WEEKLY ENGLISH PODCAST

Podcast 6 – Do I need to travel to a foreign country to learn English? NO

Hi and welcome to our podcast. You already know that what we want to do is help you learn English and do it in a way that you will use it and remember it forever. Effort and time is all you need. But you already know that. My name’s Rohit and this is English Before Going to Bed, brought to you by GoGetter English.

Today I want to jump right into the nitty gritty of our podcast, because it’s one of those things that bother our students a lot. Very often my students tell me that they wish they could go abroad and live in an speaking-English country in order to improve their English. I know they’re saying it because that’s the conclusion they have come to, after years and years of unsuccessfully studying, not learning, English. But today I want to put an end to this widespread belief. Enough!

In one of our previous podcasts we talked about how listening and transcribing can increase your English level. That is of course if you do these activities often and with meaningful and thorough follow up. Well today I’ll take you through the whole learning process, when it comes to learning English. We will answer the typical statements like: Am I too old to learn? Do I need a native teacher? Do I have to buy grammar books? We’ll go through all of these in just a second. 

But before that I want to tell you the story that inspired today’s podcast. you know there’s always something that sparks my imagination. And I’m sure my wife is going to kill me after this podcas, but hey, we came to play, right?

I met my wife in high-school, yes you could say we are highschool sweet hearts. We’ve spent more time together than we have on our own throughout life. Yes a whole eternity stuck with the same person. In my case, I was lucky enough to have been able to attend high-school in Spain. Perhaps, someday I could tell you all about my Gulliver travels in another podcast.

My wife and I were in the same classes during our school time, and way before we even thought of, well, let me rephrase that, way before I even thought of dating her, my wife had told me that her parents were planning to send her to England for a month during our summer break to improve her English. I thought to myself that that wasn’t the best way to learn English, and immediately told my wife that she would be wasting her time (and her parents’ money) if she decided to go on a month long exchange program. 

Well, we never spoke about that again. Our summer vacation started and logically I didn’t even remember to ask my wife (back then my class-mate) if she had finally decided to go abroad. Once summer was over and we resumed our classes, my wife came up to me at recess and said: You were right, I didn’t learn anything at all. 

That was the only time I have ever been right. Seriously. 

My wife then told me about her experience while being an exchange student in Eastbourne, England. She told me about some really horror stories while living with her host family, I would have rather lived with the Addams family than with the host family that took her in. She attended some really dull classes and the activities that were planned weren’t as much fun as they had seemed on the catalogue when she was booking them.

In any case, my wife told me that the experience was more a life lesson than an English lesson. Being totally honest, it would be unfair to say that travelling abroad is totally useless, but it’s not as miraculous as some people think. Especially these really short stays that are trending nowadays.

What we can conclude from this experience is that by just physically travelling to a place for a short period, you don’t necessarily gain all the knowledge you’d wish you’d get. It’s a great experience. That’s undeniable. Learning the language is a different story. 

So, today I would like to go a bit further with what you could do to learn English without having to spend a ton of money and going through the stress of living abroad. Of course, if travelling is what you want to do, then that’s what your aim should be, but if it’s English what you want to improve here are some things you can do. In this first part I’d like to tell you the things that you can do yourself and then we’ll talk about the ones you can spend some money:

