英语单词大师：Immigration

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: age and the economics of learning English. RS: Our guest is Hoyt Bleakley, an economist at the University of Chicago. He and Aimee Chin at the University of Houston have studied t

英语单词大师：Forget Chicken

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: English teacher Lida Baker explains the use of the words after and before. LIDA BAKER: I'm going to say a few sentences and I just want you to tell me two things: Is the sentence

英语单词大师：Jump the Couch

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: closing the dictionary on some words of 2005. RS: Grant Barrett is project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang at Oxford University Press. We talked to him last

英语单词大师：T Is for Trouble

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a pronunciation question from Quebec, Canada. RS: Nam-Thien Khuu writes by e-mail, I have heard [that the letter 't' is silent when it comes after a stressed syllable]. Am I right

英语单词大师：Emotion in Words

Today on Wordmaster with Rosanne Skirble, the emotions behind the words we say. RS: Think of how many emotions our voices are able to convey. English teacher and Wordmaster contributor Lida Baker says meaning changes by modifying the tone of voice in

英语单词大师：Alabama, Part 2

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: more of our discussion of language in the American South. RS: We're talking with a woman in Alabama named Donna Akins. All she wanted was an answer to a grammar question. But we a

英语单词大师：Infinitives, Part 2

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: more of our discussion of gerunds and infinitives with English teacher Lida Baker. RS: A gerund, remember, is a verb ending in -ing but used as a noun. An infinitive is a verb wit

英语单词大师：Infinitives, Part 1

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: to be or not to be, or should there be an -ing? That is the question as we look at gerunds and infinitives. RS: To be, to run, to eat: the to indicates the infinitive form of the

英语单词大师：Compounding

AA: I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away, but joining me from Los Angeles is English teacher Lida Baker to explain our topic on Wordmaster this week. It's a feature of the language called compounding. LIDA BAKER: Compounding is when we take two w

英语单词大师：Interview

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: an interview with one of our listeners in Iran. RS: Atefeh is a university student. She's studying English literature, so she reads a lot of classic books. But, like any young per

英语单词大师：A Few Words About Politics

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: The election of 2008, in the words of 1828, the year Noah Webster published his epic American Dictionary of the English Language. We wanted to know how the man known as the foundi

英语单词大师：To Master Rhythms of English,

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: expanding on reductions. When speakers compress a phrase like going to into gonna, or what do you into whaddaya, that's a reduction. We mentioned their importance when we talked l

英语单词大师：What Is the Story of Your Life?

Welcome to WORDMASTER. I'm Adam Phillips, sitting in for Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble. See if you can identify what these three sentences have in common: Found true love. Married someone else. Young, skinny: ridiculed. Old, skinny: envied. And one

英语单词大师：Five New Year's Resolutions for

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: English teacher Lida Baker suggests five resolutions for people who want to improve their English in the New Year. LIDA BAKER: My first resolution that I would recommend people ma

英语单词大师：Finding the Right Expression of

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: our friend English teacher Lida Baker joins us from Los Angeles to talk about expressions of sympathy. LIDA BAKER: The reason that this came up for me is that a friend of mine los

英语单词大师：Cultures

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we continue our conversation with James Geary about his new book, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists.An aphorism is a philosophical saying whose author is known. Two yea

英语单词大师：A Blackbird

AA: I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away, but joining me from Los Angeles is English teacher Lida Baker to explain our topic on Wordmaster this week. It's a feature of the language called compounding. LIDA BAKER: Compounding is when we take two w

英语单词大师：What Does It Mean When

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we answer some listener questions. RS: Starting with this one from Rajpal Rawal in India, who sends us two sentences with questions about pronunciation -- more specifically, about

英语单词大师：American slang

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble. This week on WORDMASTER: we're back with A. C. Kemp from slangcity.com. She calls it the online home of American slang. RS: We're talking about frequently used terms that her international students in her cla

英语单词大师：I Luv U

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and on this Valentine's Day Wordmaster: we have the author of a new book, The Joy of Text.RS: Writer Kristina Grish based her book on interviews with dozens of young men and women about what it is like to rel