As our site grows every day we want to share some information with you on the way we are operating the project. We call this section «Business Blog» as it is similar to doing a log book where data is recorded in a chronological order. «Blogging» is gaining popularity with more and more people picking up the habit of publishing their experiences and thoughts on the Internet. Our Blog covers various topics — from TOEFL, TOEIC, MBA, GMAT, ESL/EFL test preperation to cultural traditions and current political events.
There will also be some Internet marketing terminology and if you have any questions regarding the information simply let us know.

The Business Blog is written by Torsten Daerr and edited by Alan Townend.

2004 — September 18
Japan is certainly an attractive market for the «ESL» (English as a Second Language) industry as the country has a population of about 130 million and a very strong economy. If you are familiar with the TOEIC — Test of English for International Communication you probably know that this examination was developed through an initiative of the Japanese Foreign Trade Ministry. That's why it comes as no surprise to learn that there are quite a number of ESL websites that cater for Japanese learners. One of them is Englishnut.com a site I came across because its owner, Therese Farmer had added English-test.net to her resources (I can see that in our access log files.) Yes, you've guessed it — Therese called her site Englishnut because she wants her users to become nuts about learning English. Here is what she says about her Japanese English students:

«Most Japanese people study English as a second language for years throughout school, and even though many of them have fairly good reading and writing skills, unfortunately they often have very poor oral skills.»
Incidentally, this is also the case with many German people who learned English for years at school or even university. Now, it goes without saying that learning English for a German or another European is much easier than for a Japanese or any other Asian person because of the huge difference between their mother tongue and English.
If you want to read more about Englishnut.com you should click here: Englishnut

2004 — September 15
Did you know that the personal pronoun «I» is one of the most frequently used words of the English language, especially in spoken conversation? Why do you think this is so? Probably because most of us love to talk about ourselves more than to listen to others. As far as this blog concerned — we try to provide information that caters for you, our reader and if you want to share your suggestions with us you can do so in our forum. Also, this blog might help you to think about certain issues related to your learning process. For example, for the next few days I will be working with a group of young people in Berlin. Germany is still in a deep recession with a high unemployment rate and not having a job or an apprenticeship after you've finished school is a big challenge for you as an individual as well as for the society you live in. The German approach to the situation might look a bit awkward to the English speaking business world as our system is very social, that means that we delegate a lot of responsibility to our government and its institutions instead of placing emphasis on personal initiative. So, here is how it works: If you have finished school and you can't find a company that offers you a vocational training program you are listed with the state operated labour agency. This is a huge authority with hundreds of thousands of civil servants and a billion Euro annual budget. The labour agency operates a network of so called «education providers» — institutions that offer further vocational courses. Technically those institutions are independent of the state labour agency, in reality however, the vast majority of those schools have one single client, which is the state labour agency which sets the requirements for all training courses such as what time to start, when to take a break, what to do if a participant is absent etc. The participants themselves have almost no choice as to the content and quality of the training programme. In a certain way this system is very cosy because the teacher is measured on what they put in rather than what comes out the other end.

2004 — September 14
«Slava» is the Slavic word for fame and it's also the short form of Vyacheslav. Now, our programmer Slava Gromov actually is on his way to great fame — yesterday he accomplished an outstanding feat: He made it possible for Google to index all our forum pages — more than 750 to date. Why is this so important? Well, if every question, idea and message published on our forum gets listed by Google then the likelihood that people find our pages increases tremendously. Slava has turned our ESL forum into a little website of its own as now it can «communicate» with Google. Without going into the technical details — here is the gist: Google doesn't like URL's (web addresses) that contain either a question mark (?) or the abbreviation id in them because those pages are dynamic which basically means that the Googlebots (Google's server that collect data of web pages) run the risk of getting caught in a loop — an endless process of indexing the contents of a web page.

To get a better idea of what I mean you can do the following: Go to any Internet forum, click on the topic pages and check the URL that comes up in the address field of your browser. About 95% of those addresses will have question marks and «ID's» in them — something Google avoids those elements like the plague...

2004 — September 13
Rome wasn't built in a day and creating and maintaining a website requires a long term commitment too. I know many of you are searching for information on how to prepare for the TOEFL or TOEIC test — at least that's what our statistics say. Quite recently we have added an article containing an overview of the TOEFL test and that text is on its way to being hugely popular. In the near future you will be able to read more about why it is important to have a good command of the English language and how to score high marks in the TOEFL test. You are looking for new original ideas in addition to the general TOEFL descriptions and exercises that are available on various other websites. Go to ets.org, toeflcampus.com or testmagic.com and you can access articles and texts about the TOEFL test. However, do not fall into the trap of trying to find a shortcut — a «magic wand» that will enable you to score high points in TOEFL. Many students have made similar attempts before and almost all of them failed because they had the wrong idea about the TOEFL test. They thought that there is a specific «TOEFL vocabulary» or «TOEFL grammar». That's a misconception because TOEFL is just a test, not a study course or a training programme. Your best preparation for TOEFL is to surround yourself with «English of an academic nature». Do you know how many different scientific subjects you can study at university? Which is your favourite? Read articles about it in English and concentrate on learning new information rather than on «marking the correct answers in the test». When you see the bigger picture behind the TOEFL test then your'e on your way to success.