1. Practise everyday: YES! Try to practise English every day. Read a blog post, watch a video, listen to a podcast, of course everything needs to be in English. Anything, but make sure you do something everyday. Every little thing you do makes your English grow, really every little thing. 
2. Keep something to write on handy: Although it may seem a bit old-fashioned, keeping a small notebook, or for the most tech-savvy ones, an notebook app, is always a good idea to note down words or phrases that you like. You don’t only need to write down the ones that you like you can also write down the ones that are useful to you at work or in your personal life. However, it is not common that you remember a word after you’ve written it, so make sure that you go back to your note book in your dead times. We can say that dead times are those like coffee breaks, while commuting, or why not, during your bathroom time.
3. Do the things you like in English: You can only develop your English if you do the things you like. Really! let me give you examples that may help you get a clearer idea. I like learning about music everyday. I love listening to music. I’m the kind of person that believes that a day without music, is a day that you’ve lost. So, I love listening to podcasts about music and reading about music. One of the channels I follow is Loudwire, they mainly talk about rock and heavy metal music, so I couldn’t be happier. However, I also love movies so I also love passing by CineFix’s Youtube channel. They have really great sections. Do pass by if you also love movie. So, I decided to follow similar blogs and channels in French, to see if I could improve my French and I did. I practise doing the things I love in French. It’s much more pleasant and it doesn’t seem like learning. If there’s something I like, I just note it down in my note-book.
4. Translate and improve your memory: Now most of you may have just gone into shock mode, the moment I said Translation. Many times teachers, native speakers, etc. Tell us that we should stop translating in our heads and just think in English. Well, I wish you good luck with that. It’s very hard to learn a language without making the logical connections with your own first language. It’s really tough. However, these connections between English and your own language are really valuable to create processes that will help you develop your vocabulary, grammar and eventually your discourse. The problem is that, and it’s a logical problem, we tend to translate literally. And that’s what’s we might need to avoid. Literal translation is the one that we all teachers are trying to stop you from making, because if you do have to translate you need to do it in a way that is natural in English. Let’s see if this analogy helps you. Translating is the bridge you build between what you know in your first language and what you would like to say in English. In order to carry out meaningful translation exercises always do it with chunks of sentences. For example, you’d like to know what to say when you leave the office or when i leave some place. In Spanish you would say, Me largo or me voy. Now, it’s very tempting to say I leave or I go. However, if you want to sound natural in English you’d need to say I’m off. Now that’s a good translation. On many occasions your literal translation might be spot on, but other times it will just sound off. Whenever you find something that you’d like to translate from one language to another write it down in your notebook and translate it with the most natural sounding translation.

So don’t forget:

• Practise everyday
• Keep a notebook handy
• Do the things you like often, but in English
• Translate accurately not literally

In terms of money, so far you have spent literally a euro and a half on your notebook. That’s it. Let’s take a look at the type of things you could do investing a bit of money.

1. A teacher: Being taught by a good teacher is almost like winning the lottery. If you have a great teacher then it’s probably not going to be cheap. 
2. An intensive or an immersion course: These courses are actually very productive and have a very high impact in your level in actually very little time. However, they can be quite pricey. If you are debating between going abroad or taking an immersion course where you live, I would still choose taking an immersion course in English where you live.
3. An online course: An online course is probably one of the cheapest options in order to make meaningful progress in your English. Nowadays most platforms have a very systematic approach to learning and they keep a very accurate record of the things you can do well and the ones you need to improve. The only problem might be the speaking part, you would still need a teacher in order to practise your pronunciation and fluency, but if you can do it online even better. There are many quality teachers online who will be able to help you for very little money.

So here are the things you can do to improve your English without spending a ton of money and making the most of your time, without the hassle of getting visas, boarding, and English schools abroad. 

Thanks so much for following week after week. We’d love to hear from you on our Facebook page or on our instagram @gogetterenglish and if you can post the things you are doing to improve your English day after day. 

My name’s Rohit this is English before going to bed, brought to you by GoGetter English. Have a wonderful day! Wherever you are and don’t forget #beagogetter.

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Podcast 5 – The five things that annoy me the most

Hi and welcome to the podcast that will help you learn English. Yes, we’re sure about that. We love having fun, and we have a ton of fun making these podcasts just for you. 

My name’s Rohit and I’d like to welcome you to our fifth episode of English before going to bed. brought to you by GoGetter English. You know that what we want to do is to go great lengths and do whatever, whatever, no matter what is in our hand to help you learn English, once and for all. If there’s a mission for us, it’s to help you with your English.

