Apr 022015
 

Because they taste funny!
‘Fun’ and ‘funny’ are often confused by English learners. Our latest video explores the different meanings of the words and looks at the two different meanings of ‘funny’.
It’s available on YouTube (click the link below) and also with a clickable transcript at the Simple English Videos website.

 Posted by at 3:19 am
Mar 182015
 

I’m very grateful to Anne Sinclair for suggesting this topic for a video. I think it’s very useful for business English students and I’ve just written a guest blog post about it over at the Gallery Languages website that you can read here. Hope you like it!

As always, it’s available on our Simple English Videos website, and also on our YouTube channel.

 Posted by at 9:48 am
Mar 132015
 

‘Lie’ and ‘lay’ are so confusing that native speakers sometimes muddle them up. When Bob Dylan sang ‘Lay lady lay’ he should probably have been singing, ‘Lie lady lie’ – it doesn’t sound as good though.

We’ve made a video lesson about the two verbs. Please share it if you think you know some people who would find it handy.

As always, it’s available on our Simple English Videos website, and also on our YouTube channel.

 Posted by at 8:45 pm
Dec 022014
 

There’s a hand gesture I find myself making when I’m teaching. It goes like this…
wordorder

I hope it’s not rude in Italian or any other languages, but I find it jolly handy for showing students when I want them to switch the word order around. Now, of course, it doesn’t work too well as a still image. If you could see me actually moving my hands around it’d be much clearer.

And it’s the same with whiteboard text. I can draw lines and arrows, but without moving type, I can’t actually show my students how words need to be moved around. But video changes that. It’s a cool feature of video – you can animate text.

I made an earlier version of this video a while back and we’ve just upgraded the text animations, audio, lighting and we’ve added a couple of gags. Don’t get too excited. This is not a laugh-a-minute-video, but I think it’s full of solid learning matter. See what you think.


It’s also available at our Simple English Videos website with a clickable transcript. Hope you like it!

 Posted by at 7:24 am
Nov 122014
 

animationsOne of the many things I love about video is the way it allows us to animate text and diagrams. Being able to show a dynamic image often makes things clearer.

Here’s our latest video on the prepositions ‘by’ and ‘until’. I’m very fond of this one for two reasons . Firstly, I could animate the time line diagrams. Second, Zehra and Zeynep kindly reprised their boss and manager roles. They’re so good! Enjoy!


As always, this video is available with a clickable transcript at Simple English Videos.

If you’d like to see Zehra playing our unrelenting boss in another video – check out this one about ‘on time’ and ‘in time’. It received some great comments so we made a follow up that’s here.

 Posted by at 11:03 pm
Nov 102014
 

If you teach any business English students, you’ll know that language we use to talk about time, schedules, and deadlines is jolly useful. With that in mind, we decided to take a systematic approach to teaching the verbs ‘take’ and ‘last’. We made three videos.

Here’s the first one and it’s about the verb ‘take’:

Here’s the second one and it’s about the verb ‘last’:

The third one compares the two verbs and has one of my favourite gags – watch out for Jay playing my dentist!

 

Fortunately, learning the difference between ‘take’ and ‘last’ is a lot quicker than a tooth extraction. As always the videos are available with clickable transcripts over at Simple English Videos Dot Com.

How long does it take?

How long does it last?

Take or Last?

Enjoy!

 Posted by at 8:44 pm