Here are 5 great ways to improve your English

And the best part, have fun doing it

Okay, so starting off with the first one

I know you’ve probably heard this tons of times

Watching a movie, like you can’t learn from watching a movie

Well you know what, I actually had this student in Brazil

And… her English is really good. I asked her where did she learn English

And she said, “Friends”. Crazy

But she did have limitations, you know

But some of her grammar maybe wasn’t that great but she communicated really well

So anyway, watch a movie or TV series

At the beginning, I think it’s a really good idea for with subtitles

And even later on sometimes it’s good to see the way the language is broken up

So here is a quote, the opening scene from a movie called “Rounders”

A really good movie with…

who was it… Edward Norton is in it. Matt Damon I think

“Listen, here’s the thing. ”

“If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table,”

“then you are the sucker.”

Okay, so any guess what…

I mean, if you haven’t seen the movie, you don’t know what…

At the table. Any idea what the…

Yeah, they’re playing poker. That’s it

And the sucker. The sucker is someone who’s easily tricked or conned

So there’s tons of language in here and this is just

like the smallest amount right here that I’m giving you

But throughout the movie, there’s so much that you can get from it

Here’s another thing. Read a book, newspaper, or read something online

The only problem with things online sometimes, um…

Depending on the site, if it’s like a reputable site

Like a good site where there’re people who are writing

and English is their first language or they’re just good writers

Then you’ll see very good quality writing. But sometimes

the writing online can be quite poor

So you just have to be careful about that

But reading a book, it helps you to expand your vocabulary

Helps you with grammar and tenses and things

So you know some of the tenses like…

But seeing it on paper written well,

you can sort of see better examples of it

But one of the most important things, too,

is choose something that is at your level

Because if it’s not at your level, then you’re gonna get frustrated,

put it down, and then you’re not learning anything

Okay, something else

So, don’t get, you know, all hard on yourself, okay

There’s plenty to learn with children’s poems

So here’s a little poem here

There are no happy endings, endings are the saddest part

So just give me a happy middle and a very happy start

So that was by Shel Silverstein.

He was a great children’s author

It’s a great way for you to practice your pronunciation

And the rhythm and also, so pronunciation we know that…

This part rhymes with start. Part, start.

You can think of other words that rhyme with those words

So that’s another great thing to do

The 4th thing that you can do is that you can write

Get an article from the newspaper

Find all the nouns, for example, and change them

You can also do the same thing with adjectives.

Replace them with similar words, adjectives

For more advanced students, you can take clauses and change the endings

So for example, “when man first harnessed fire, no one recorded it.”

Well, we could also say maybe, “when man first harnessed fire”…

I don’t know.

Everyone had a barbecue

Or we could change man to woman

First discovered

Instead of fire, maybe you wanna put nail polish

And then, well, anyway, you can

You can think of so many different ways to change the sentence

But we kind of got the first sort of clause here

So you can just sort of play around with it

And the good thing this is it really helps you to maybe

expand or use certain clauses as ways of writing

that you wouldn’t maybe normally think about

But you can try it and you can use someone else’s writing styles

So that’s really great. I mean all great artists started off by stealing, so…

Okay, and last but not least, of course

The best thing, number 5, talk with someone

Videos are great, especially this one

But they don’t talk back, so um

Yeah, you’re probably wondering why am I not talking right now

You probably maybe tried to push the button right there

I know it’s frustrating, but you couldn’t tell me that

I know, so that’s the frustrating thing about videos

But they can be good, and anyway

So these five great things right here

The watching a movie,

uh what was the next one? Reading, reading children’s poems

Writing and talking to someone.

Those are great ways for you to improve your English

And you know, have fun doing it

So anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did

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