How would you fare if we transported you to Portugal right now? Would you have enough Portuguese phrases under your belt to survive for a week? Oh, you wouldn’t? That’s all right. Then you have clicked on the right page. Although Portuguese tends to be overshadowed by French and Spanish, it’s still the official language(…)

I met a Brazilian couple in Egypt while travelling and they sold me on a visit to the country without having to say very much. The same was true for the incredibly intelligent Brazilian students I taught this summer. A country filled with contradictory elements like the favelas and 4 star hotels, there are so(…)

The Simpsons, love it or hate it, you’ve no doubt heard of the animated TV show, and like it or not, you’ve probably used one of the many words or phrases attributed to the characters too – I’m in the fan category, so you can “eat my shorts”! The Simpsons first debuted way back in(…)

Spelling and pronouncing the word mnemonics is pretty challenging, but this memory technique is actually here to make our lives easier, and you’ll be surprised how often you actually use it. A mnemonic device is simply a technique that helps us learn and retain information through simpler ways than the original format. There are several(…)

There are many phrases and idioms we bandy about in every day conversation, but have you ever wondered how they came to be in common parlance?

If you haven’t read the Bible in a while then you might be surprised at how up to date some of the phrases in it appear. For a book that was written many centuries ago it is incredible to find so many modern sounding phrases. Of course, that’s because we have stolen so much of(…)

When you learn a foreign language the individual words are really the easy bit. Far more difficult are the phrases. This is where you need to roll a few words together and hope that it all makes sense. Sound easy? Take a look at these stinkers and you’ll see that it’s not so easy after(…)

I love to see the look on the faces of foreign language speakers when they have recently arrived in Scotland. Of course, they go there thinking that their English lessons are going to make life easy for them. Right? Wrong. Apart from having a fairly impenetrable accent, we Scots also have a host of unique(…)