30-day challenge for C2

Hi everyone! For today, let's go back to the very beginning. Do you remember the first challenge, 16 days ago? It had four little tests on make/do. There is somethig about testing ourselves that appeals to our competitive nature. So I thought I'd make use of that competitiveness to lure you into today's challenge. Would you like to push yourselves? What about one of the hardest tasks in the Proficiency exam? For today's challenge: - Go to this page and read the advice for Proficiency open cloze tests. - Test yourself on the five big areas that go into this exercise: pronouns, articles and determiners, conjunctions and linking phrases, prepositional phrases and phrasal verbs, and collocations. That is, do the five tests proposed on the page. - Share your results with us! See you in the comments!

... if you want to continue on your quest. I am still in a playful mood! I am a fan of the animated riddles on TED-Ed, and I found this one, which has the flair of medieval knight riddles. Here's the challenge for today! - Tell us if you could solve the riddle! - Give us your five favourite words from this video. As an extra, this challenge reminded me of a song I love a lot, Koeeoaddi There , by The Incredible String Band. The chorus (or kind of) goes like this: Earth, water, fire and air Met together in a garden fair, Put in a basket bound with skin. If you answer this riddle, If you answer this riddle, You'll never begin. Listen to it if you want to get into the mood for the riddle. Enjoy, brave knights!

Hi everyone! Day 15 is here! How hard was it to get this far? You're halfway through! For this day, I'm feeling a bit playful. And what is the word game  par excellence? Scrabble! This challenge is somehow related with Scrabble, in that I'm asking you to find as many words as you can with the letters that form a word. Say, for instance, that our word is WORD. Your goal is to find as many possible combinations with the letters W, O, R, D as you can. They must be accepted by the dictionary, of course! Some examples would be rod , dow , or row . With two letters, we could make the words or and  do (but the longer, the better!) The challenge, then, is the following: - Give us as many existing words as you can made up of the letters in the words given below. Classify them by number of letters (in our example: 3 - rod, dow, row; 2 - or, do). - And that's it. That's all we need! And since day fifteen splits our challenge in half, the words we propose are

Hi everyone! What a lovely sunny day. Come to think of it, you may open this post on a miserable rainy evening. But if you happen to visit the blog today, you're likely to be enjoying a bit of sunshine. What does this have to do with today's challenge? Well, as I was enjoying the light in my living room, I thought about how the room was alight today. Alight . What a beautiful word. It has so many meanings, and all of them are just wonderful! Talk about favourite words! One of the things that is special about this word (as an adjective--it's also a really cool verb) is that it is one of those adjectives with a- that can only appear in predicative position, that is, only in the predicate, and never preceding the noun: I could never say "the alight room", but I'd have to think, as it occurred to me this morning, that the room was alight. The challenge for today is: - Read the following sentences and transform them so that the adjective follows the

Hi everyone! These are days of wishing and hoping. Hoping that everyone around us keeps well, hoping that we will come out stronger, wishing we could do more. We hope that what we're doing is useful, in our own little way. But can we use wish and hope correctly? There are some small intricacies to the use of these two verbs, which may cause a bit of trouble even at higher levels. All of these sentences   contain errors made by students at Proficiency level. Can you find them? For today's challenge:  - Spot the error in each sentence and correct it.  - Tell us in the comments what you found, and what you think are the main rules of use of hope and wish that the errors illustrate. Hope and wish to your heart's content today! 1. I do wish I will turn out to be a good doctor. 2. She wishes she would be more positive about the future. 3. I hope you to have a pleasant stay. 4. I wish I will be able to suppress my laughter when he speaks, but I can't. 5. I

Hi everyone! I can't help bringing you one of my favourite activities: finding vocabulary in videos. And here is one that is short, educational, and natural. Apart from the fact that it is related to what we're seeing right now in C2.2 (technology, and simple machinery in this case), the conversational tone of Stephen Colbert in this short video is what really got to me. So here's our challenge for day 12: - Find at least three expressions that you could use naturally in conversation. - What do they mean? Can you find another way of saying the same thing or are these phrases really unique for the idea they want to express? Tell us in the comments! Enjoy here Stephen Colbert changing a bike inner tube!