Today, for some reason I had a more than usual busy day at work. My day job is in an office and I do the typical office things like I attend some meetings, and write emails. But a good amount of times I either help people with their excel sheets or you can find me fixing a light bulb in my co-worker’s office. The company I work with isn’t very big, so most of the things are done by the people who work, no budget for outsourcing. In any case, this morning was really busy and I hadn’t even had a chance to even sit at my desk for a second. Really, just non-stop from the moment I stepped in. Well, once the hustle bustle of the office stopped for a second, I was able to turn on my computer and I said to myself, finally I can get some real work done. And guess what? I couldn’t. My computer needed to be updated, but not one of these five minute automatic updates, it was one of those I knew was going to take a whole hour to update. So the moment I was all ready, after having spent more than half of my day out of my seat, the computer started updating and that’s how I came up with today’s podcast. Today I want to tell you about the five things that simply drive me crazy. You know, when you feel like punching someone. We don’t support any kind of violence in this podcast, even if it’s just imaginative. 

So, while my computer was updating I started to think about all those things that drive me nuts, and of course I made a list about these things and today I wanted to talk about just 5. The list was pretty long, but I was able to cut it down a lot. So these are the five things that annoy me the most: 

So, at number 5: When you’re doing the dishes and you leave out something. Don’t you ever go through this? 

When I didn’t have a dishwasher the drama was a bit less than now that I have one. Picture yoursel, all focused on cleaning every little piece of cutlery. Your kitchen is starting to look a bit less like hell. You’ve almost dried up everything and you’ve put everything where it should go, but wait, there it is, the one pan that you didn’t wash up, it wasn’t there before, but suddenly now it’s there, all dirty, making your kitchen look horrible. So, you put some more soap on your sponge and get down to cleaning again, just when you were about to sit down for two minutes. But wait , the story gets worse, the drama level increases if you have dishwasher. Because when I place everything like if I were playing Tetris in my dishwasher and I close the door and push the on button, the dishwasher starts making all those noises,  there I see it, looking back at me, the bloody pan with all the oil in the world in it. I swear to you it wasn’t there before I pushed on and the moment I pressed the button it suddenly appeared. Sitting there as if nothing had happened. Has this ever happened to you? I can’t be the only dumb person in the world who this happens to, right?

Let’s move on. 

At number 4, let’s forget the kitchen drama for a second and let’s move on to a situation I get so annoyed with the universe that it’s not even funny. Imagine this, a cold winter morning, you wake up and you turn on the shower, and you’re there waiting for the water to heat up, you get in the shower, you have one of those showers in which you’re thinking you know one of those motivational showers, in which you tell yourself today is going to be great, I’m going to do a great job, nothing can ruin my day and then you finish your shower and, bam your biggest fear come true, you realize, your towel isn’t where it’s supposed to be. And there you are dripping wet in a cold morning walking around naked and wet looking for a clean towel. Just when I thought I was going to have a great day. Why? Why does the universe hate me so much?

On to the next one.

At number 3. I consider quite Tech savvy that means that I tend to be up-to-date with mostly every little bit of tech out there, well let me tell you why I mention this. And it’s because of my mom. Let me explain. I tend to write my mother through one of these instant messaging apps, you know Whatsapp. And well I usually inform her of how things are going and how I’m doing, you know the typical, good son update. When I wrote these rather lengthy messages, my mother always tries to reply instantly, and you know I’m there waiting, looking at the word Typing and the three dots. A few seconds later and and I keep seeing the word Typing and the three dots and i’m thinking, my mom is writing the speech of her life, or she may have got mad with whatever I wrote or she had a stroke and just left her finger on the phone keyboard. And she’s still TYPING. and after 3 whole minutes waiting, she replies, OK. Jesus, that’s all. She just wrote OK. A lot of people tend to do this to me. WHY? Jesus Why?

Let’s move on to Annoying thing number 2.

