Hello Dominique & All You Lovely Students of English!

Hello Dominique & All You Lovely Students of English!




Hi Dominique,
It's lovely to meet you! I was so happy to turn on my laptop this morning and see two wonderful posts from you, and I thought I had better hop to it and reply!
Some of you may be thinking "hmmm...I know this guy from somewhere", well if you have been following the BBC blogs for a while you may remember me from way back in summer 2006. I was the second teacher blogger. Go on, take a peek and see how the blog used to be four years ago...
A few things have changed since then as you can imagine. So let me write a few lines about myself before getting back to Dominique (I hope you don't mind). My name is Lewis and I live just west of London in an area often called the 'home counties'. I am happily married and have a 2 year old boy called Oscar. He's a little terror, but of course, I love him to bits! My wife, Tomono, is from Kochi in Japan and we have been married for just over 5 years. We moved back to England in December 2006 and have lived here since then.
Okay, back to Dominique... Again it's really nice to meet you! I've never been to Cameroon, or indeed Africa, so I can't wait to get to know you a bit better and learn all about your life, family and culture. I just hope a month will be enough. I'm so happy that you are dedicated to improving your English and you have summed up the courage to write about your life in this blog. From my experience it takes a lot of guts and I really admire you for it.
Here's how I'd like to help. I will respond to your posts and help you to notice any errors you made by using the same vocabulary and expressions in my blog. I will italicise any corrections so you can 'notice' them and then look back at your post and see how to improve it.
Does that make sense? Lets look at an example:
I often jump on the scales myself and complain about my weight just like you.
Ok, did you notice what I did? I took your expression 'complaining about this weight' and re-worded it with the more natural phrase 'complaining about my weight'. Simple!
I will also add lots of useful new words and phrases in bold so you can add them to your vocabulary books with the correct collocation.
So have no fear Dominique, you are not hopeless at English at all! I'm so impressed with the enthusiasm and energy in your writing.
I look forward to reading a lot more about you.
Best,
Lewis
Useful vocab:
(to) hop to (something)
(to) take a peek (at something)
(to) love someone to bits
(to) sum up the courage (to do something)
(something) takes a lof of guts