Hi everyone! We're still on time! But don't worry,this will be quick, because it's about not doing something. What consonants are not pronounced in these words? Can you pronounce them all together, like a tongue twister? For today's challenge: - Tell us what the silent consonant is in each word. - Which is the most difficult to pronounce for you?  - In one of the words, w hich letter is pronounced that normally is not? - Have you learnt any new words with this list?  Enjoy! knowledge wretched rustled rhythm heir coup indebted exhilarating denouement pseudonym doubt mnemonic condemn apropos penchant

Well hello! I found this little clip and the contrast between the title and the subject matter actually surprised me. Whoever wrote the title had a sense of humour. It's called "Alaskan money laundering". The video gives a new meaning to "money laundering" all right! What is the contrast between metaphorical and literal use of "laundering" that makes this title funny? Understanding this kind of humour, based on metaphor, is to me one of the signs of reaching a C2 level. So, for today's challenge: - Answer my question about the title: What is the contrast between metaphorical and literal use of "laundering" that makes this title funny? - Write a short summary of the video using these words: charred, denominations, distinguishable, rinse off, intact, stack, going the extra mile, salvage, tragic. See you in the comments!

Hi there! Have you ever played this game where you're not allowed to answer "yes" or "no"? Well, that game came to mind when reading about these expressions that we tend to use when answering questions in natural conversation. For example, have you ever thought about how many ways of saying that you don't know something there are, apart from, obviously, "I don't know"? Depending on the question, you could say "who knows", or "that's anybody's guess", or "I wish I could help", or "I haven't the foggiest/faintest idea". So, to introduce this topic (clue: there may be a "part 2" to this challenge), here is today's challenge: - What would be the right answer to these questions: a), b) or c)? - Give us an extra possible answer for each of those questions. 1. Weren't you supposed to take out the recycling today? a) I thought you were going to. b) I won't forg

Hi everyone! How do you feel after passing the one-week mark? Are you settling into a routine? Tell us in the comments about how you have incorporated this challenge into your daily life. Today's the day that the mystery of the pronunciation lists is revealed. There is this fiendish pronunciation poem that highlights the worst part of English pronunciation: the exceptions to the most useful of all findings for a learner of English--patterns. What happens when we have internalised a pattern of spelling-pronunciation and then--oh no--we find a word that doesn't follow it? "It's just a pattern", we tell ourselves, "it's not a rule". Oh well, we'll get over it. We write it down and try to learn it, cursing the English language mildly. We try to brush it off, but the truth is that it's frustrating. And the only antidote against that frustration is humour, and a sense of community that comes from acknowledging that even native speakers strug

Hi everyone! We're back with the second part of the pronunciation challenge! Let's remember the rules: 1. Read the words. Which one rhymes with the underlined word? 2. Look them up in a dictionary to check. 3. Did you change your mind?  4. What words surprised you? Can you pronounce them all? As an extra to today's challenge: can you go back to the first pronunciation challenge and pronounce all the words again? It takes a bit of time to get used to strange pronunciations! Had you forgotten any of them? Ready? Round two! 15. home    -   some   comb   tomb   bomb 16. aunt    -   grand   grant   font   wont   want 17. linger    -  ginger   singer   finger 18. loth    -   oath   doth   cloth   loathe 19. moreover    mover   cover   clover 20. vice  -  chalice   lice   police 21. deceiver  -  aver   ever   fever 22. label  -   principle   disciple   stable 23. chair  -  spectator   senator   mayor 24. clean  -   marine   doctrine   turpenti

Hello again! Are you ready to take up the challenge for day 6? Today I'd like you to get aquainted with gerunds , a form that learners of English don't use very often. I find that the best way of introducing it in your speech is to use "ready-made" gerunds, that is, fixed expressions and chunks of language that help fluency by minimising the effort of composing a sentence. So here is a little selection of common idiomatic expressions that feature one or several gerunds. For day 6: - Read the idiom and complete it with a gerund. - Provide a new example of your own making. Share your answers with us in the comments! Ready? 1. Happy New Year! Here's _______________ for a bright future! 2. The star has it all but is still miserable; really there's no _______________ some people. 3. True Detective is full of twists and turns; there's no _______________ what will happen. 4. She doesn't expect to get the part, but there's no harm in _