Let me start by telling you this, I love people who work in service, you know waiters, cooks, receptionists, they are my heroes. I have a ton of friends who are or have been waiters, and the one thing that annoys me is when there’s a little bit of my drink still left in my glass and the waiter comes and just takes it away, as if I had finished it, without asking. Why? That was my last sip, before going back to work or wherever. Why do they keep doing this to me? Once I even had to beg the waiter, PLEASE, PLEASE, it’s the last sip can I have it. I really appreciate all the work waiters do, but STOP taking my drink when I haven’t finished. PLEASE.

And at number 1, the top of all annoyances, the thing that would drive even the most patient and understanding person crazy, At number 1 . The one that beats all of the rest of silly things that drive me crazy it is . The moment when someone is actually very interested in giving you their opinion because you’re either talking about a very serious topic and you’re actually genuinely interested in what the other person has to say and they start with, jesus they start with the phrase,: THAT’S LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE. Here in Spain, the ‘ESO ES COMO TODO’ phrase is just unbearable. NOOOOOO nothing is like everything else. Don’t start your sentences like that. If you need time to think your answer, take a moment, but don’t say anything and please don’t say that’s like everything else. Because nothing is. Usually, when anyone starts with this sentence it is followed by a saying or a fixed phrase, THAT’S ANOTHER THING I JUST CAN’T STAND. I’ll probably come round to making another podcast just about all the idioms and fixed phrases that I just can’t stand really. But particularly THE THAT’S LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE. Jesus just stop that. 

Well, friends that was all for today. Now you know me a little bit better and now you also know about the five things that annoy me the most. I really hope I’m not the only one that goes crazy when these things happen.

Thanks so much for listening once again. We really appreciate all the love support we are getting week after week. It’s been incredible. Please share, talk about and like our podcast wherever you see it. It honestly keeps us, well it keeps me super motivated to keep making more of these and like that, somehow help people improve their English, while they have some fiun.

Thanks once again from the whole GoGetter Team, My name’s Rohit, I hope to catch you in our next podcast. The GoGetter Team says see ya’ and don’t forget, #beagogetter.

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The secret to learning English: JUST LISTEN. The Jaime Altozano story

Hi and welcome to the podcast that will help you learn English. Yes, we’re sure about that. We love having fun, and we have a ton of fun making these podcasts just for you. Don’t forget to share this podcast with your friends and family, because that’s all we do all day.

My name’s Rohit and I’d like to welcome you to our fourth episode of English before going to bed. brought to you by GoGetter English. You know that what we intent to do is precisely  whatever, whatever, no matter what is in our hand to help you learn English, once and for all. There’s no other thing we think about when planning our podcasts, how do we help all of our wonderful listeners with their English.

We won’t just TEACH English in the most effective way, no, we’ll help you overcome those barriers that you yourself have put up and we’ll also try to help you discover how you can learn English in a way that is fun, amusing, exciting and overall good for you. Learning anything takes time and effort, and although this podcast might help you, it is only you, your time and your effort the ones you will have to invest to improving your English

So, if you’d let us, we’d love to show you how you can maximize your time while learning English. So it’s my pleasure to Welcome you to another episode of English before going to bed, brought to you by GoGetter English.

I’ll be your host, my name’s Rohit and today I’d like to answer one of the most common questions I get asked as a teacher. I have had and still have a lot of students who are determined to learn English, whether it is for their job, for an exam or just to know a bit more than their kids. I love these types of competitive parents. So, today I want to share a secret that will surely change your life forever. Although it might seem that I’m giving away the secret to immortality, it’s far from a Matrix like training in which you are plugged into a computer and magically learn English. No, nothing like that. 

Let me start by reviewing those fundamental aspects of learning English that you all are familiar with. The reason I’m going over these is because it’s important to see how these aspects interact and help you learn, not just anything, just practically anything. 

