Re: Where to find daily conVerSation

Tanit — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:13:00 GMT

Hi K.,

I spent a whole year in the UK, doing a postgraduate course. To make things worse, I chose to go to Wales because Cardiff Uni is at the cutting edge in my field. Have you ever heard somebody speaking with a Welsh accent? For the first two months there, I only wanted to cry... In spite of my excellent performances during tests and exams (I had taken the FCE, the CAE and the TOEFL), I could understand very little outside the Uni
You know, most teachers' accents were pretty standard and easy... something like BBC's anchors, and my classmates were mostly international students, each with their own accent (we were a funny bunch!). I simply became accustomed to them... Welsh English (there was a girl who had a nice Swansea accent), Scottish English, Cornish English, Virginia English (AmE), Indian English, but also French-English, Chinese-English, Pakistan-English, Greek-English and lot more! Oh, I really miss them!
However, cashiers in supermarkers and kids playing in the parks were too hard for me... real English, lots of phrasal verbs I had never heard before, lots of contractions, and intonation quite different from the one I am used to!!!
Funnily, for a piece of coursework I had to interview six people. I was quite discouraged when I had to do the write-ups of the interviews (I remember you posted in the thread I created, "Spoken English").

Anyway, what I wanted to say is: formal education (all of the four skills) has helped me a lot to deal with University tasks, or with "formal" situations; it was not of (great) use, though, when it came to "real", daily life. I had often to guess, but people were usually kind, and when I made it clear I hadn't understood, they would repeat slowlier what they had just said, or rephrase it.

Re: serious / deep

Diamondrg — Mon, 28 May 2007 00:14:25 GMT

Mister Micawber wrote:

If the test is anything like the ETS tests (TOEFL, etc), Clive, then it tests both grammar and vocabulary. The TOEIC section offers the two types of questions in a roughly 50/50 ratio.

It is among the vocabulary set. The section which this question is in consists of 18 questions. 10 vocabulary questions (2 nouns, 2 adjectives, 2 adverbs, 2 verbs, 2 phrasal verbs] and the rest is grammar. So it is fixed. Maybe I should have posted it in the vocabulary section.

Search results for 'tag:Phrasal verbs tag:TOEFL' matching tags 'Phrasal verbs' and 'TOEFL'

Re: Where to find daily conVerSation

Re: serious / deep