Your English Test guide

🐄 To celebrate the upcoming launch of The Bovine View Almanac 2025–2026, Hilda and Maude have officially made their debut as Telegram stickers! 🎉 Over the past couple of days I've been teaching the two girls how to express themselves without saying a word (not always an easy task! 😄). From "Aww, shucks." to "English Error!", "Cool!", "I don't know.", "Hilda Likes", "Hilda Loves", and plenty more, they're now ready to join your conversations. The sticker pack is completely free, so please do install it, use it, and share it with your friends. Let's see if we can get Hilda and Maude grazing all over Telegram! 🐄🌍 Just tap "Share Stickers" 👈 here to install the pack. Thank you to everyone who's followed the girls' journey from a simple cartoon to what is becoming The Bovine View Almanac. I hope they bring a smile to your Telegram chats as well! #TheBovineView #TelegramStickers #LearnEnglish

Over the past couple of days I've been teaching the two girls how to express themselves without saying a word (not always an easy task! 😄). From "Aww, shucks." to "English Error!", "Cool!", "I don't know.", "Hilda Likes", "Hilda Loves", and plenty more, they're now ready to join your conversations . The sticker pack is completely free, so please do install it, use it, and share it with your friends. Let's see if we can get Hilda and Maude grazing all over Telegram! 🐄🌍 Just tap "Share Stickers" below to install the pack. Thank you to everyone who's followed the girls' journey from a simple cartoon to what is becoming The Bovine View Almanac. I hope they bring a smile to your Telegram chats as well! #TheBovineView #TelegramStickers #LearnEnglish

🍓 Did you know today is National Raspberry Day in the USA? When you hear the word raspberry, you probably think of the delicious red fruit.🤩🌸🍓 But in English, to blow a raspberry means something completely different. It means to stick out your tongue and make a rude buzzing noise with your lips! 🎥 Watch today's one-minute video to see the expression in action. So how can one word have two completely different meanings?🤔🤔 The fruit is, of course, a raspberry. The rude noise, however, comes from Cockney rhyming slang. The expression raspberry tart rhymed with fart, and over time it was shortened to simply raspberry. That's why we now say to blow a raspberry. This brings us to an interesting piece of English vocabulary. Some words have more than one meaning.❌2️⃣ If the meanings are completely unrelated, we usually call them homonyms. If the meanings are related and have developed from the same original idea, we call this polysemy. For example: 👤 Head is an example of polysemy: • the head on your body • the head of a company • the head of a table All of these meanings share the idea of being "at the top" or "in charge." Today's word raspberry, however, is generally considered a homonym because its two meanings have different origins. 📊 Now try today's Telegram poll below! Can you decide whether each word is a homonym or an example of polysemy? Test yourself before reading the explanations. Good luck! #LearnEnglish #EnglishVocabulary #NationalRaspberryDay #WordOfTheDay

Listen carefully to the audio attached to the poll.

Listen carefully to the audio attached to the poll.

✈️ Today is National Air Traffic Control Day in the USA! If you've ever seen the comedy classic Airplane!, you'll probably remember one of the most famous exchanges in movie history. Before take-off, the pilots are talking to the air traffic controllers in the tower:

"We have clearance, Clarence."

"Roger, Roger. What's our vector, Victor?"

It's funny because everyone gets confused. But imagine that confusion happening not before take-off, but at 30,000 feet, travelling at 500 km/h, with a plane full of passengers. Not so funny anymore. That's exactly why pilots, air traffic controllers, emergency services, and many other professionals use something called the International Radio Alphabet (IRA). In fact, I found myself needing it last week. I was teaching an online word game in which my students had to solve clues and then spell the answers aloud so that I could fill in a grid. Unfortunately, because of the internet connection, some of the letters weren't always easy to distinguish. Was that:

M?

No, not N — M!

Or:

C?

No, not S — C!

After a few attempts, I suggested using the International Radio Alphabet instead. The problem? None of my students knew what it was! 😄 So today's post was born. 📻 What is the International Radio Alphabet? Instead of saying:

❌ "B... no, not D... B!"

you say:

✅ "Bravo"

Each word represents one letter of the alphabet: Letter Word Letter Word A Alpha N November B Bravo O Oscar C Charlie P Papa D Delta Q Quebec E Echo R Romeo F Foxtrot S Sierra G Golf T Tango H Hotel U Uniform I India V Victor J Juliett W Whiskey K Kilo X X-ray L Lima Y Yankee M Mike Z Zulu ✍️ When is it useful? The International Radio Alphabet is useful whenever you need to spell out: your name, a place, an email address, a booking reference, or any word that could easily be misunderstood. It's also useful in high-stakes situations, such as language proficiency tests, where you may be asked to spell your name or other information accurately. For example, in exams such as IELTS, the examiner may not be familiar with the spelling conventions of your first language and may need to check them carefully. Using the International Radio Alphabet can help avoid misunderstandings. For example, my first name Michael becomes:

Mike – India – Charlie – Hotel – Alpha – Echo – Lima

Much easier than:

"M? No, not N — M!"