As you all know since we were kids all our teachers of English have continuously told us that there are four basic skills that make up a language. And you them too well: Reading, Speaking, Listening and Writing. In fact, there’s an organisation in Europe that has been able to divide these skills and the subskills and define what we call our ‘level’ of English. I’m sure you’re very familiar with this categorisation. You may have heard of A1, A2, B1, B2, and so on. You listening right now may even know which level you’re currently in. Well, these levels are defined by averaging out the skills and language knowledge.

In any case, this is getting too technical. 

Today I want to tell you the secret of how you can improve your overall level English by just doing one thing. If you do this just the way we’ve laid it out, I guarantee you will improve your English level dramatically. Yoou must be thinking that now comes the part in which I tell you that you have to pay a lot of money to learn English because you think you have to travel abroad, to an English speaking country, take super expensive lessons and pay for all the extra costs. Well, let me tell you that all you’ll need, believe me, is time and effort. 

And so let me tell you that key to your English development is…Steve Jobs (insert soundbites). And Barack Obama, George Clooney and Malala Yousafsai and of course my favourite Chandler Bing. 

They all can help you improve your English. Easy right? Well let me first tell you what you think happens when you listen to any of these people talking or anyone talking in English.

The first thing you realize when you listen to someone talk is YOUR OWN LEVEL of English. Let me explain. When you listen to someone, especially if you’re not looking at them, for example during a telephone conversation you become aware, very especifically of what you can understand and what you can’t. It’s like a level test of your English in real life. So, you can quickly grade your own understanding in a percentage. You could say that you understood 20, 40, 60 80% of the conversation, right? This is the first thing you panick about. 

Then you think about things like the accent, the speed, the empathy of the speaker and that’s when you start to fear for your own life. You know exactly where you are at. 

Now the only way to overcome these issues is by first accepting that most of the times someone talks in English or you listen to someone talking in English you’re not going to understand each and every word. You need to know that. 

One of the things  my students continuously tell me, is “Teacher, I got lost in one word and I couldn’t continue listening” This is very normal. Our brain is so trained to listen and understand each and every word that it’s very easy to lose interest once you miss that one word you can’t understand. The difficult thing is getting back on track and That’s precisely what what we should train. It’s like running a race with hurdles, you just can’t stop at every hurdle, you need to keep moving on, just like those athletes do.

So, how do I train and how are Steve Jobs and Chandler Bing going to help me. Remember there’s no magic potion for learning anything. Time and effort is all you need. 

The first thing you need to do is at least have half-an-hour free. Totally free. No distractions or interruptions. Nothing. The more focused you are the better the exercise will go. The next thing you need to do is have a smartphone, a computer or tablet ready. The third and last thing you need to have is a pen and a notebook. This technique is called transcription. Yes, the exercise in which you write everything you hear. 

Let me tell you why, this technique works. It may seem quite old fashioned, but believe me that gradually you will see how not only your comprehension skills improve, but also everything else. 

In basic form, the Transcription Technique has just two steps:

Listen to a recording in English, and write down the recording as you listen. Replay the recording word for word until you can transcribe the words. Do this for 30 minutes, no more. And you can use any type of video or audio material. YouTube is a great source for that. 

Once you have transcribed around three paragraphs, you can then record yourself speaking the text that you’ve written down.

You then repeat these two steps until you’ve mastered that piece of text. You don’t need to memorise it or anything, just read it with not much hesitation.

This creates a full skill circle from listening to writing then back to reading, speaking and listening.

During the first step (listening and transcribing), I recommend that you listen to a recording in short segments, pausing and repeating the recording regularly to type or write what you hear. Really, even though you think it’s boring and that you’re not learning you in fact are. Trust me. Just do it! Ideally, it would be great if you could do it for a month. Every day. But let’s take baby steps and I’ll be more than happy if you just do it once. You need to complete the full circle. Listen, transcribe, read and speak. 

