English in VGs

Update on the way.. I will take care of weird sentences and spelling mistakes

Both America and Scotland are English-speaking countries. We have done some research on the differences between these two societies.

United states have their national holiday on 4^th of July which is their day of independence. Usually countries have their national holiday at the day of their independence; however Scotland celebrates their national day on St. Andrews day. St. Andrew was one of the twelve apostles to Jesus. They celebrate this day in order to honor him.

The population density in America is about half as the density in Scotland. The density in America is 33.7/km^2, and in Scotland the density is 65.61/km^2.

The national costume in Scotland is the Kilt + a Prince Charlie jacket, in the U.S.A there is no national costume because the people there are from such diverse backgrounds that costume represents Americans. The national costume goes under the group.

Some of our questions has been answers, but it would be nice if you could dedicate 2 minutes of your time.

School is free in America as well as in Scotland. How’s the school system, how long are your school days, which subjects do you have, is it much homework? It would be great if you would share that with us!

We also wonder what you guys do on your national holiday?

I want to write about online dictionaries. Why should we use online dictionaries instead of books? First of all, speed. Think about it, if you want to look up a word on your Mac, you just open up your browser and use the URL bar to type the word or question you have and you will get instant feedback. If you choose to go the old-fashioned way, you’ll have to go and find the book, and then you’ll have to look up the word you want to find. It may take two to three minutes instead of 10 seconds.

So the big question remains: which dictionary should I use? I taken the time to test out a handful of online dictionaries.

Which is the best? The two main things I looked at was the definitions of the words, is it easy to understand or is there more words that you don’t understand? The other thing I looked at was the overview of the site, is it easy to manage your way around the site, do I have to use unnecessary clicks to get to the word description?

Now you may ask how can you test out an online dictionary if you don’t search for words? Come on, I’m not stupid. We tested some words and looked on how easy it is to understand what the word means.

We start the whole test of with.. Drum roll please…………….

–> http://www.wordreference.com/

The main site looks ok, not relatively fresh. The look is kind of old, however it’s easy to know where to search. Even though it may look a little bit old it does describe the words in a good way, you don’t have to use unnecessary clicks to get to the description.

–> http://www.thefreedictionary.com

The first time I went to this site it I thought that it was really unclear where to do what. I did a few searches and got a good overview of the site really fast. The site can also translate words to a great variety of languages.

–> http://thesaurus.com/

I did not like this site. I think they focus more on ads than getting information to the “client”.

–> http://nhd.heinle.com/home.aspx

This site is ok. The site does “only” contain 40,000 entries, whereas many of the other sites has a lot more words:”19,500,236 words in 1062 dictionaries indexed” (http://www.onelook.com/)

http://www.onelook.com/

Although http://www.onelook.com/ has a huge database, the site doesn’t give an instant feedback. You’ll have to choose the dictionary you want to search in, it’s like a middleman..

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

Great site, very good explanations of the words. Instant feedback.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

This site is “ok”, however I won’t use this as my main database…

http://school.eb.co.uk/

I would not recommend this site..

My favorite:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

I will use this site much more often, and I hope you will to

The weather is terrible, everyone shops at IKEA, and Norway is expensive? Not really. Living in Norway, is not that different from living in any other country. In this post I want to clarify a few things about Norway.

#1 – The weather is awful.

When I ask people from the other side of the globe about what they think the weather in Norway is like, the answer is always “Well, I`ve heard that it`s raining all the time”. I have to tell them that it`s not like that. Although the weather is bad, it`s not raining all the time.

#2 – Everyone shops at IKEA.

IKEA is not even from Norway! IKEA is originally from Sweden, it was founded in Älmhult, Sweden in 1943. IKEA`s headquarters is now located in Delft, Netherlands.
I`m not going to learn you everything about IKEA, but you can check out the Wikipedia page.

#3 – Norway is really expensive.

Norway is not really that expensive, in fact, the only reason that people find it really expensive here is because the 25% sales tax. All price tags already include that tax, which means that the prices is only slightly higher in Norway than for example the US.

Hi, my name is Haakon. Thanks for visiting my site. On this blog I will write some of my english assignments. The site may not be really interesting right now, but trust me, it will be.