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Learning animal nouns is a great way to help students feel where they are.
What I mean by this is students who have never lived in so-called ‘English’ countries
may be unfamiliar with animals there.
Animals foreign to their country.
Animal names are practical to learn,
but contribute to the more creative English communication I teach in the top level lessons.
They are used in idioms, metaphors, complex nouns, complex adjectives and even phrasal verbs.
The biggest problem is that in my experience,
there is rarely enough time to learn even a sufficient quantity of animal nouns
to qualify most students with more than an intermediate level of animal vocabulary.
If you studied English as a child, you probably had more exposure to animal nouns in story books
and fables than ninety-five per cent of people who started studying English as adults.
In one lesson, I teach the following ten animal nouns:
rabbit, skunk, fox, bear, deer, porcupine, squirrel, owl, beaver, racoon.
These are fun animal names and can be useful when teaching other grammar rules later in a course.
Knowing a lot of animal nouns is less important for fluency than it is for comprehension.
You will eventually hear and read a significant number of animal nouns in and out of context.
The more of these words you can learn by sight and sound,
the better your comprehension will become.
As your English develops, to achieve a high level of sophistication,
try learning variants between male and female nouns for animals
and eventually nouns for the young of an animal family.
There are a lot of lists available for these on the internet
and in the reference section of several larger dictionaries.
Read some and pay attention for their spelling.