Are we even sure that we're learning English at this point?
🤩 The most recent trend in English Olympiad tasks has pointed to an increase in the popularity of linguistic puzzles: from rebuses to homonyms.
🤩 Although such tasks are an unconventional way of testing your English knowledge, they can involve your feel for the language, as well as your creativity and even the knowledge of unusual and obscure phrases.
Storytime 🤩
This goes to all the people that think that the jurors pluck the phrases out of nowhere. In 2024, the answer for one of the puzzles was the phrase "fender bender."
Our entire team was enraged, as the phrase itself was ridiculously odd and, once again, obscure. If you look this up in a reliable dictionary, it is registered as informal and North American - essentially, American slang.
Several months later, I was casually reading a book in English and, voilà - fender bender.
Moral of the story? Obscure by no means implies non-existent, just more specific and woven into the context. The more you subject yourself to raw, unprocessed English, not just the textbooks, the better.
However, having a deep understanding of the language is not enough even for a native speaker to solve such tasks well. This is why it's necessary to practise soving linguistic puzzles, rebuses and word games.
These formats are veeery peculiar. Thus, you can't expect to find many materials on them. However, I can offer some books that you could use in your preparation.🤩
Useful textbooks with riddles:
🧐Test Your Vocabulary 5 by Peter Watcyn-Jones and Mark Farrell - a mish-mash of Use of English, vocabulary exercises and crosswords. It's really good for learning and practising new topic vocabulary. Although it includes linguistic puzzles, they aren't plentiful.
🧐Advanced Vocabulary and Idioms by B J Thomas - the holiest of holy grails when it comes to the Use of English. In fact, task writers used one of the exercises from here to make up an actual zakl task. This is one of the books that you must solve, no ifs or buts + make sure to pay attention to the exercises in the grey boxes!! If I could, I'd probably kiss this book.
🧐1000 Trios by Krzysztof Kiljan - literally a book with 1000 trio tasks. This format originally comes from the CPE and CAE exams. The tasks from this book can get quite unhinged in terms of the content. Interestingly, the writers took some of the exercises from this book and included them in one of the recent final stages. Make sure to solve a good portion of this book, if not the entire thing.
🧐Great Lengths by Gulov - check out the use of English tasks from the units in this book, they are specifically focused on zakl-type tasks. I, personally, think that the greatest merit of this book are the integrated and reading tasks, but some puzzles from here are pretty good, too.
🤩 Don't forget to solve the past papers! Resist the urge to look up the answers right away, no matter how ridiculous the task may seem. You need to train your brain muscle for this and seeing the correct responses right away won't do the trick.
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