Tdol's English Language Blog

Typely

Typely is a free editor that claims to be able to edit grammar. Most grammar tools are fairly limited, and this is no exception.

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Non-Roman Language

I have been studying Lao for the last few months. As I leave the school and go home to work on the internet, I don't practise that much. But I have been learning how to read and write in Lao. 

EFSET

EF (Education First) have created a free online language test called EFSET. As it stands, it is a bit of a curate's egg, but I do think that they are onto something. It's slick and available in several languages, and you can log in directly from Facebook,Google or Linkedin.

Access to the forum from South Korea

A couple of weeks ago, we blocked access to the forum from all IPs from South Korea. The forum had been under attack by some organised spammers for a few weeks, and it was ruining the forum. The attack was, presumably, using something like a botnet as there was a seemingly unending supply of different IPs used. Day after day, hundreds and hundreds of posts were being made and it was impossible to keep up with deleting and banning the accounts posting the spam. This was affecting the forum- people were complaining, and many were simply put off by finding page after page of nonsensical messages. The spam filter was not catching a lot of the messages as most didn't contain links but text pointing towards sites that were probably full of malware.

Forum Policies- Cross-Forum Posting

Quite a lot of people post the same question in a number of ESL forums. The logic behind doing this is clear- you should be able to access a wider selection fof views and opinions and get better answers. However, things don't always work out the way people think and this process can lead to objections from the people answering.

First Certificate- Updated Exam Specifications

We are updating our site to incorporate the changes that have been made by the updates to the First Certicate in English (FCE) exam from Cambridge English.

Salaries

I left the UK in 2004. There are jobs currently advertised that pay the same, or in some cases 10% less, than I was earning then. Add even a very small amount of inflation and this makes for a huge drop in spending power. The average salary that people talk about in Japan today is the same as when I first visited Japan in 2005. I saw hourly rates in Portugal, where I first taught, a decade later that were the same as when I left.

Family-Friendly Forum

I have had a few complaints about swearing in the forum, even though the posts were legitimate questions about the use of slang and swearwords. There aren't that many threads dealing with these, but some of them do contain language that somewould consider to be extreme and taboo.

Football Glossary

The World Cup is about to start and the football glossary posted in the forum a couple of years ago has been updated, turned into a regular glossary format and is now available as the Glossary of Football Vocabulary.

Forum- Passwords & Personal Data

After we changed everyone's passwords a couple of weeks ago, people were asking some questions about passwords and personal data.  Firstly, we don't hold much personal data- as people have usernames, we don't know real names. We do ask for the year and date of birth to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). We ask for an active email account and send a link that has to be clicked on to complete the registration. This is to make it harder for automated registration by advertisers and spammers. We also ask where you're from, where you are based now and what your first language is. There are also optional fields where people can add biographical information and interests if they wish. Unless you use your real name as a username or connect via Facebook, the data is anonymous. If an acount is deleted, this information is deleted from our records.