afloat. Try it here.

5. The Pre­fixes Game
Play­ers fit block together to build a tower and have to select pieces with the right shape and pre­fix in order to build the tower higher. Try it here.

Author Bio:
Maria Rainier is a free­lance writer and blog junkie. She is cur­rently a res­i­dent blog­ger at First in Edu­ca­tion where she writes about edu­ca­tion, online col­leges, online degrees etc. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gar­den­ing, swim­ming, and avoid­ing her laptop.

Why you should avoid the passive voice

Guest post by Angelita Williams.

Gram­mar teach­ers always hound their stu­dents about the same errors. They tell their stu­dents to use proper verb sub­ject agree­ments, they teach about the per­ils of comma splices and proper semi­colon usage, and they dis­tin­guish between adverbs and gerunds like it’s the most impor­tant les­son of the Eng­lish lan­guage. Proper syn­tax in a sen­tence means everything.

I would argue that the most impor­tant gram­mar les­son has to do with the voice of a sentence—specifically, the line between pas­sive and active voice. Most gram­mar­i­ans, edi­tors, teach­ers, and pro­fes­sors com­plain more about pas­sive voice than any other gram­mat­i­cal “mis­take,” and for good rea­son. If you use too much of the pas­sive voice in your wiring, it just looks bad.

So what’s the dif­fer­ence between pas­sive and active voice?

The dif­fer­ence between pas­sive and active voice is a mat­ter of, well, action. A typ­i­cal sen­tence has a sub­ject, and verb, and the object of the verb. In an active sen­tence, the sub­ject car­ries out an action (the verb) onto some­thing (the object). Con­sider this sen­tence: “Carl drove the car.” the action in the sen­tence is clear: Carl (the sub­ject) car­ries does some­thing to an object (he dri­ves the car). Pas­sive voice tells the same story, but takes some of the action out of the sentence.

In the pas­sive voice, the same sen­tence would look like this: “The car was dri­ven by Carl.” Notice the syn­tax of the sen­tence and the new feel of the story within. The sen­tence men­tions Carl (the sub­ject) at the end of the sen­tence rather than at the begin­ning, and his actions have less weight to them. He did not drive the car; the car was dri­ven by him. The same event occurs in both sen­tences, but the pas­sive voice cre­ates dis­tance between the sub­ject and the subject’s actions.

Why the active voice always looks better

So if the active and the pas­sive voice vir­tu­ally tell the same story, why does it mat­ter if you pick one over the other? It’s a mat­ter of assert­ing your­self in your writ­ing: the pas­sive voice sug­gests, well, pas­siv­ity. Your writ­ing looks weaker and less con­vinc­ing when writ­ten in the pas­sive voice. There’s a bet­ter chance that your ideas will come off as con­fus­ing if you write them in the pas­sive voice, pre­cisely because the sub­ject is so far removed from the begin­ning of a sen­tence. Some writ­ers opt for the pas­sive voice because it pads their wiring, but that too is an insuf­fi­cient rea­son. Ideas that you can clearly write in the active voice might have a longer word count when flip­ping into pas­sive voice, but that won’t help your writ­ing style.

What do you do to com­bat the pas­sive voice in your writing?

By-line:
This guest post is con­tributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the top­ics of online courses.  She wel­comes your com­ments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.

Grammar vs. Usage

Guest post by Kim­berly Wilson.

Lan­guage is a tricky, sticky, icky thing, infa­mous for hav­ing too many rules that nobody fol­lows any­way — and espe­cially so in the Eng­lish language.

Your sopho­more Eng­lish teacher counted points off your mid-term paper for mis­takes that your boss’s boss makes every day in e-mails to the office, and the Oxford comma keeps appear­ing and dis­ap­pear­ing with­out any appar­ent reper­cus­sions whatsoever!

Is it an epi­demic of illit­er­acy? Does it mat­ter at all?

The answer to both ques­tions is, more or less: not really.

There are, of course, hard and fast rules that should be adhered to when writ­ing or speak­ing Eng­lish; adjec­tives must mod­ify nouns, sub­jects must agree with verbs, and so on.  But there is also a line that should be drawn in the sand for so-called gram­mar Nazis and other annoy­ing perfectionists.

