Pragmatic and practical. It may well be time to rehabilitate the first of these words, because I have lost track of the ideological interpretation of it, sometimes
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Satisfied and happy. I can't believe I've never done this - maybe there are some living witnesses out there who can remind me. Normally it is not good enough to
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There are quite different concepts of nouns (podstatné mená) in Slovak and English, and the Pinkerton piece provides some good examples. The concept of countable and
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The word "outstanding" is a good example of the practical need to learn a minimum of two Slovak translations for each English word, and vice-versa, allowing students
to...
Tender. I've done this before a couple of times, but it's here again. This is a tricky word in Slovak, because it is used here, for example in the original Slovak
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There's a good play on words (otherwise known as a pun in English) in the Slovak title for the piece on the hearing-impaired teenagers' football tournament: "Zlato do
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This week's extracts are good sources of expressions called collocations, which are word combinations that are generally accepted by native speakers as "typical" or
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Smell. This can be a countable noun (a smell, probably "pach" in Slovak) or a verb, but with two meanings, one transitive (to smell something, like "We can't smell the
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Workshop. The English word "shop" originally meant the same as the Slovak "šopa", really. It meant a lean-to shed, a primitive shelter built (leaning) up against a
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I would like to be able to explain how it happens that modern English words become used in Slovak with a different meaning compared with the original. These form a new
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Open versus opened. There could be a competition to find the greatest number of different uses (with different meanings in different contexts) of the word "open". Even
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Last week we looked at the difference between "open" and "opened", where the former is an ordinary adjective whereas the latter is a past (passive) participle, but
this...
This week's extracts are quite full of doctors, and the title Doctor is relatively tricky. I would expect most native English speakers to understand doctor as meaning
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Analyst. This is tricky from the pronunciation point of view, which is something I haven't looked at systematically for quite a while. Normally I say to people that if
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One of the reasons why particular words are tricky is because they develop new meanings through use. Words that are over-used become devalued, like old banknotes, then
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Handling and manipulation. These words with originally similar meaning come from very different roots, German and Latin respectively. As is typical in these cases, the
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There are various tricky words in this week's extracts, so I shall go through them one by one. First of all award, which as a noun means something like a prize, and as
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Ešte pred novým ročníkom hokejovej extraligy, kedy sa tvorilo mužstvo HC Košice pre sezónu 2006/2007 bolo známe, že náš odchovanec Jirko Bicek zotrvá v...
There is more than the average incidence of words with superlative meanings in this week's extracts. There are "prestigious awards" at the film festival, "outstanding
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Time expressions referring to the past can be tricky, because you need to know EITHER that they specify "when" something happened (started and finished) in the past,
OR...
The most obvious tricky word in this week's extracts is Gymnasts /džymnasc/, because if you don't think twice, you could fall into the trap of associating this word
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Hut - a relatively small, simple, usually wooden, house-like construction - and a typical example of the way that even ordinary words in different languages don't
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This week I'm focusing on the word "splnit" (as in "splnit detske zelania"), because there's a difference in spelling (pravopis) between British and American English.
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V priestoroch Arcidiecéznej charity na Bosákovej ulici v Košiciach sa 23. decembra 2005 uskutočnilo vianočné posedenie pre bezdomovcov. Už od rána tu vládol...