Learn English for free online with the Ginseng English blog!
Learning English online isn't easy, and your best options are generally actual online classes with real teachers, but Twitter does have some great ESL accounts you can follow to help improve your English in 280 characters! Here's a list of our favorites.
The past perfect is an important verb form for describing events in the past. Read about the rules for using the past perfect tense, how we form it, and tons of example sentences!
选择出国留学是一个害怕但令人兴奋的决定！如果你正在考虑到某一个国家留学，让我看看能不能帮助你做决定。我们有成百上千的理由去留学，但下面六个理由是你决定留学之前所需要考虑的。
既然你已经下定决心要出国学习，你就需要决定你想去哪个说英语的国家学习!
你可能会想，“我是不是应该去可以和袋鼠一起玩的澳大利亚？”或者“要不加拿大？贾斯丁 特鲁多很帅…”或者爱尔兰怎么样？我喜欢倒一杯吉尼斯黑啤酒 …”或者“也许美国!一个芝士汉堡现在听起来很棒!
这一切在理论上听起来都很不错，但重要的是要撇开对这些国家的刻板印象，再确定哪个才是最适合你的留学国家。让我们多谈谈如何获得你想要留学的国家的现实情况。最终，由你来决定哪个国家对你来说是最合适，但你首先要考虑以下几点。
In America, summer officially ends on September 22nd, though in many places it starts to feel like fall much earlier than that! To make sure we enjoy summer for as long as possible, here are some fun summer idioms!
The past continuous is an important and challenging verb form in English. It is used to describe actions that were in progress at a specific point in the past. Read about the rules for using the past continuous tense and how we form it, with charts and over 25 example sentences!
Stop pronouncing these words wrong! If you’re looking for explanations and examples of words with silent T, you’ve come to the right place. Charts, definitions, a word list of over 20 examples, and the history of how silent T became silent.
Today’s idiom posts are all about dogs! Check out this post for several example sentences, definitions. and images to help you remember these idioms!
The present continuous is a common but challenging verb tense in English. It is used to describe actions that are happening at the current moment. Read about the rules for using the present perfect tense and how we form it, with charts and over 25 example sentences!
Today’s idiom posts are all about dogs! Check out this post for several example sentences, definitions. and images to help you remember these idioms!
English has tons of idioms about animals. Have a look at these idioms about cats. Check out this post for several example sentences, definitions. and images to help you remember these idioms!
Today’s post is about all the different nicknames that Americans have for their country.
The present perfect is a common but confusing verb tense in English. It is used to connect the past to the present.. Read about the rules for using the present perfect tense and how we form it, with charts and tons of example sentences!
The simple future is a very common verb tense used to talk about plans and expectations in English. Read about the rules for using it, how we form it, and tons of example sentences!
How many vowels are there in English? Five? Six? Twenty? Five and a half?
If you ask an American what the English vowels are, we will almost all say the exact same thing that we learned in school as children:
A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.
Ellen Degeneres recently tweeted at NSYNC, and she jokingly congratulated for making a major accomplishment "without a vowel" in their band name. However, as many people (including Ginseng) explained, Y is a vowel in NSYNC. Ellen was just making a joke, of course, but many people, learners and native speakers alike, really don't understand what it means when we say that Y is "sometimes" a vowel.
Let's look a little closer at what exactly we mean when we say "and sometimes Y" in order to help us understand several important aspects of English pronunciation and spelling.
Before we can say how many vowels there are, we need to clarify what exactly a vowel is. The answer is not as simple as you may think. The most common dictionary definitions say something like this:
vowel (n.)
1. a speech sound in which air flows out through the mouth and is not blocked by the teeth, tongue, or lips;
2. a letter representing one of these sounds.
On the other hand, consonant is usually defined something like this:
consonant (n.) - any speech sound or letter that is not a vowel.
So a vowel is a sound made with your mouth open, and a consonant is basically every other sound.
You may have noticed that the definitions of consonant and vowel above talk about both sounds and letters, and this is where the confusion comes from. Sounds and letters are different things. Letters are written and are meant to represent the sounds in a language.
However, you have probably noticed that English sounds and letters don't have a perfect correspondence. For example, sometimes the letter C sounds like S (as in city) but other times it sounds like K (as in cat).
This is especially true about vowels. If we ignore Y for a moment, there are 5 vowel letters: A, E, I, O, U. However, if we look at vowel sounds there are between 14 and 21 (depending on the accent).
How is this possible? Think about the different sounds that A makes in the words father, bake, and cap, and the different U sounds in put, cup, and nuke.
The most important idea here is that letters can make different sounds.
Okay, but we're talking about Y, right? Is it a consonant or a vowel!? How many vowels are there!? We need a number!
So, like many other letters, the letter Y represents many different sounds. You can see the most common ones in the words only, cry, myth, and yet.
Let's look more closely at those examples: in only, Y makes the long E sound /i/, the same sound E makes in we. In cry, Y makes the long I sound /aɪ/, pronounced like the I in mine. In myth, Y makes the short I sound /ɪ/, the same sound as the I in kid. As you can see, these are all vowel sounds.
The Y in yet is different. It isn't really a sound that other letters frequently make. Its "the Y sound" /j/. And this is a consonant sound. If you make this sound, you will feel that the back of your tongue rises up toward the top of your mouth. Remember, when we block or obstruct the air to make a sound, this is what makes a consonant.
So the reason that the letter Y is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant is that it makes several different sounds. Some of these sounds are vowel sounds, and one is a consonant sound. In the words only, cry, and myth, Y is a vowel. In yet, yellow, and you it is a consonant.
In case you were still wondering about Ellen's NSYNC tweet, the Y in NSYNC is definitely a vowel.
So we know why Y is sometimes a vowel, but we were curious: How often is Y a vowel and how often is it a consonant. How common are the different sounds that Y makes? The answer was not easy to find, but eventually we came across an academic paper that contained the answer we needed.
It turns out that Y is not just "sometimes" a vowel. It is almost always a vowel. It is only a consonant around 2.5% of the time. That means about 97.5% of the time it is a vowel. By far, the most common sound it makes is long E /i/. As you might guess, this is probably because -y and -ly are very common suffixes in English.
Next time you hear someone say "A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y," you can correct them: "A, E, I, O, U, and 97.5% of the time Y!"