Another thing that you should do, this is why it is important that you can choose a good audio or video, is that once you’ve got your transcript on paper, you need to check that it’s correct before you record yourself reading it aloud and you can usually check that with the original transcript of your audio or video. YouTube doesn’t have this feature but you can always check the audio with the subtitles on. Another great source that provides transcripts is TED. Their website is just marvelous. I’m sure you already know that. 

You can in fact, carry out this exercise with this very podcast and try to transcribe it and then check it on our website. Good luck!

Some of my students, who have become really proficient in their English, have actually practised this technique, hundreds of times and they have improved their English at least ten fold in very little time. 

A student of mine, who back then was just 12 years loved music a lot, and she wrote down the lyrics to all of her favourite songs. On average it would take her around 45 minutes to write down one song. Those were 45 minutes that she was just practising English on her own. Every day. Just like going to the gym. If you do an exercise correctly for a period of time you will surely develop some useful skills. 

And I have to tell you the reason why I trust this technique so much. I’ve been following some Youtubers for a while. Most of them aren’t what I would say worth my time, but on the other hand, there are some others that actually make a difference with every word they say. This is where one my Internet idols comes in and I must say he is so much more than marvellous. Well back to the story. A few months back a co-worker of mine sent me a little video in which some kid was breaking down what the education system in Spain looks like. His interpretation of the facts was so similar to mine, and so well articulated in his video that I instantly knew this guy was a different kind of YouTuber. His name was Jaime Altozano. Reputable musician and an incredible and knowledgeable speaker. I couldn’t help but to follow him and watch his vast collection of videos, most of them focused on the ins and outs of music. Something that I’m also very passionate about. 

After watching several videos of his I noticed something very funny. I realized that Jaime was using words in English in most of his videos, but he wasn’t using these English words randomly, he was actually using very native sounding words in very accurate moments. Totally intentional use of vocabulary and very high leveled vocabulary. So I needed to know how he actually reached that level. After teaching English for a very long time, you more or less know everybody’s love hate relation with English. And I was determined to find out Jaime’s story. So I did what any person my age would do, I wrote him an email. In that email I wrote down all my questions and my theories and all he had to do was just choose the one that matched his story.

Long story short. Mr Jaime Altozano replied and he replied with one of the most beautiful emails I have ever received. In that email this master of communication detailed how he had arrived to that level, but first he thanked me and felt very surprised that anyone had even realized he had that level of English. Anyways, he said that his passion while growing up was watching TV series. All of them. ALL. 

He spent hours and hours watching series in Spanish, but one day he ran out of series to watch, so he started watching series in English, because the dubbing in Spanish wasn’t yet available. The process he set up was as follows. He first watched the episode in English and was able to understand 20% of the episode. He then watched it again and was able to understand a bit more, let’s say 40% then once again and his comprehension grew to 60% and he continued watching the episode until he understood 99% of it. But not only did he listen to series over and over again, he listened to Youtubers and transcribed what they said, he listened to songs he liked and transcribed every song. And this gave a really vast vocabulary and good knowledge of how grammar stuck together and almost automatised it.  When the day came he was able to pass his Cambridge proficiency exam with just a bit of preparation. So, Jaime Altozano learnt English by doing what he loved most, so let me tell you that you can enjoy learning English doing what you like. And that’s really the key. Your passion enables you to learn anything you want. 

I hope my really close, life-long friend, wait what am I saying, I hope my bro, Jaime Altozano doesn’t mind me mentioning him in this podcast. Now that we’re so close I’m sure he doesn’t mind. 

So, please, try this technique for a few days. Choose a video or an audio and write it down, write down a few paragraphs, then check if what you’ve written is correct, if not correct it and then record it and listen to it again. Really if you do this for 30 minutes every day I guarantee you that you will gradually become great in English.

Thanks so much everyone for listening, it’s great to be here every week and we honestly hope we are helping you in your English. 

The whole GoGetter Team says see ya and catch you in our next podcast and don’t forget #beagogetter.

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Hi and welcome to the podcast that will help you learn English. Yes, we’re sure about that. We love having fun, and we have a ton of fun making these podcasts just for you.

My name’s Rohit and I’d like to welcome you to our second episode of English before going to bed with Rohit, brought to you by GoGetter English. As you know the main aim of our podcast will be just to do whatever, whatever, no matter what is in our hand to help you learn English, once and for all. We’re determined and we will do it.

We won’t just TEACH English in the most fun way, no, we’ll help you overcome those barriers that you yourself have put up and we’ll also try to help you discover how you can learn English in a way that is comfortable and at the same time suitable to you. Learning anything takes time and effort, and although this podcast might help you, it is only you, your time and your effort the ones you will have to invest to improving your English

So, if you’d let us, we’d love to show you how you can maximize your time while learning English. So it’s my pleasure to Welcome you to another episode of English before going to bed, brought to you by GoGetter English.

I’ll be your host, my name’s Rohit and the first thing I want to do is tell you a little story that inspired this podcast, today we’ll be talking about the type of friends we all have, but Stay tuned, because you might find this little story I have to tell you relatable. A couple of months back, maybe three, my wife and I decided to watch what I think we had put off for way too long and that was the Queen slash Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. You can say that I’ve always been interested in music, well, actually, addicted to music since I was 3 years old. And of course, just like any other person who loves music, Queen is in my top 5 list of best bands ever. So, although it took me a while to finally watch the movie, I was determined to enjoy every bit of it, even though I was almost certain I knew, if not all, most of the stories the movie might have included. In any case, it was a movie about one of the music greats and I wanted to watch it.

So, we went ahead and started watching it. It’s also important to note that I tend to have a really good memory when it comes to remembering really useless stuff. Like fun facts or ridiculous dates and that sort of thing. And however, this memory of mine also helps me remember the people who like a particular band or type of music. Some day we’ll talk about how I like classifying personality types. In any case, while watching the movie I remembered some of my friends from my school times (back in 1994) who loved Queen.

I liked Queen, these friends of mine, loved them. So, I couldn’t help it and started remembering those times I spent, especially with one of my friends, listening to Queen after school, and learning the words to their songs by heart.

I couldn’t help but get very emotional while watching the whole movie, because every song reminded me of a different situation I had spent with my friends. And this friend in particular.

I hadn’t seen this friend in the last 15 years. In fact the last time I saw him was at my wedding. Exactly 15 years ago. Maybe a text message or two might have gone back and forth in those 15 years. Anyways going back to the story. After I dried up my tears once the movie was over, I picked up my phone and Whatsapped (that’s a verb today, right?) my friend after, god knows how long and I wrote. “David, I’ve just finished watching Bohemian Rhapsody and the only person I could think about the whole time while watching it was you, and all those evenings we spent enjoying good music. I thought you should know. A big hug my friend, hope all is well”. To my surprise he replied immediately after almost 15 years and we made plans to meet soon. Youuuu knowww, the typical, we should catch up, we need to have lunch or dinner soon, yada yada yada.

And of course, this got me thinking about the kind of relationships I had with my friends. How I like to keep the connection with the people I consider my friends. And so since I love making lists, lists help me organise things, you will surely see more of that in future podcasts.

So, Like the saying goes, “You can’t choose your family.” With family, the relationships are there whether you like them or not. But friendship, friendship is different. Your friends are people YOU select based on shared values, on your ideals, experiences, interests and beliefs. Your friends ARE your chosen family.

It’s important to have friends who represent the different stages of your life and the paths that you’ve taken. It’s important to surround yourself with friends who know the whole you; a work friend may not know the same you as a friend from college. When you maintain friendships from different stages of your life, you’re able to express more of your real self, isn’t it?

You need different types of friends in the same way that you need food from different food groups. Different types of friends help you nourish and enrich your life in different ways.

