Thursday Recap..

Well, there you have it, another week successfully navigated! What was your favourite part of this week? My favourite parts were all your wonderful presentations - I was very proud of you all. The saddest moment was when we said goodbye to Brito - it's always sad for me when people finish their courses, but we wish him the best of luck in the future, and I know there is no one I would rather have as the captain of my ship! Bon Voyage Brito! 

Now, to our recap. On Thursday we looked at formal letters of complaint, and we noted how there isn't really a culture of letter-writing as a means of complaining where you guys are from, but how here it's actually one of the most powerful consumer weapons. I remember we found a hair in a packet of biscuits once when we were kids. My mam took a photo and wrote a letter to the company and they sent us about 6 months' supply of chocolate biscuits. It was a wonderful day, but it resulted in my current biscuit addiction, so it wasn't all good news! Anyway, our homework is to write a letter of complaint based on the worst service we have ever experienced. You can find some good tips on this site and this one too! Remember, you can bring the letter to class on Monday in a handwritten form or you can email it to me.

Finally, we reviewed all of our vocabulary from the past 2 weeks' lessons and then played a game of SuperStop, where we needed to combine adjectives with our nouns and adverbs with our verbs. The review portion is useful because it shows you just how quickly new vocabulary can disappear if you don't review it every so often. At least once a week you should sit down and have a look through your notes, checking that you still remember all the new words. You also need to make an effort to use those words in a conversation - force your friends to talk about newspapers or music or whatever the topic of that week happens to be - the hardest part of practising is creating the opportunity to use the new language! Be selfish - talk about the things you want to practise, don't wait for someone to walk up to you and ask, "Hey, do you know the word for a large group of people who sing together?" It's very unlikely that will happen.


The game of SuperStop is designed to make you use adjectives and adverbs in combinations with nouns/verbs. This is something you need to pay attention to when you are speaking. You can improve your vocabulary more if you use more words on a daily basis - using more adjectives and adverbs when you are speaking - listen to natives and how they express themselves - they normally use 2 and 3 adjectives in combination. Take this example:

Teacher: Hi, what did you have for breakfast?

Student: An apple. 

...Hmm, there's not a lot of practising happening there... 

Student: Hi, what did you have for breakfast?
Teacher: Oh, Just an apple, but it was absolutely delicious! So ripe and very juicy. I love apples like that! 

There are 3 adjectives in the teacher's response, and none in the student's. You may think it's strange to speak that way, but that's really how it works. We speak in chunks of information, always doubling and sometimes tripling our adjectives. Try to use more adjectives in your daily conversations, and more adverbs too! 

That's it! Have a great weekend! And don't forget the small matter of Ireland -v- England on Saturday evening - here's a little video to catch you up on the history of the match: