Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles As an English learner, your goal is to speak English like a native English speaker, but there's something you have never been taught, something that you can't learn from English books. You see, when native English speakers are in high school and college, we are actually taught a simple rule of threes, and this is the rule I'm going to teach you today and help you apply it so that you can sound like me. Are you ready? Well then I am teacher. Tiffani, let's jump right in. Now, this rule that I am referring to is actually something my English teachers taught me. The rule goes like this, provide enough support for your thoughts, ideas, and opinions by giving three details, three examples. And or three reasons. Now I wanna show you how you can apply this rule. So let's get started now. The three details. Here's the simple explanation. The first part of this rule focuses on the important details of the topic. Subject or person you are discussing. In other words, you want to help your listener visualize what you are talking about. Let me show you how this works. In this first example, here's the first part. Let's say the topic is winter, winter weather, and someone says, tell me about the weather in your hometown. Now remember, we are working with the first part of the. Three details. So here are the details you could give your response like this, my hometown is known for its cold weather, but what happens when you add the three details? Detail number one. Blizzard detail number two, five feet of snow and detail. Number three, freezing cold. Now again, the basic response is my hometown is known for its cold weather. But how will that response change when we add the three details? Let me show you. This is what the response will look like. Now, my hometown is known for its cold weather. I live in upstate New York, and just recently we got a lot of snow. The news actually said it was a blizzard and one day over five feet of snow fell. It was freezing cold That. What happened? You suddenly started to visualize that day. Why? Because I added three details. How much snow? How did it feel? Oh, it was a blizzard. Now let me explain some of the words and expressions that I used. The first one that I wanna explain to you, just to make sure you understand is Blizzard. Yes. Good job, Blizz. Excellent. Now, a blizzard is just a severe snowstorm with high winds and low visibility. Again, it's hard to see because there's so much snow coming down. We say it's a blizzard. Now the next thing I said was freezing cold. Not just cold, but freezing cold. If you say that something is freezing or freezing cold, you are emphasizing that it is very extremely cold. In English, we say freezing cold. So again, I gave three details that helped you visualize what I was describing when I answered the question. So again, part one of the rule is, Details, giving three details to help support your idea, your thought, or your opinion. Now, what about part two of this rule? Part two is giving three examples. So the second part of this rule focuses on examples of the topic, the subject or person you are discussing. In other words, you want to help your listener understand more by giving. Real life example situations. This is part two of the rules. So let's see this in action here. Again, we're talking about winter weather. Tell me about the weather in your hometown. Same basic response. My hometown is known for its cold weather, but now remember we're looking at part two. We're discussing by giving three examples how we can speak English like a native English speaker. Here we go. Example number one, snowball fights with my siblings every winter. Example number two, building snowmen after a big snow storm. And example number three, racking up money from shoveling driveways in my neighborhood. So all of a sudden we have three different examples, three different example situations to add to our response. Let's see what our response looks like. Now here's the response, including the three example. My hometown is known for its cold weather. That's the basic response. Every year we get lots of snow. The snow helps us make so many memories as kids. I remember having snowball fights with my siblings every winter example, number one. Then we would build snowmen after every big snow storm example number. We would even rack up money from shoveling driveways in our neighborhood. Example number three. We really enjoyed the winter weather. You see how my response expanded as I gave three examples to support my idea, my thought, and my opinion. Now, within this response, I did use some new expressions. So snowball fight, snowball fight. This just refers to a playful fight, which in which people throw snowballs at each other. We love it. It's great fun. My nieces, whenever there's a snowstorm, whenever there's snow, and they would be at my, my parents' house, their grandparents. We try to have snowball fights with them, just having a good time throwing snow at each other. In English, we say snowball fight, and the next thing I used was rack up. I said we would even rack up money from shoveling driveways in our. Rack up. This just means to accumulate or gather or achieve something, typically a score or amount of something without other people knowing. Right? A, we racked up the money. We got a lot of money, we accumulated or achieved a large sum of money. We got a large sum of. Rack up. So again, we added three examples. We had our basic response. Remember the basic response was, my hometown is known for its cold weather. But when we added the three examples, what happened? We got our long response, the one that sounds like a native English. Now part three of the rule, part three of the rule is very important. Part three is three reasons. So the third part of this rule focuses on giving specific reasons for your ideas on the topic, subject or person you are discussing. In other words, you want to help your listener understand your thought process and how you developed your idea. Again, we native English speakers learned this in high school and in college, and now I want you to understand it so that you can sound like me. So here's an example. Again, the topic, winter weather. Tell me about the weather in your hometown. Same response. Same basic response of my hometown is known for its cold weather Now, reason number one, it snows like clockwork. Reason number two, the temperature never goes above 30 degrees in the winter. And reason number, Boiling water transforms into snow in a manner of matter of seconds, not manner, but matter of seconds. So we have three reasons for the basic response of my hometown being known for its cold weather. Now, how do we turn this information into a longer response? Here's how it works. My hometown is known for its cold weather. The basic response, there are three reasons why it's so famous. First, it snows like clockwork every single week. The snowfall so regularly that people stopped paying attention to the news. Second, the temperature never goes above 30 degrees in the winter. It's always cold outside. Finally, if you toss boiling water into the. It will turn into snow in a matter of seconds. What happened? I supported my idea, my thoughts with three reasons, the third part of the rule, and now we have this response that sounds like a native English speaker. Now, in this response, I also used some new expressions. The first one, like clock. Like clockwork. Now, this means that something happens regularly and almost without any interruptions. For example, normally my lessons go up on YouTube and on my podcast on Sundays like clockwork regularly, right? Again, something happens regularly and almost without any interruptions. We say like clock. Now, the next one I used was a vocabulary word toss. Now, this just means to throw something somewhere lightly and easily or casually, right? You're not throwing it hard, but you're just tossing it in the air, throwing it lightly. You got it in English, we say toss. So again, we used the three reasons to give a longer response. Now this rule is something again, that native English speakers learn the rule of three again, three details. Three examples or three reasons, use this rule to start sounding like me. I hope you enjoyed the lesson today. Don't forget if you want to keep studying with me and if you want to get my free emails with tips and English tips that will help you improve your English, all you have to do is again go to www dot. Speak English with Tiffani.com/newsletter and I'll send you English tips and much more each and every week. I hope you enjoy the lesson and I'll talk to you in the next one. Oh, you still there? ? You know what time it is. It's story time eight. I said it's story time. All right. Today I wanna tell you a story that I've told before a while ago. So I like cycling when I was in college and a little bit after college, I cycled on a regular basis. We would go out on Sundays like clockwork. You got it right, like clockwork to cycle. And I loved it. I had a road bike and I had a mountain bike. So on this one Sunday, my friend, he and I went to college together. We had graduated, both had jobs and he hit me up and he said, Hey Tiff, do you wanna go riding today? And I said, yeah, definitely. He said, let's go on a longer ride. I said, okay. There was a mountain, um, mount. Say no, I went to school in Huntsville. He said, TIFF, let's ride to Mount. Say no. I said, okay. I, it will be my first time riding to Mount, say no. So I was excited. New scenery, new road. So he said, the only thing is Tiff, the mountain is kind of high, so we have to be careful. I said, no problem. I've never been scared of heights or anything like that. So I was like, Hey, no problem. So we ride, we leave our um, apartment. We live in the same apartment complex, so we leave the apartment complex and we take the ride to the mountain. So we're riding up the mountain and it was challenging. Uh, our legs were on fire as we're riding up the mountain, but it was a good exercise, uh, a good exercise routine, a good route that we were on, right? So we're riding up the mountain and we get to the top and I was like, man, that was great. And I was looking forward to the descent, right? Going down the mountain because when you go down, it's really fast. But before we took off, my friend said, TIFF. I said, yeah, what's going? There's one thing you should know. I said, Hey, what's up? When we go down this mountain, we are going to go super fast. I said, yes, my kind of speed. He said, no, no, no, no. It's gonna be double what you're used to. I said, Double what I'm used to. You see, up until that point, he and I and some other friends we had did a lot of rides and we would get up to maybe 20, 22, 23 miles an hour and we had a great time going fast, he said, but Tiff, as we descend down the mountain, it's gonna be so steep. We are going to hit 40 miles an. I said, what'd you say He said, we're going to hit 40 miles an hour. He said, so just be very careful to avoid rocks. Now we're gonna be riding on a road with cars, so watch out for the cars, watch out for the rocks. He started telling me all this and I said, okay, wait a minute. Now again, I, I'm, I like ex um, uh, I like going fast. I was looking forward to the thrill of riding down the mountain, but I still was thinking about the fact my. A road bike, the tire is about that wide, almost an inch or less than an inch. If you hit a rock just riding at 10 miles an hour, it can throw you off the bike going 40 miles an hour, hitting a rock. That's not gonna turn out well. So I said, okay. He said, are you ready? I said, I'm ready. So we start down the mountain, 20 miles an hour, 25 miles an hour. 30, 32, 35 miles an hour, we hit 40 miles an hour. And I was passing cars. I was passing cars on my bike, looking to the right, I'm passing a car going down this mountain and it wasn't a straight, a straight hill. It was winding curves, so we had to think carefully as we were riding down the hill. So part of me was excited, like Woo. And the other part was like, TIFF, stay focused. Stay focused. Make sure you're looking at the road. Make sure you're looking at the car that's next to you that you're passing. Now I can remember it like it was yesterday, even though this happened. almost 20 years ago. I can remember it just like it was yesterday. I remember going down the last curve and turning, going 40 miles an hour, turning this bike with wheels less than an inch thick, praying, God, get me down this mountain safely. And also, oh my goodness, this is the most fun I've had in a long time. So we made it down the hill, down the mountain safely. As you can see, I'm here, and when we got down the mountain, we weren't talking at all As we were riding down, when we got down to the bottom of the mountain, we were on the road. We paused. I looked at him and he looked at me. and we both said that was amazing, . Even though there was a measure of fear and danger, we had a great time. So for you, maybe there's something you want to do and there's a measure of danger, or you're scared, even with English, you're scared of doing something, don't be scared. Realize you can do whatever you put your mind to. Enjoy the process and you will achieve your goal. I hope you enjoyed today's story and today's lesson. I'll talk to you next time.
A2 US response mountain hometown rule cold weather riding SPEAK ENGLISH LIKE A NATIVE USING THIS SIMPLE RULE 15 0 S posted on 2023/12/15 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary