Go home!
This is one of my favourites. An invited speaker at a conference provided the audience with a go home message rather than a take home message. Be careful what you wish for!
This is one of my favourites. An invited speaker at a conference provided the audience with a go home message rather than a take home message. Be careful what you wish for!
I just came across a very dangerous false friend while listening to a scientific talk. This time, it’s a false friend for non-native German speakers. Please, do not translate the English word ordinary as ordinär. The former means gewöhnlich (common) or einfach (simple), whereas the latter means vulgär (vulgar).
At a recent conference, one of the speakers had a very unusual way of pronouncing the word asymmetry. Instead of pronouncing it as ay-symmetry (that is, adding the letter a at the beginning), he actually said ass-symmetry.
This is a tricky one, and as is often the case with languages, there are people who argue that the two words can indeed be used as synonyms. However, according to the majority of sources I consulted, and in line with my gut feeling of the English language, briefly and shortly are not interchangeable, and
A couple of years ago, I attended a company presentation as part of a job market session at a big physics conference in Germany. Two high-potential employees, with doctoral degrees from famous universities and way too much self-confidence, discussed the different markets their company is engaged in. Of course there was the usual talk about
In a very irritating (to the English language enthusiast) series of commercials on German television and radio, Deutsche Telekom keeps using a wrong pronunciation of entertain. As you can hear in the video linked below, the word entertain is incorrectly (but repeatedly) stressed on the first instead of the third syllable (that is, [‘entəteɪn] instead
There are a number of words in the English language that start with a silent p, such as psychology (and psych, psycho etc.) pseudonym pneumonia pneumatic psalm Ptolemaeus The fact that the p is silent is often ignored or missed by non-native speakers. This is surprising, because the correct pronunciation appears to be easier. In
You certainly know that the English alphabet does not contain any umlauts. However, there is a pitfall for German native speakers which often leads to incorrect pronunciation. The difficulty is that in German, the letter y is in many cases pronounced as ü. Some examples are Physik, Rhythmus, System, and typisch. A common mistake is
Very often while waiting for something in a crowd of people, I hear non-native speakers (predominantly from countries such as Italy or Spain) trying to make their way through by repeatedly saying “Sorry!”. The problem is, practically none of the native speakers, and very few of the non-native speakers pay attention. The reason is not