How to make Google your English Teacher
Posted on: 19 Nov, 2008|Comments: 19|Views: 14280|Likes: 10| INT
Google
is a very popular search engine, but did you know that it could
also serve as a Tutor? Click here to
download a 5-page guide, or scroll down to preview a few tips from
the guide itself.
Enjoy...
1. Did I say that the right way?
There are often several ways to say the same thing in English. So, how do you know if the way you are phrasing your sentences is correct? I would suggest that you compare various sentences in Google and pick the sentence that is most popular among the search results.
For example, I searched the sentence "What do you mean by that?" on Google and received 489,000 search results. I then looked up the sentence "What is it that you mean?" and found 74,300 search results. From this comparison, I would deduce that "What do you mean by that?" is generally more widely used as an English expression than "What is it that you mean?"
2. Should I say that over here?"
Thanks to the movie "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery," the phrase "Yeah Baby!" has become a popular slang phrase in America. Is this generally accepted slang in Italy? What about the United Kingdom? What about Russia?
To investigate this, I searched the phrase "Yeah Baby" and ask Google to only return search results from pages in certain locales. For example, the command site:uk only returns web pages that are hosted in the United Kingdom.
"Yeah Baby" site:uk returned 37,000 search results from the United Kingdom.
"Yeah Baby" site:it returned 5,520 search results from Italy.
"Yeah Baby" site:ru returned 17.900 search results from Russia.
So, from this experiment, I would ascertain that the phrase "Yeah Baby" is more popular in the United Kingdom than Russia and much more popular than in Italy.
Make sense?
3. Is there a word missing?
By using an asterix in a sentence, Google will assume that a word is missing and search for phrases that it thinks fills in that blank. For example...
By searching, How are you * today?
Google returns search results that includes:
* "How are you doing today?"
* "How are you feeling today?"
* "How are you guys today?"
* "How are you coping today?"
Click here to see for yourself and pay attention to the phrases that are bolded.
4. Is there another word I could use?
By using Google's Tilde command (~), you can find words that Google thinks is synonymous to the word you are searching for. For example, if I wanted to find words that are similar and/or associated with "coffee," I would perform the following search:
~coffee
Click here to see the results. What you will notice is that certain words are bolded and these are the keywords to focus on. In this case, these keywords include: Starbucks, Starbucks Cofee, caffeine and cafe.
These are just a few tips, let me know what you think?
-Jim
Submitted by Lee_Wright on 17 Jul, 2010 11:37 PM GMT
Jim, you taught me a few things about Google searching that I didn't know. Thanks.
Lee
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Submitted by TimAllan on 15 Jul, 2010 06:05 AM GMT
If you are living in a non native English speaking country and would like to learn a new subject or language then there are educational programs that are transmitted to satellite uplinking.
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Submitted by TimAllan on 13 Jul, 2010 12:58 PM GMT
This a very nice post especially for those who are seeking information on how to learn English language on Google. People belonging to native English speaking countries will not have problems in communicating and writing English but there are many other countries where people would like to learn the English language.
This post should help such people.
Tim
Boarding
School
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Submitted by Humanisov on 03 Jul, 2010 02:01 PM GMT
I'll be subscribing to your feed/ serving dish | vanity table
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Submitted by Genaromanal on 22 Jun, 2010 06:03 AM GMT
Thanks for a great post online payday loan
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Submitted by Vickihollett on 19 Jun, 2010 06:45 PM GMT
As you say, a google search is a great way for checking phrases
and the strength of collocations. So you can compare the number of
hits returned for say "fierce competition" as opposed to "hard
competition", or "miss the bus" as opposed to "lose the bus". The
more hits there are, the stronger the collocation.
When I've been working with a co-author in Europe on the phone,
we’ve run identical searches at the same time, and we've discovered
collocation frequencies can vary greatly. (I'm in the US) In an
ideal world, I'd like to be able to search google's US site and
then google's UK site and then google's Australia site etc. Does
anyone know a way to do this?
And while I love them, there's also something I find a bit
frustrating about Google's searches. Google decides on its own how
long a search should last and I'd love to be able to control it, so
I can get better comparable results. I seem to remember having that
possibility in the past but I can’t work out how to do it these
days, and think the feature might have disappeared. Does anyone
know a way to do it?
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Submitted by Althea on 29 Jan, 2010 12:09 AM GMT
What a smart way to learn english!
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Submitted by Hikimiti on 18 Jun, 2009 06:43 PM GMT
such useful tips.
i've never imagined that google could be used like this.
Lol.
very helpful tips. Thanks jim
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Submitted by Tracy_tang on 23 Mar, 2009 07:30 AM GMT
such useful tips.
i've never imagined that google could be used like this.
Lol.
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Submitted by Johnson on 26 Jan, 2009 08:58 AM GMT
Great tips, JimStroud! Thanks! Actually, we've been using these
tips for many times, but we never noticed that, we used to these
regulations but never summerize and use it more effectively. More
attention we pay, more knowledge we'll get!
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