Welcome to Harry’s conversational English page!
After years of collection and acquisition of these colloquial phrases through watching movies, observing native speakers, reflecting on my own life experiences and continuously adding to these topic lists, plus three major updates (adding examples, creating quizzes, and re-designing the page architecture), this page is finally where it is today! With all the tremendous work that has been done, I’d be more than happy if this site could help you build your conversational skills and ease into the North American culture!
I’ll keep growing these lists, with new phrases being constantly added. That will be an ongoing process. I’m also planning to attach some movie clips to the idioms / phrasal verbs to help you understand those phrases in a context, which is going to be another huge project. Also on my agenda is adding the corresponding phrases from other languages (Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) to the English phrases and I seriously think this is going to be a life-long course of action.
Here’s how you can use this part of the website.
You will learn the expressions you can use to:
- express your idea, understanding or opinion *
- ask for someone else’s idea, understanding or opinion
- agree
- disagree *
- request repetition or clarification
- convey ability or inability to understand
- show interest, surprise and strong feelings
- make a suggestion and turn down or accept an offer *
- reduce embarrassment and potential offense *
- give wishes, comfort and encouragement
- make a polite request *
- respond to questions, and backchannel *
- Filler words and air quotes
in an English conversation or an interview.
In linguistics, these are called “speech acts”. A speech act is something you say that not only presents information, but also performs an action. If you’re interested and would like to learn more about speech acts, here’s the link to a very good website exploring this topic, although it’s intended for language teachers.
I’d like to quote a paragraph from that website here, so that you understand why this is an important topic in your language learning.
Speech acts are difficult to perform in a second language because learners may not know the idiomatic expressions or cultural norms in the second language or they may transfer their first language rules and conventions into the second language, assuming that such rules are universal. Because the natural tendency for language learners is to fall back on what they know to be appropriate in their first language, it is important that these learners understand exactly what they do in that first language in order to be able to recognize what is transferable to other languages. Something that works in English might not transfer in meaning when translated into the second language. For example, the following remark as uttered by a native English speaker could easily be misinterpreted by a native Chinese hearer: Sarah: “I couldn’t agree with you more.” Cheng: “Hmmm….” (Thinking: “She couldn’t agree with me? I thought she liked my idea!”)
Each topic has three parts.
- a list of expressions with example sentences and usage notes to show you how to use them in real-life situations
- a video (or two) teaching this topic
- a quiz you can use to test yourself out and see how much you’ve learned and how well you can understand and use these expressions in various contexts
Some of the expressions are linked to their dictionary or forum pages. If you click on those underlined phrases (hyperlinks), you will see more information to help you learn those phrases.
The quizzes will be graded. Every quiz has 5 questions with 2 points for each and 10 points in total. You can see the correct answers and view the answer key after you submit. You can also use the quizzes for fun because they ARE fun! Or, you can try the quiz first, then look through the list of phrases to check. When you’re going through the questions, just keep in mind that CONTEXT plays a very important role when you decide on the option(s), and what you can say with your friends, or in one culture, might not be appropriate with your professor and older people, or in another culture. Also, what you say in one context might not be a good choice in another context, even though grammatically correct, because it might suggest a different (hidden) meaning as the context has changed. In other words, these quizzes are also testing your PRAGMATIC skills using the language. On that note, pay special attention to how “would” and “could” are frequently used as a “distancing strategy” to show respect in English.
For any questions, you can always find me via email: esperame76@hotmail.com
Enjoy 🙂