Rosyrain

SWELL and FUDDY DUDDY are old english words used back in the 1950s that we do not use anymore. SWELL basically means something good, but you sound very old if you are caught using it. FUDDY DUDDY basically means a grumpy or old person without a sense of humor.

"You are the cats meow" means you are all that, or the best at something. This one is not used that often anymore and it can also be construed as sexual harrassment as it has some dirty undertones as wewll.

"You've got killer instincts" which means you have good instincts. It is ironic because most murderers are dumb and get caught within hours after committing the crime.

It's raining cats and dogs out there- is my favorite one. I am a native English speaker and yet I don't even really know what that means! Another one of my favorites is "your head is in the clouds" which essentially means you are deep in thought.

English is my native language and I could not tell you the right answer for that one. We spend all of our young lives learning to read and write, but they spend so little time teaching us about tenses and all of the nitty gritty of the language.

Con Carne- with cheese! That is the only two words in Spanish I ever need to know in this life!

"Slug" is my funny word. They are gross little creatures that spread their slime everywhere, compounded with a bad name. It really is just one of those gross little words that make you cringe.

I did some sign language in college and I had a great time learning it. The key is lots of practice. The symbols are pretty easy to learn, but you have to practice a lot to get them memorized.

My kids do a lot of reading aloud in school as well. When they are learning to read, it helps them to get a grasp on pronunciation of the words. It may be that the teacher is not as concerned with your kids reading and understanding the story as much as practicing reading in general.

Thanks for adding the exchange. This would have helped me out tremendously in college with learning Spanish. It is like having a one on one tutor that you can connect with but it's free. I am going to see if I can connect with someone to teach me Italian and help me out with Spanish.

That sounds like a great idea, how will you go about teaching it? I am interested. It's kind of ironic, I met a lady the other day who natively spoke Swahilli and she was trying to teach me a couple of words.

Using the word "cute" to describe something is for the ladies..."that shirt is cute." Whenever I use the word cute to describe an item that I like, my fiance looks at me weird and asks how it is "cute." I think this word is reserved for the ladies, unless describing a baby or an animal.

I'm not sure there are any countries out there that don't teach English as it is becoming the standard global language. I would say probably the remote small village countries, but then again, there are missionaries who teach English to the populations there. I have friends from all over the world and English was taught to them at some point in school.

For me the hardest part is writing in the language I am trying to learn because you have to learn how to spell the word correctly and use it properly in the sentence. For instance in Spanish, the description word comes after the noun in which it is describing, like the Rio Grande river in English means River Grand. In English we would call it the Grand River. This gets confusing. At least when reading and speaking the words, they are spelled correctly and used properly so you just have to learn pronunciation of the word.

I have never tried this, but wish I could learn to read in Hebrew and Chinese. The characters used in these languages are beautiful to look at, if only I knew what each one represented. Chinese seems really complex as a single symbol can have many strokes.

I never knew that you can keep track of how many words you know in another language, that is interesting. I'm not sure that knowing the exact total of words would help me or make me feel any better in my studies though. I keep track based on how much I can read of a story and have it make sense to me. I am currently navigating Spanish, and can pick up an article and understand the basic meaning of it, even though I still do not know all of the words.

"Towards" is my favorite misused word, it is supposed to be "toward" but I see lots of people put "S" on the end of it. I think the sad part is that the Oxford dicionary is actually buying into the slang words and starting to incorporate them into the English Dictionary. I could understand it in the urban dictionary you can find online, but I have always considered the Oxford more scholarly.

Here are mine: From the Bible..."And Ruth said, where thou goest I will go. Where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy god, my god." And From We Bought a Zoo "Sometimes all you need in life is 20 seconds of insance courage." I love those quotes and they have so much meaning to me.

I use the dictionary all the time and English is my native language. It is a great tool if you are unsure of the meaning of the word or need help spelling it. I do a lot of writing and the dictionary is one of my best friends. I do not own a physical book though, I use the online version.

I try to use it only once in my thought either at the begining or end of the sentence. I hate when people use lol as their only response to something I said, it makes me feel like the conversation is one sided. Usually when I text someone or email them, I would like good solid feedback as the response!

It's much harder to learn a second language that it was the first one you learned. When you learned your mother language you were a baby and it was part of your development. The second language is something that was not familiar to you since you were an infant so it will be new and strange to you to learn. It helps though if you learn your second language in a country where your second language is the spoken language so that you are submerged in it all of the time.

I am an American and I think we have a more lazy English than the Brits. Things kind of roll off our tounges without as much thought as our friends to the east. I have noticed over the years that the way we spell the same words is often different too. For example, in American we would spell "Catalog" and in England they spell it "Catalouge."

When you are writing a story, even an autobiography, you would mostly use past tense because you are talking about things that have happened before writing the story. If you are discussing something that will happen in the future, then it is okay to use present tense.

I would like to learn the French language, but as many others, I am so busy that I do not have time right now to sit down and learn. When you are an adult, it is so much harder to learn and retain a new language. I thought of getting a Rosetta Stone program, but not sure how well it will work for the price you pay for it.

It is much easier to research information now with the Internet. Instead of having to find a book on a topic that you are interested in, now you can just type it into a search engine and research away. I think you can become a little smarter a little faster if you want to learn something now. If you want to look up something in the middle of the night, information is now at your fingertips.