Software Engineer, Linguist, Author

Review of Oxford Seminars Course / Oxford Seminars Reviews

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Tue, 06/26/2012 - 21:54

A Google search for Oxford Seminars Reviews shows, when excluding the company's cherry-picked reviews and advertising, that Oxford Seminars, an accreditation program to teach English as a second language (ESL, TESL, TESOL) is probably worth the money. Most people on various review sites seem to praise the book as being instructive and practical. Based on those reviews, and a suggestion from a friend that I take the course, I decided to read the entire book (cover to cover), take the course, and report my findings as I went along.

I laugh at him -- Indirect Object, Direct Object, or what?

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Tue, 06/26/2012 - 19:06

Here is an interesting ESL question: What is "at him" in I laughed at him? I wasn't sure, so I asked the following question:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2447204&p=12309998

According to Wikipedia's Grammatical Object page,

There must be a direct object for an indirect object to be placed in a sentence.

Grammar Question and Answer: Toni Morrison's genius enables her to ...

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Tue, 06/12/2012 - 14:01

After reading a page in Oxford Seminars, an ESL course, I was confused about the "mistake" in the following sentence:

Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.

So, I asked the question on Wordreference:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2438089&p=12262747

the answer boils down to this explanation:

Embed MP4 in flash (swf) in html in Drupal 7 from Amazon S3 and Google Cloud using CDN's

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Fri, 05/18/2012 - 19:17

I recently needed to show a video, an MP4 file (http://www.paperupgrade.org/blogs/digital-learning-digital-studying-book-scanning-project-video-lecture-portland-state) stored on Amazon's S3 servers via my Drupal 7 website (thus via HTML) using a free flash player (SWF -- JWPlayer ) and using external javascript files and swf's (from a CDN, namely a dropbox account, thus Google and Amazon cloud services). The result is like this:

Translation for Dependent Clause / Independent Clause in French from English

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Tue, 05/01/2012 - 12:32

Out of curiosity, I looked up Dependent Clause / Independent Clause in French and found the following, which I posted on Word Reference (http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2410613&p=12120779#post1...)

proposition dépendante
proposition indépendante

Selon Grammaire en poche

Negative Partitif With Double Object Pronouns -- Elle ne lui en a pas proposé / Elle ne les lui a pas proposées

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Mon, 04/23/2012 - 11:11

Having trouble with french partitives and double-object pronouns in the negative? Well, I was too, so here is a nice illustration that I posted on WordReference with some clarification of my own below:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2404788&p=12093383&poste...

Duda gramática: De haber sabido + imperfecto - ¿uso criticado?

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Wed, 11/30/2011 - 10:54

I started the following thread at WordReference.com regarding the use of De haber sabido + imperfect:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2303159&page=2&p=1156535...

How do you say "By the way" in Spanish?

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Tue, 09/27/2011 - 15:40

Below is a reprint of the thread I started on WordReference (http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2254465&p=11314044#post1...):

By the way in English has various meanings, among them

German Cases Chart / Diagram of Accusative, Nominative, Dative, Genitive Cases

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 16:57

NOTE: Download the Excel attachment for better detail, presentation, and example phrases (where you can see the comments for individual cells).

Lyrics: Couleur Café - Serge Gainsbourg -- English Translation

Submitted by Sean Wingert on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 17:15

Couleur Café by Serge Gainsbourg is a wonderful song. However, its current translations into English, as shown by various Google searches (http://lyricstranslate.com/en/couleur-cafe-coffee-color.html and http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100207150610AAEDb40) are decidedly less wonderful, with one of them, hopefully machine translated, rendering "Ta gorge café" as "your throat coffee." If you've never heard the song or seen the video, here is a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDOk6nu9udo. Below is my attempt at a better translation: