Dictionary review transcription

After having looked at various monolingual online dictionaries in this week's English class we got the task to review one of them in a group of four. My group chose the vocabulary.com-dictionary and tried to give a well-structured overview of the different features it offers. The next paragraph shows you what I actually said about it:

‘And there’s another special feature: There’s some kind of vocabulary list and you can add different words to your vocabulary list. And there are also some given lists where you can look at different words and their meanings and example sentences and you can learn this words and repeat them and the spelling… And there is also something called the challenge and there you have to guess the different meanings of a word and it’s also some kind of game to improve your English.’

When I first heard my voice on the record I had a really strange feeling. But then, when I made a transcript of what I actually said, this feeling didn't disappear but got stronger. Why? Here comes the answer ;-)

• I have already noticed my over-usage of the word “and” in earlier days when doing presentations. While listening I realised that this habit obviously gets worse when I haven’t got much time to prepare what I’m going to say. I should definitely work on that and find different linking words in order to avoid my thousands of ANDs.
• While reading the second sentence it’s obvious that it would have been better to stop somewhere and start a new sentence, because the end of it doesn’t make much sense and only confuses the one who is listening à ‘…and you can learn this words and repeat them and the spelling’ - First of all, in order to be grammatically correct, it should be ‘THESE words’ instead of ‘this words’ and the second thing is that I should have mentioned that “spelling bee” is a special offer on vocabulary.com to learn the spelling of the words of your vocabulary list.
• Last but not least “the challenge” should be explained more detailed: At first you read a sentence where one word is missing and the next step is that you have to guess the suitable word out of four different choices! In my opinion it’s a nice way of learning vocabulary but it may not lead to the desired success ;-)

Here is the link to vocabulary.com - just in order you want to know what exactly I have been talking about in this post ;-)