"C? No, not S — C!" 😄

🎧 Listening Challenge I've recorded a short audio message using the International Radio Alphabet. Can you decode what I'm saying? 👉 Head to the poll below and choose the correct answer!

Listen to the music.

#AmericanEnglish #IndependenceDay #EnglishLanguage Happy 4th of July! 🇺🇸 Today marks the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence.🎆 We'd like to congratulate all our American friends on the most important day in the American national calendar. As Brits, we're not too disheartened that things turned out the way they did. In fact, we're rather glad that our two countries remain as close as they are. After all, as the saying often attributed to George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill goes, Britain and America are "two nations divided by a common language." Perhaps the reason we can still joke about each other after 250 years is precisely because we share that language. But just how independent is American English? A fascinating BBC Future article explores how America didn't simply separate from Britain politically in 1776. Over the following 250 years, it also developed its own vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation, and attitudes towards language. 🔗 BBC Future: : How America reinvented English 👈 Americans write color, center, and defense. Britons write colour, centre, and defence. Americans take the elevator to their apartment. Brits take the lift to their flat. And here's a twist: some words we think of as "American" are actually older English words that Britain later used less. For example, Americans still commonly use fall instead of autumn, a word that was once widespread in Britain too. So if American English continues to develop independently, should it eventually stop being called American English altogether? Should Americans simply say: "I speak American!!" But then where does it stop? Do Canadians speak Canadian? Do Australians speak Australian? Do New Zealanders speak New Zealandish? Do Indians speak Indian? Do South Africans speak South African? And what about Ireland, where Irish already refers to a completely different language? Perhaps this is why linguists usually prefer terms such as: 🇺🇸 American English 🇨🇦 Canadian English 🇦🇺 Australian English 🇳🇿 New Zealand English 🇮🇳 Indian English 🇿🇦 South African English 🇮🇪 Irish English What do you think? Do Americans speak American? Answer in the poll below.👇

🐄🌿 Happy Bovine Day! 🌿🐄 It's the first Friday of July, the weather is finally behaving itself, and Hilda and Maude have moved from the kitchen to the garden for the summer.🏖️ Moving to the garden🌱 led to a search for some garden-related language news, and that search found a fascinating research paper published on 25 June 2026 about garden-path sentences. These are sentences that lead us towards the wrong meaning before forcing us to stop and think again. Why is this important now? Because researchers are always looking for ways to help AI systems 🤖 understand language faster and more accurately. One idea is that both humans and AI make probability-based guesses about what words and sentence structures are likely to come next. Garden-path 🇺🇿 sentences are especially useful because they show what happens when those guesses are wrong. By studying them, scientists hope to learn more about both human language and artificial intelligence. The researchers didn't just describe the problem — they also tried to explain it mathematically. Our explanation here is very much an INS (In a Nutshell Summary). The real mathematics is considerably more complicated, but if you'd like to explore it, the full paper is linked here.👈 Interestingly, this is not just an English problem. People speaking many different languages can also be led up the "garden path". This happens because our brains naturally try to predict meaning before a sentence has finished. The expression "to lead someone up the garden path" means to confuse or deliberately mislead someone, which makes it a perfect name for these sentences. 🌿 What do garden-path sentences look like? Read these sentences slowly. At first, they may seem wrong or incomplete. • The horse raced past the barn fell. • The florist sent the flowers was pleased. • The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi. • The old man the boat. Now read them again. Try to work out where your brain took the wrong path. ✏️ How can we make them easier to understand? The horse raced past the barn fell.👇

The horse, raced past the barn, fell. (Commas show that "raced past the barn" is a participial clause.)

The florist sent the flowers was pleased.

The florist, sent the flowers, was pleased. (Commas show that "sent the flowers" is a participial clause.)

The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

The cotton that clothing is made of grows in Mississippi. (Adding the relative pronoun that clarifies the sentence.)

The old man the boat.

The old people man the boat. (The word man is a verb her e, meaning "to operate".)

🧠 Can you choose the correctly punctuated sentence? Below this post, you'll find a poll containing four garden-path sentences. Each question has three possible punctuated versions. Can you choose the correct one? Good luck — and try not to be led up the garden path! 🌿🐄🇺🇿💭 #TheBovineView #GardenPathSentences #LearnEn