Learning a new language is always tough, and one thing that makes matters even more complicated is homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same when pronounced, but have different meanings. They are often a source of confusion in the English language, and even native speakers make mistakes.
Struggling to distinguish between two or even more homophones? These tips can help you take control of this tricky English phenomenon:
Write down and create your own personal dictionary of the homophones you come across in your new language. That way, you will have access to them when in doubt.
Use flashcards! These are a fun and effective method to remember homophones. There are plenty of apps to use for that very purpose, such as Memrise.
Help yourself with mnemonic sentences such as: “We didn’t see the sea, but we did take a stroll through the city center.”
Associate each homophone with a color, an object, or something to set it apart. For example, beat of the drum, but also red beet.
Identify the position in the sentence that each homophone tends to come in. If it’s a verb, such as break, it usually comes after a noun, but if it’s after “the”, it’s a noun, such as brake.
Ad is short for ‘advertisement’, while add can mean anything from calculating a sum to joining two or more elements together.
Board can be a long, thin piece of wood, or to ‘get on’ a plane or ship, in case it’s a verb, while bored means ‘disinterested’ or ‘weary’.
To die means to ‘cease living’, while dye is related to painting something (hair) in a different color.
Example: I had to dye my hair, because the hairdresser did such a poor job, I thought I was going to die.
This list is a great place to start if you are serious about learning the ins and outs of the English language. Practice and you will master them in no time!
Sophia Anderson is an English language tutor and a freelance writer at AU Essaysontime. She is passionate about covering topics on learning, writing, self-improvement and others. She believes in the driving force of positive attitude and constant development. Talk to her on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Alex is Memrise’s Language Learner in Residence. He spends his time working with the Language Research Team, making fun videos about languages, and contributing to the Memrise blog. He tweets @rawlangs_alex. In his free time he enjoys cooking, watching films, and walking his dog. He also writes books, like this one.
Hospitality industry experts across the nation are forecasting that 2012 will continue the growth and recovery of room demands that started in 2011. 1 With that in mind, it is a good idea to revisit a topic we spoke a lot about in 2011: best practices in conversion optimization that works for hotel websites. Why? Because our RevPAR will recover a lot better if these additional demands are converting on our own website rather than OTAs! Without any particular order, the top Conversion Optimization Best Practices for hotel websites are:
Trust Factor comes from many different sources; it could be a money back guarantee for retail website or certificates/credentials for a law firm’s site. For a hotelier, things that help build trust on the website are things like:
And most important of all, a site design that follows eye tracking and usability guidelines. If you haven’t had a chance to read about it, you can find it here: https://blog.milestoneinternet.com/web-development/eye-tracking-usability-and-neuromarketing-research-ses-san-francisco/
De-cluttering of pages. This is an effort to prevent “Banner Blindness”, ensure all the pages of your website have a clear and concise purpose, and to avoid confusing your website visitors. This is especially important on pages with conversion elements. “Banner Blindness” is having multiple banners for special packages on the same page, this actual distract the visitor from making a purchase decision and adds to their decision-making fatigue!2
To sum it all up, we believed the three most important best practices for Conversion Optimization on a hotel website is adding trust factors, following call to action best and usability best practices, and focusing our web pages to prevent banner blindness.
One more that I would add to the list of conversion optimization best practices… Test each every change that you make to your website to see which change performs the best. You can perform A/B tests or multivariate tests using any number of testing tools (Google Website Optimizer, Visual Website Optimizer, etc.).