Helping Malaysians Improve their English
I’ve recently changed to a new mobile phone (after several months of using a phone that wasn’t functioning too well). The phone displays the total time I’m looking at my screen every day. So far I’m averaging one hour and 50 minutes of screen time per day! Continue reading “No time to learn English?”
I’ve just returned from a trip overseas with my family earlier this week. After a couple of days adjusting back to our local timezone, I’m now catching up on all the tasks that have been piling up over my break.
On my last day of the trip, I received an email about the release of a podcast that I’m featured in. I was interviewed by Hafizah, the host of her own podcast show called Stand Tall, Girl. In the episode, I talk about our work at My English Matters, I share a few tips to help people improve their English, and we discuss the importance of speaking up even when we’re afraid of making mistakes.
You can listen to my conversation with Hafizah on the podcast episode here or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Continue reading “Improve your speaking skills with podcasts”
How many times have you seen people write “congrates!” when they congratulate someone? This is quite a common mistake among Malaysians, particularly spotted in social media.
Today, we’re going to talk about the difference between “compliment” and “complement”. Both are pronounced the same, but they’re spelled differently (one is spelled with an “i”, the other with an “e”) and have different meanings.
Continue reading “Compliment vs Complement. What’s the difference?”
Today, I’m going to talk about pronouncing the word “read”. Did you know that there are two ways to pronounce this word? When it’s in the present and future tense, “read” is pronounced as “reed”. But when it’s in the past tense, it’s pronounced “red”, like the colour red.
Last week I reposted our most popular blog post, “That’s Mean vs. That Means” and just recently, I’ve noticed another common mistake Malaysians make which can be easily corrected. Joint vs Join.
It’s the school holidays! Today I took my three boys out for breakfast at our favourite roti canai restaurant, went swimming and then had a late lunch with Aisya near her house. As Aisya and I were talking in the car on our way to lunch, we brought up the topic of how a lot of people, especially women, tend to say “sorry” even when they shouldn’t be. So I thought this would be a good topic to write about today.
Continue reading “Want to sound more confident? Then stop saying sorry…”
Today I’m going to share 10 expressions I’ve come across while translating a documentary recently. I thought it would be great to share it with you here.
Here are the expressions:
Continue reading ““If it’s not broke, then don’t fix it.” Try this quiz!”
Today Azimah and Aisya are away for a workshop at CIAST, Shah Alam. Azimah has been staying over at my house over the past couple of days. As always, I love having family stay over. We could spend hours talking about everything under the sun. Last night, as Azimah was preparing for her public speaking workshop today, she was telling me about how nervous she gets before a training session. She’s been teaching and training for 12 years and she still gets nervous. She always wishes the nerves would one day disappear, but unfortunately it won’t. It’s part of the process.
