To be honest, I’m not a fan of all the whooping that goes on at parties, sports events, etc., even if I only witness it on TV. I could only bear to watch the first 10 seconds of the following video, any more should be considered torture. On the other hand, since I do enjoy
Somebody at work keeps using the phrase next next week to refer to the week after next. This made me curious. Is “next next” actually correct English? From my search through online discussions by native speakers, it appears that it is not a generally accepted or even very popular expression. Although there is an entry
The words lecture and course are both used in connection with education. Consulting the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, we have lecture = a talk that is given to a group of people to teach them about a particular subject and course = a series of lessons or lectures on a particular subject. Especially German native speakers
I recently came across an interesting false friend in the form of the word scrupulous, providing great potential for thorough confusion. According to Merriam-Webster, scrupulous means, in particular, having moral integrity, acting in strict regard for what is considered right or proper. Its opposite is unscrupulous. As a German native speaker, I find that quite
[Switch to an English version of this post] Das englische Wort loser wird auch im Deutschen gerne verwendet. Loser hat sogar den Weg in den Duden gefunden, obwohl es mit Verlierer und Versager eigentlich brauchbare Alternativen gibt. Abgesehen davon, dass man sich fragen sollte, ob man wirklich jemanden so bezeichnen möchte, machen viele den Fehler,
This week’s seminar speaker (German, but currently working in the US) made several interesting pronunciation mistakes. Most notably, he kept pronouncing the verb interpret so incorrectly that I did not even recognize it immediately. To understand what went wrong, we best look at the phonetic spelling. The are actually several pronunciations of interpret that are
I’m quite sure that even people who are not very confident about their English in general would not hesitate to claim that they can of course count to five. However, if you take pronunciation into consideration, this is not be true for many of them. (This post was inspired by an announcement I recently heard
A fellow member of my gym tried to find someone to take over her membership. She posted on Facebook in German, but also included the following English translation: Hallo! Ich gebe meine Fitnessstudio-Mitgliedschaft ab. Bei Interesse gerne melden. Hi! I’m giving away my gym membership. If you’re interested, let me know. The problem is that
Almost every week, I hear one of my German colleagues say I have to charge my card just before we go to lunch in the canteen. Interestingly, this means essentially the opposite of what they mean to say. When you charge a card, the card owner will have less money than before. What my colleagues
At a physics conference I attended last week in Berlin, I came across yet another example of tricky distinctions to master. Several speakers confused the words monotonic or monotone with monotonous. While these words can be used interchangeably in some situations, only monotonic and monotone are correct in a mathematical context. The Oxford online dictionary