Learn Natural English Phrases that People Really Use
Phrasemix is an excellent website for learning useful English phrases. We're not talking phrasebookish phrases like "Where is the toilet?", but real phrases that people actually use everyday. Things like "They set a pretty high bar for me" and "Can you fit me in this afternoon?".
Phrasemix has put together expressions and phrases that are used all the time by English speakers, ones that are incredibly helpful both for understanding what's going on around and being able to express oneself in new, varied ways ("To mix it up a bit!").
The website interface is clean and easy to navigate. All of the more recent phrases have a unique, specifically-designed cartoony image to illustrate them, which is great for committing them to memory. Currently the database has over a thousand English phrases and is growing steadily.
Phrasemix is highly recommended for more advanced English learners and also very useful for English teachers seeking practical materials for their lessons. Commenting is easy and encouraged, and questions are answered promptly about the phrases as well as in the Ask a Question section.
Altogether a great resource! Keep up the good work, Aaron :)
About Phrasemix.com
What's so great about PhraseMix?
PhraseMix teaches natural language.
Most classes and textbooks teach a formal style of English that's used in writing. But it's not as useful for real-world situations. That's one reason that you might have trouble understanding native English speakers, even if you've studied English for a long time in school.
PhraseMix lessons are organized around different realistic situations that you might find yourself in. The phrases we teach are all natural responses to that situation. So you don't have to worry about learning English that sounds "strange".
PhraseMix only teaches the most useful phrases.
Lots of websites and books promise to teach you English phrases. But a lot of them focus on phrases that are "interesting" to native English speakers, but not actually be very common.
But PhraseMix also teaches you common word collocations. Collocations are words that often come together. For example, people usually use the words "nice" and "day" together:
It's such a nice day out.
PhraseMix makes it easy to memorize phrases.
PhraseMix gives clear explanations if each new word and grammar point. But explanations aren't helpful unless you can remember the phrases. It's easy to remember PhraseMix lessons because:
The sentences are short and don't include too many difficult words.
Each sentence is tied to a specific and easy-to-imagine situation.
There's a fun illustration to help you picture the situation.Once you've memorized the phrase, it should be easy to remember the words and phrases that are part of it.
About the author
My name is Aaron Knight, and I am a language learning freak. It all started when I decided to move to Japan in my early twenties and bought a series of tapes to learn Japanese. Language learning became a hobby, then an obsession.
At the same time that I was learning Japanese, I was also teaching English as a foreign language. I've taught English to all kinds of people.
I have a B.A. in English Education from North Carolina State University. I live in NYC.