Links for pleasure

To keep up a good level of English you have to practise it. Reading books, newspapers or magazines in English, seeing films in the original version, travelling, going out with English-speaking friends - all these activities and others are good for maintaining your level.

However, today we've got the internet. For those who have all they need for surfing, here are some interesting sites.

For all today's news in English, two of the best British newspapers are The Guardian and The Independent.

The Guardian site is completely free, but you have to pay for certain things in The Independent. I'm sure that soon we'll have to pay to read the papers on internet, but for now (and for ever, according to their editorial policy) The Guardian provides you with a huge source of news and articles.

For everything about sport in English - which you can also read on the sites above - the place with the most information is Sky Sports.

For those who like the cinema, a site that's got everything you need to know about films: actors, plots, directors...

And if you're hungry and fancy some English food (?), there's plenty of information and all the recipes you could need from the UK and Ireland.

There are lots of interactive sites you can visit and waste plenty of time. One of the best will try to guess any object you happen to think of. You have to answer a maximum of twenty questions and almost certainly the computer will know the object before the twentieth. It beats me every time. But it's also a perfect way to revise or perfect question forms. You have to be a member to play, but it's free and you don't have to use your real name.

For when you've got some free time and want to look for something a bit less serious, here are some more websites.

Somewhere with loads of terrible jokes, all in English.

Somewhere you can test your knowledge of trivia, with a new test every week and a huge permanent archive of information.

Somewhere to find out about ridiculous laws all over the world that have never been repealed.

And finally somewhere that has converted some songs into karaoke 'sung' by online dictionaries.

Two more websites that really haven't got anything to do with English, but they're fun.

In the first one you can create the choreography for a disco cow and then see the results by video.

And in the second one you have to help a penguin get back to his spaceship. Unfortunately you have to do it using a catapult and the poor penguin spends a lot of time being bounced off planets.

And finally the BBC website. It contains everything from news and entertainment to games for kids and activities for practising your English.