In lin­guis­tic cir­cles, this line is called usage.  There is gram­mar, and there is usage.  Com­mon usage is fre­quently  at odds with mechan­i­cal con­ven­tions, often because speak­ing “prop­erly” is incon­ve­nient, awk­ward, or pre­ten­tious, and peo­ple want to sim­plify their lives and their speak­ing habits.

At its root, lan­guage is a tool used for com­mu­ni­cat­ing ideas from one per­son to another.  When you ask some­one where your pen is, and they tell you they “don’t know where it’s at,” are you com­pletely igno­rant of what they were try­ing to say? No. You know exactly what they meant. It might not have been “gram­mat­i­cally cor­rect,” but it got the point across, and the result was a suc­cess­ful com­mu­nica­tive event.

Dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions call for dif­fer­ent degrees of pre­ci­sion and for­mal­ity, but for the most part, you can reserve impec­ca­ble gram­mar for schol­arly essays, resumes, inter­views, and other impor­tant junc­tures.  Let lan­guage serve its pur­pose, and you’ll be hap­pier, health­ier, and gen­er­ally more well-liked.

Byline:
Kim­berly Wil­son is from accred­ited online col­leges, she writes on top­ics includ­ing career, edu­ca­tion, stu­dent life, col­lege life, home improve­ment, time man­age­ment etc.

Learn English Through Song

(This post is from guest blog­ger Angelita Williams)

Textbooks–they’re my own per­sonal form of Ambien.   I’ve never been able to fig­ure it out, no mat­ter what it is, one page and I’m out like a light. But let me play with my Ipod and the music car­ries me for days.  I boast about being able to learn an entire new song in just a few hours.

You might not think of it as study­ing but in a sense that’s exactly what you are doing. You lis­ten and repeat, lis­ten and repeat, until the lyrics are per­ma­nently implanted in your head. And unlike mate­r­ial gained through books, songs can radi­ate through your head for days or even weeks before they’re entirely flushed down the drain.

So, what bet­ter way to study Eng­lish than learn­ing it through song? You get to learn vocab­u­lary while hear­ing its proper pro­nun­ci­a­tion, though you might want to stay away from rap or any­thing too mod­ern just for now, since col­lo­qui­alisms are best learned at a more advanced stage, when you can tell the dif­fer­ence between cor­rect and incor­rect idiom usage. Below are some quick tips on how to study your lyrics:

1. Pick a song that you like but that is not too com­plex. It’s extremely impor­tant that you get the cor­rect lyrics so that you can deci­pher the right mean­ing of the song. Lyrics mode is a great site to get accu­rate lyrics.

2. Read the lyrics in their entirety. You don’t need to under­stand every­thing but try to see if you can at least get a good feel of what the song is about. Is it a roman­tic song? A sad song? A happy song? Is it abstract or lit­eral? Try to com­pare and con­trast the Eng­lish song to some­thing famil­iar in your native tongue. It’ll help you see sim­i­lar and cul­tural dif­fer­ences from your own.

3. Re-read and cir­cle all the words/phrases you don’t know and would like to learn. Some­times con­text clues will give you a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what the word means but if nec­es­sary, by all means look up their exact mean­ing in a dic­tio­nary. A dic­tio­nary might also be use­ful in find­ing other inter­est­ing phrases or words.

4. Hear the song three to four times before you decide to chime in karaoke style. Read the lyrics a few times right before bed and also try lis­ten­ing to the song while you sleep. Even in your slum­ber, your brain will still retain the infor­ma­tion. Lis­ten and repeat until you got it down.

5. Test your­self. There’s a neat Web site called Lyrics Train­ing that is espe­cially designed to help non-English speak­ers learn the lan­guage. As a series of song lyrics run down the screen its up to you to fill in the miss­ing words. You can choose from a huge selec­tion of con­tem­po­rary songs in their bank that are divided into easy, medium and hard dif­fi­culty levels.

By-line:

This guest post is con­tributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the top­ics of online col­lege courses.  She wel­comes your com­ments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.

