As 2018 draws to a close, let’s review the year's best blog posts from the Ginseng English blog! Tell us in the comments what you want to see in 2019!
1. SILENT E WORDS
In 2017 we began our posts on words with silent letters—almost every letter is silent sometimes!—almost but one of the most popular and useful came this year. Silent E words are a super useful pattern to learn, and will help with both your spelling and pronunciation!
2. STUDY OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN THE US
So many people are choosing where to study abroad in the U.S. but have only considered Boston, New York, and California! These are great cities, but America has a whole bunch of weirder, more interesting options that you should consider if you’re going to study English abroad!
3. NICKNAMES FOR AMERICA
This quick post on different names for the United States has been surprisingly popular! We just threw it together to celebrate Independence Day in the U.S., and we have gotten a whole lot of hits since! How many names does your country have?
4. CONTRACTIONS IN ENGLISH
Contractions are challenging because some are acceptable in some situations but not in others. In this post, we break down when you can use both standard and nonstandard contractions, and how to form them!
5. PRONOUNS IN ENGLISH
The English pronoun system is notoriously tricky, with different sets of pronouns for subjects, objects, possessives, etc. We developed this post and pronoun charts in various languages to help teachers and students sort out this important grammar point!
6. IMMEDIATE FAMILY
This post is a great place to start for some basic vocabulary. It covers the words we use to describe the most important people in our lives: our family! Watch for a follow-up post in 2019 on extended family!
7. ADVERBS OF FREQUENCY
Students have been asking for a while now for a post on this useful grammar point, and now we’ve finally got one! Take a look to learn what all these different adverbs mean, which verb tense to use with them, and where to put them in your sentence!
8. TOP 27 TWITTER ACCOUNTS TO LEARN ENGLISH
Alright, so the Top 10 Twitter Accounts to Learn English was on our list of the best English blog posts of 2017, but we made a huge update to that list in 2018, so we had to include it again!
9. SIMPLE PRESENT TENSE
This year Ginseng started releasing detailed guides to each and every English verb tense, and the first in the series (and the most common verb tense in English) is on the simple present tense. If you only learn one English verb form, this is the one!
10. C-V-C WORDS
This post is the perfect complement to the post on silent E words (in fact, it’s better to start with this one!). This pattern is a surefire way to know how to pronounce those tricky vowels in tons of short words in English!
More free English resources:
