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Learning about English - language and culture |
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Hello and welcome to this page
Translators on the WebOpen a translatorBefore you go any further, you might need help. You can change this site into most languages of your choice. Use a translation engine like the Babelfish translator. You will find the Babelfish translator at uk.altavista.com/trns. Put chunks of English in and see the output in your chosen language. Or you can even translate this whole site! It won't be very natural. But it will help you get the sense.
Keep this translator open while you use this site. If you are stuck, use it. But try to work without it, as far as you can. Other translation toolsThere are other translation sites on the Web, and you can get software for your computer which does a similar job. Try any of the sites below:
Why is it called a Babelfish?There are two parts to this answer. The British author Douglas Adams, who died in 2001, wrote a comic science-fiction novel called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In this novel he describes a creature called the Babelfish, which is able to translate from any language in the universe into any other: “The babelfish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain. The practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech you hear decodes the brainwave matrix. ” The name comes originally from a story in the Bible. According to this story, there was a time when everyone spoke the same language. A group of people came to the plain of Babel (probably meant to be Babylon) and tried to build a tower, which would reach to Heaven. The story says that God did not want them to succeed, so he made them all speak different languages. If you click on the link below you can read this story as it was written in English in the King James version, published in the year 1611. English is internationalEnglish comes from England but now it is spoken everywhere in the world. It is the first or official language in many countries. In almost every other country it is the second language - which children learn as soon as they have learned their mother tongue. Look at the list below and click on a country to see if English is spoken there.
What next?Please use the links at the top of the page, or in the list below. These will take you to different parts of this site, where you will find resources to help you learn English.
Words to useMost pages in this part of the site have a short lexicon or vocabulary. This will pick out some words you ought to know, if you want to learn English. For each word, you will get information about what class it belongs to (verb, noun and so on) with an example of how it is used.
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