Hello everyone! How's everyone faring? Today's challenge had to be split into two because I got carried away. I started making odd-one-outs and I got so many that I can't possibly ask you to do them in one day! Or can I? Here's today's challenge: I will propose a word and a short list of words that may or may not rhyme with it. You have to identify the word that rhymes, thus putting your pronunciation pattern skills to work! Even if you identify the word right away, you must check all the pronunciations, because as you can guess, they are all tricky and worth learning! So, the challenge for day 5: - Read all the words in the set.  - Which is the one that rhymes with the underlined word? Try to guess first pronouncing it yourself. - Use an online dictionary to look up the pronunciation if needed. The one we try today is Macmillan Dictionary. - Did you change your mind after checking? Which is the one that rhymes? - Which pronunciations surprised you?

Hi everyone! Let's talk about the elephant in the room: we're all homebound, and trying to make the most of what we have around us, rediscovering the beauty of our living spaces, if you will. So I thought I'd challenge you to take a look around and find the idioms that are "hidden" around us when we're at home. What idioms can you find that feature these household items? - door - handle - fence - ceiling - bed - book - picture ... and as an extra, what idioms can you think of that contain the words  "house" or "home" ? My favourite would be "hit home": The full extent of this situation only hit home when we looked out of the window to see empty streets (true dat). Give us a definition and/or an example sentence with the idioms you find!

A classic challenge for any language lover! Full of synonyms, abbreviations, cultural references. Who's up for a crossword in English today? Instructions for Day 3: - Find the crossword I have more or less randomly selected for you here in this link . - Start as soon as you can! This crossword tells you the time it takes you to complete it, and the timer will start running as soon as you open the tab. A little convention on this page is that correct letters will appear in black and wrong letters in red. Every wrong letter will give you a 10-second penalty. - Complete the crossword to the best of your ability for 15 minutes ("I just feel like a mild challenge" mode) or 20 minutes ("I got hooked" mode).  - Take a screenshot after that time and show us your result.  Let's see who we consider to be the winner! You can see here my result for a different crossword. It took me a little while until I realised there were penalties, so my

Hi again, everyone! I hope you're ready to sharpen your eyesight and your competitive edge with this one. I have just tried this challenge and it was pretty hard! So, without further ado, here are the instructions for Day 2: 1. Read this Time Magazine article called A Guide to the Most Calming, Anxiety-Free Content You Can Stream Right Now. 2. Identify the words and expressions you think are the most advanced and make a list. 3. Using this dictionary , find out at least one word or expression that is considered to be part of C1- or C2-level vocabulary. How will I know, you may ask? The dictionary will indicate it. For instance, have you noticed any metaphorical uses of a word in this blog entry? What about "sharpening" in the expression "sharpen your eyesight"? Take a look at sharpen in the dictionary. Yep, it's a very advanced use of vocabulary. So was the expression "gain momentum" in yesterday's entry. So make your little

...or should I say "let's make it"? Oh my! Is it make or do? Do or make? Our first challenge is the longest "do or make" list I've ever seen! It's a challenge even for me! Here are the the instructions for Day 1: 1. Go to this "make or do" blog entry. 2. Read the list or do/make expressions, save it, memorise it. 2. (Now seriously) Read the list or download it for reference. But learn it eventually, one day. 3. When you feel ready, do the whole series of exercises, 1 to 4. Hop, hop!  4. Share your results in the comments! Ideally, you should be doing this challenge today, on day 1, so we can start sharing results and gain momentum . But don't worry if you can't. The only condition is that you complete challenge 1 before you move on to challenge 2. See you around in the comments!

Hi everyone! Many of you may be familiar with the idea of a 30-day challenge: challenge yourself to do something consistently for 30 days, and see how it goes. Matt Cutts already proposed this in his (very brief) TED talk "Try something new for 30 days". Wait, you haven't watched it? Hit play! Have you ever thought of challenging yourself with English? Would you commit to checking this blog every day and attempting a new activity? Would you share your progress and, why not, compete with your classmates? But, what do these activities consist in?, I can hear you ask. A full listening? Reading an article? A crossword? What is it going to be? ... Well, you'll have to stay and find out for yourselves. Hehe. So, if you're ready to stick to it for 30 days, stay tuned!