Your newsletter 'A funny thing happen...' and your forum

[MaryR]

This is from your latest newsletter (A funny thing happen..., and I'm troubled by it:

I just wanted to mention the word «forum» and explain that the word has now come to mean anywhere that discussion takes place in.

I think it could have and should have been written thus:

I just wanted to mention the word "forum" and explain the word has now come to mean anywhere a discussion takes place.

Your editor needs a brush-up.

[Alan]

Hi MaryR,

Thank you for your comment. I don't see that grammar has anything to do with it. You have simply expressed the sentence in a different way.

Alan (editor/writer of newsletter)
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English as a Second Language
You can read my ESL story Word Story: Weather

[Bechir]

Dear Alan,

I have enjoyed reading all your essays and had the pleasure of going over the site for the last few months. It's a forum, without knives.

We in this part of the world have already experienced Julius Caesar's knives, it's a delight to find a knifeless forum.
To avoid giving a history lesson myself, I'll let you guess where I am from.

Pending a good guess, have a nice time and thank you for the marvellous time you are giving me with the site.

Yours,
Bechir Saadaoui

[Violet]

Dear English-test.net Team,

My name is Violet Kotkova and I am from Ukraine.But now I live in the USA,New Jersey.I've been in the United States for 2 years.In Ukraine I graduated The Mariupol Institute of Humanities,my major was English language and literature/Greek.
When I just came to the USA, I realized that even after 4 years in college I don't know English at all!Not really...I could understand mostly what people was saying,but for me to speak it was kind of a problem.It's not that my vocabulary was too poor or I didn't have any idea about grammar,intonation,word order...,I just could not say a word!And it took me some time to start speaking.One my friend gave me a piece of advice that if i want to learn SPEAK English I should communicate with original Americans,i mean people who were really born in the USA and lived here all their life,not those immigrants who came here 5,10 even 20 years ago,it doesn't matter- because they will not help you a lot with your English,like those teachers at my school.I do not blame them at all,I am really grateful to them.But I believe if you want to learn language,any foreign language, you should be in this special language atmosphere,around native speakers.
Now my best teacher is my fiance,he helps me a lot with my English,every day I find out something new, i didn't know before...Though sometimes he makes fun of my mistakes,but says that it's really cute.

Yours,Violet

[Torsten]

[CristianDinescu]

Hello to all of your highly professional team and thank you for allowing me to join you.I am a 47 year old teacher of history from Bucharest,Romania.Your tests and stories are a great source of information for me and other people in my country.I really want to thank you for the opportunity you give too so many students of all ages to test themselves, to assess their knowledge, and to get better.All my best wishes.Respectfully yours,Cristian Dinescu

[Torsten]

Hi Alan,

Looking at the feedback we have received from your current newsletter issue it is quite obvious that the newsletter could serve as the glue that holds all the sections of our website together. You see, a lot of newsletter subscribers don't know to use the forum and many forum users don't know that the newsletter exists. Some of the feedback messages in this thread were sent to us via email and we posted them here on the forum. This mean, the authors of those messages might not even see their own messages simply because they don't know how to use the forum.

So, I suggest we continue to refer to the forum in our future newsletter issues. For example, we could introduce some of our new forum members to our newsletter readers. We should also try and explain how to register on the forum and how the forum works.

What do you think?
Regards
Torsten
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Guest]

hello dears
i would like to mention that i really like the newsletter which i receive from you, and that it helps me a lot to improve my English skills. thanks a lot.
Riana

[Puzzled 2]

[Alan]

Hi,

Without wishing to overegg the matter, accepting your sentence doesn't read well -

[Guest]

[Alan]

The whole point as I'm sure you realise is that 'in' had to go at the end of the sentence because it couldn't precede 'that'. But then I guess you know that!

Alan
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English as a Second Language
You can read my ESL story A day in the life of a flat hunter

[Yankee]

Hi Alan

The original sentence would be standard without 'in' hung on the end of it. It seems to me that adding 'in' at the end of that particular sentence would be viewed as very informal at best. But I guess you knew I'd say that.
.

[Alan]

Very puzzling indeed!
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English as a Foreign Language
You can read my EFL story Party Conferences