Summary

Learning a foreign language is not easy. You may have a lot of technical resources, but your attitude to learning is very important to be successful in your studies. It is necessary to have a strong will, clear objectives, and a lot of patience. In the first text, you will read about this in detail. The other two texts in this unit introduce basic elements in a computer system: in the second text you will read about the computer hardware; in the third, you will read about the internal components of a computer.

The grammar of a language is very important because it tells you which form a word must adopt and how you must place the words in a sentence. In the first section of this unit, you will study some basic words, like nouns, determiners (for example, the articles and the demonstratives) and the personal pronouns, which are used to talk about nouns (for example, I, him, her, you, etc.). Next, yo will find information about the auxiliary verbs (be, have and do), which we use to form other verb tenses. Finally, you will study other groups of basic words, like the quantifers and the intensifiers. The quantifiers are used to express the quantity of a noun; on the other hand, the intensifiers are placed before an adjective or an adverb to add the intensity to the meaning. We will also make a special reference to the English numbers and how they are used.

This unit also deals with the four skills of a language (listening, speaking, reading and writing). In the first section, you will learn about the two oral skills (listening and speaking), and in the second section you will learn about the two written skills (reading and writing). The unit also introduces a section called ‘Everyday language’, which explains what is called the ‘functional’ or, sometimes, ‘social language’. Functional language refers to the words and expressions which we use in our daily life. In this unit, you will learn how to introduce yourself and others and how to greet people.

You will also find lists of basic words which are frequently used in the world of computers. In this unit, you will find some general terms related to the field of computing, as well as words related to the hardware and the internal components of a computer system.

There is also a text explaining how to translate a text from English into Catalan or Spanish, and the tecniques and resources we can use to make a translation. This is important because we must often translate texts from one language to another when we are learning a foreign language, but we might also do so in our working life, especially if we have to deal with instructions and manuals in English.