They’re In Their Car Over There: Never Confuse Your Homophones Again

(This post from guest con­trib­u­tor Alexis Bonari.)
Homo­phones are those words that sound the same and are often even spelled in sim­i­lar ways, but mean dif­fer­ent things. They can be frus­trat­ing to both stu­dents of Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage and native speak­ers who get hung up on try­ing to fig­ure out which word to use in a cer­tain con­text. The fol­low­ing are some com­mon mis­takes made with homo­phones that you can eas­ily avoid by learn­ing how to use each spe­cific word.

Com­pli­ment vs. Complement

The word “com­pli­ment” is used to describe or refer to a pos­i­tive com­ment given to a friend, as in “Rita com­pli­mented Sue on her new Mozart wig.” Some­thing “com­pli­men­tary” is given as a bonus, nicety or extra fea­ture, as in “The hotel offered a com­pli­men­tary break­fast.” When you use the word “com­ple­ment,” you should be describ­ing some­thing that com­pletes some­thing else. For exam­ple, you might say, “This white wine really com­ple­ments the seafood din­ner.” An easy way to remem­ber this is to think of “com­plete” when you say “com­ple­ment” because both words use “e” as their sec­ond vowels.

Prin­ci­pal vs. Principle

“Prin­ci­pal” often refers to rank of impor­tance, as in “prin­ci­pal request,” and can also be used to mean the head of a school or a sum of money. “Prin­ci­ples” often refer to a person’s rules of action or con­duct, as in “He was a man of good principles.”

Their vs. There

The word “their” is pos­ses­sive and indi­cates own­er­ship. For exam­ple, you could say that “Fred is their pet octo­pus.” When using “there,” you should be talk­ing about a place or loca­tion, as in “The Ear­wax Museum is over there.”

Peace vs. Piece

A fre­quent mis­take made with these homo­phones is “piece of mind.” You can give some­one a piece of your mind, but peace of mind is entirely dif­fer­ent. “Piece” indi­cates a part of some­thing else, as in “a piece of pie,” but “peace” is strictly a state of har­mony or absence of war.

Sta­tion­ary vs. Stationery

The word “sta­tionery” only refers to paper used for writ­ing notes or let­ters, as well as writ­ing mate­ri­als like envelopes and pens. It should never be used instead of the word “sta­tion­ary,” which refers to a state of still­ness or lack of movement.

Affect vs. Effect

When you use the word “affect,” you should be using it pri­mar­ily as a verb. It is used to describe an action per­formed on some­thing, as in “The inces­sant snor­ing neg­a­tively affected his mar­riage.” Only dis­ci­plines like psy­chol­ogy and psy­chi­a­try use the word “affect” as a noun, so you prob­a­bly don’t have to worry about it. An “effect” is pri­mar­ily some change, result or con­se­quence of an action, as in “She never paid atten­tion to the list of side effects.” This word also describes phe­nom­ena like “the Doppler effect.” It can be used in its verb form to mean insti­gate, bring about or cause, as in “The new croc­o­dile pond in the front yard effected a change in foot traffic.”

Con­trac­tions

If you’re ever in doubt about a homo­phone, think about what you’re try­ing to say. If you use a con­trac­tion, remem­ber that it’s a com­bi­na­tion of two words and that the apos­tro­phe sig­ni­fies a miss­ing let­ter. Con­fused about “your” vs. “you’re”? The lat­ter is a con­trac­tion and means “you are,” while the for­mer is pos­ses­sive. If you stop to think about the mean­ing of con­trac­tions, you can avoid many homo­phone mistakes.

Bio: Alexis Bonari is a free­lance writer and blog junkie. She often can be found blog­ging about gen­eral edu­ca­tion issues and col­lege schol­ar­ships. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gar­den­ing, swim­ming, and avoid­ing her laptop.

Everything About Relative Pronouns

Every­thing you wanted to know about how to use rel­a­tive pro­nouns (that, who, whom, whose, which, where, when, and why):

How to Use Rel­a­tive Prounouns

Online English Language Instruction

Peo­ple write to me all the time about the best way to learn Eng­lish con­ver­sa­tion online. This video instruc­tional class is one of the best ways I know about to learn Eng­lish online. There are three dif­fer­ent lev­els with 72 videos in the most advanced course. The video lessons are based on real-life sit­u­a­tions and cover many dif­fer­ent types of top­ics. Click here to learn more about Eng­lish Con­ver­sa­tion Instruc­tion Online.