In this series we are going to be looking at ways that we can enhance and improve our learning and perhaps crushing some of the myths about learning techniques that we learnt in school.
Every day we meet people with different techniques for learning vocabulary, but most of them revolve around some pretty shaky ideas, those being ‘if you write stuff down, you’ve learnt it.’
If only things were that simple …
This rarely works, due mainly to the fact that some important steps have been missed out – those being, actively learning the vocabulary and then actively using it.
Let’s put this in prallel with sport, to illustrate the idea.
Imagine that you are a huge cycling fan and you love the Tour de France and you would like to experience the grueling (look that one up if you like) hardships of a day riding in the mountains of the Tour de France.
So, you get all the magazines about the Tour and mountain cycling, you have the maps and you have read all the technical stuff on hydration and nutrition during a massive climb in the Pyrenees mountains in the south of France.
You have even chosen your mountain, Le Col du Tourmalet – wow! that’s a big one, and have bought a fabulously expensive ‘S-Works’ bicycle for the climb.
You’ve seen the videos and read all the information, but that’s as far as you go – THAT is how a lot of people learn – they don’t go the final mile of training before getting on the bike after weeks of muscle and stamina building. They don’t prepare for the day that they will be climbing Tourmalet on their bike.
OK, they know all about Tourmalet, Le Tour de France and mountaing cycling – but they have no guarantee of ever being able to achieve the ascent of a mountain on their bicycle.
Listen to the podcast, N°1 in a series, to get some ideas to improve your learning.
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Staying focused, motivated and driven can be tricky, especially when you have a busy working and/or family life to deal with.
Check out this podcast to find 10 golden rules for staying motivated learning English.
When we start learning something new, it can be a novel experience at the start and we want to put a lot of effort into our learning, but as time goes on, we can start to flag and at times we just cannot get the motivation to continue learning.
This is especially true if we don’t have a clear plan for our learning or if we can’t see our progress moving along as fast as we would have expected.
Try some of these golden rules.
How many are you using now?
How many come as a surprise to you?
Will you try and use some of them?
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How do you learn new vocabulary?
Do you make lists, or mind maps, or translate into your own language?
In this video you’ll pick up some great tips and have a good laugh at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCoAI8vUKuk&t=75s
Tag questions are questions added to a short sentence, usually at the end, to engage the listener, check understanding or confirm that an action has heppened.
Tag questions are very common in natural English and they can also have distinct meaning according to the tone used with the tag, a rising tone and a descending tone can communicate very different meanings from the question asked as you will find out in this podcast.
Common tags include: Won’t you? Wasn’t it? Don’t you? Haven’t you? Wasn’t it? Wouldn’t you? Isn’t it? Isn’t there? etc.
Listen to the tag question examples we use in the podcast.
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It’s so nice to be polite isn’t it? When we ask direct questions, especially to people we do not know very well, we can come across as being too abrupt or even as rude, something we would like to avoid at all costs.
In this podcast we will explain how to easily change direct questions into more polite forms, very useful to avoid any sticky situations.
Polite questions are particularly useful when we need to ask for confidential or sensitive information, where a direct question would probably not elicit an answer, such as, ‘How old are you?’ or ‘How much do you weigh?’ etc.
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