Learn some English (should they be Latin, French) words.

This article from dailywritingtips.com does exactly what I wanted to do a while ago. I was writing a report and was not sure how to use some of those expressions described in the article. Particularly the usage of "per" and "per se". I did a bit of research and figured out how to use them and thought about writing a blog to share the knowledge with my other friends, for whom English is not their first language. So read this article and learn about "De Facto", "Vis-à-Vis", "Status quo", "Cul-de-sac", "Per se" and "Ad hoc".

I have only one thing to add to this article ... the usage of "per".

E.g. Changes have been made as per our earlier arrangement.

Search on Answers.com shows the following results

per (pûr)

prep.

1. To, for, or by each; for every: Gasoline once cost 40 cents per gallon.
2. According to; by: Changes were made to the manuscript per the author's instructions.
3. By means of; through.

adv. Informal.

1. For each one; apiece: sold the cookies for one dollar per.
2. Per hour: was driving at 60 miles per.

[Latin.]

So, the example above can also be written as

"Changes have been made according to our earlier arrangement."

I remember vividly the first time i encountered this word. It was in a uni assignment, where we were required to write a program "per requirements". Before this, I only knew "per" used in "$10 per kilogram", so I thought that we needed to write a program "for each of the requirements" ... luckily, it was a group assignment and one of my group members is a native English speaker ...

Another site that is very helpful for learning English is

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html