Hello again, Zara.
Thank you for your very kind words. Just as you say that I have given
you encouragement, so I must say that you in turn have encouraged
me to continue giving some of my time to help you and others here on this forum.
Strangely enough, I have never taught English before. I study how language works, and I use computers to help me. Computer building is one of my hobbies. Another thing I like to do is search the internet for interesting web sites about language. That is how I found this web site.
I came here just now because I wanted to respond quickly to your kind remarks. I hope to come back again and again. For now, I am going to try to help you in just a few ways. As before, I shall mark some parts in
blue. Why blue? Well, I think that most people see
red ink as marking something
bad. In writing, I don't think of good or bad, but rather clear or not clear.
If you go to this web site, you will find about 850 words listed.
http://ogden.basic-english.org/basiceng.htmlIf you search around there, you may find many helpful ideas and new words. If there are any words that you don't know, or don't understand, please ask here for help. There are many people here who are very keen to help you, and others like you.
I am now going to change some of what you have just written. You will notice that I have not said that I am going to
correct it. It is for
you to choose what is correct. I can only advise. There are many kinds of English. There is British English and American English. Then there are Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and South African English. I suppose there is also a Burmese English. In each country there are different choices about what words
mean, and there are different ideas about
style.
First, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to write a very knowledgeable encouraging post. I really appreciated it and it’s really helpful.
[or - " ...for giving your time to write... "]Yes, you are absolutely right. English is really flexible. I often get confused by the different ways of saying the same thing . It's hard to understand all of them sometimes. I also like to watch interviews, so I’ve found there’s a lot of different ways of saying things. As you said, it’s really flexible and also complicated.
[or - "...ways of saying the same thing."]
And I enjoyed reading Theseus & the Minotaur . But I have to read it again because there's a lot of words I don't know and I have to look them up in a dictionary .
[vocabularies are lists of words]
Oh , Do you have any idea of how to learn a vocabulary . Somebody told me that I should learn five words per day from the dictionary, but I think it's a very hard idea . And I can't learn them all, I mean there's
millions of words . But I do it like this: when I have found a new word, then I look it up in a dictionary but the memory doesn't last long, I forget them in a short time . Sometimes I feel exhausted trying to catch those thousands of words.
[I like the idea, the mental picture, of catching words. It's poetic! I would have just said "...trying to remember all those words."
You see, that is your choice of phrase. You would never find that in a book about grammar.]
I hope you can give me some good suggestions.
Thanks again.
..................................................................................
You are most welcome.
Do you see where I have used
italics? The idea is to show where in speech you would
stress, or
emphasise a word.
I hope to come back and see what else you, and others, have written.
Goodbye for now.