English in Europe

Ze Langadzh of ze Urop

 (You will understand this title when you read the text)

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that would be known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, 's' will replace the soft 'c'. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard 'c' will be dropped in favour of the 'k'. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome 'ph' will be replased with the 'f'. This will make words like 'fotograf' 20% shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double leters which have always been a deterent to akurate speling. Also al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent 'e' in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl will be reseptiv to steps such as replasing 'th'with 'z' and 'w' with 'v'. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary 'o' be dropd from vords kontaining 'ou' and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to oza kombinations of letas.

After ziz fifz yer ve vil have a rali sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu anderstand ech oza. Ze drem of an united Urop vil finali kum tru!

   
                                                  

Expressões Idiomáticas

You know those expressions that we sometimes use in Portuguese, like “A casa caiu”, “Ele bateu as botas”, or “Comi o pão que o diabo amassou”? Well, every language has expressions like that, and they usually don’t make any sense when we translate them into another language. These are called “IDIOMS” -  which doesn’t mean “idioma”, you see? Here are some of the most common ones in English:

1. Piece of cake – When you have something to do and you think it’s going to be easy to do it, you can say: That’s a piece of cake!”

2. Costs an arm and a leg – This is used when you want to buy something but you think it’s very expensive and you can’t afford it.

3. Break a leg – When a friend is going on a job interview and you want to wish him good luck, you can use this expression.  It means good luck!

4. Hit the books – If you’re a student in an English speaking environment you’re probably going to be hearing this phrase a lot. Hit the books actually means to study.

5. Let the cat out of the bag – Why would someone put their cat in a bag? What did the cat ever do to them? It actually means to reveal a secret.