And Here are the seven different types of friend you need and we probably all have:

1. The friend who’s up for anything.

This is the friend you can call any time of day or night and ask him or her to either have a drink, a coffee, anything. Ready to spend some time with you. These are friends you’ll need always. There’s a wonderful poster I found one day that read: “Good friends will talk you out of doing silly things, Great friends will tell you ‘when and where are we doing this?”

Next in line is

2. The friend who’s just a little bit cooler than you.

This friend encourages you to step outside of your comfort zone and opens your eyes to things you might not normally see. They are the ones who push you to your full potential and usually by using taunting phrases such as, ‘You have no guts to do this or that’

3. The friend you want to be like

This friend is inspirational as well as aspirational. When you’re with them, you feel like you are a better person. You admire them and they encourage you to be the best you can be. It’s like having your own personal coach.

4. The funny one
There’s always a friend that with their charm, intelligence, and endless sarchasm ready to brighten up your day with their hilarious sense of humour. No matter what the situation might be they just make you laugh until you even pee a little. Those are great friends to have. There’s nothing more uplifting than someone making the effort to make you laugh.

5. The one who’s brutally honest
This friend doesn’t care what might be politically correct or not, he or she will tell you the truth without sugar-coating any bit. Being told what you need to be told is just what we sometimes need to make better decisions.

6. The one who’s always looking on the bright side of life
Yes, these are the ones that don’t want to or can’t see the drama or sad things about life. They tend to always find the good side of things and people, even you, they only see the best side of you. A delight to have.

and the last one:
7. The friend you’ve known longer than you’ve actually known yourself.
These are the friends that appeared in your life at some point and never left. They were always there, those are the ones that even if a few years go by without any contact it seems that nothing had changed, you just pick the conversation where you left off. There’s nothing better than that. Even if life forced you on a different path, it takes very little effort to reconnect and chat about things as if nothing had happened.

Throughout my life I’ve met incredible people and made incredible friends, all over the world and the two things I’ve realized is that, it takes very little effort to talk to someone again when they’ve been a relevant part of your life and two that it’s never late to check in on how someone is doing. Just one line, “Hey I thought about you, just wrote to say hi” You never know when you might make someone’s day. Trust me, it works.

And going back to my story, if you were wondering whether I met up with my childhood friend, yes we did, and we spent the most delightful time together catching up with the most mundane things that make up our everyday life after 15 years. There’s a picture to prove it. You can visit our blog and you’ll find tons more related to our podcast besides the picture, you’ll find the transcript and the most relevant vocabulary of today’s podcast, a podcast that proves that friends are the people we need to be the best of us.

Thanks so much for listening and we hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. If you want to receive this podcast in your email, don’t forget to subscribe, and you will receive our podcast every Friday with some great extras like the transcript of the podcast and some really useful things from our weekly episode. I’m your host, Rohit and I hope to catch you in our next podcast. The GoGetter Team says SEEYA and don’t forget #beagogetter.

it took me a while

to be up for anything

talk someone out of something

by heart

encourage

hilarious

sugar-coat

pick-up where you left off

Hi and welcome to the podcast that will help you learn English. Yes, we’re sure about that. We love having fun, and we have a ton of fun making these podcasts just for you.

My name’s Rohit and I’d like to welcome you to our second episode of English before going to bed with Rohit, brought to you by GoGetter English. As you know the main aim of our podcast will be just to do whatever, whatever, no matter what is in our hand to help you learn English, once and for all. We’re determined and we will do it.

We won’t just TEACH English in the most fun way, no, we’ll help you overcome those barriers that you yourself have put up and we’ll also try to help you discover how you can learn English in a way that is comfortable and at the same time suitable to you. Learning anything takes time and effort, and although this podcast might help you, it is only you, your time and your effort the ones you will have to invest to improving your English

So, if you’d let us, we’d love to show you how you can maximize your time while learning English. So it’s my pleasure to Welcome you to another episode of English before going to bed, brought to you by GoGetter English.

I’ll be your host, my name’s Rohit and the first thing I want to do is tell you a little story that inspired this podcast, today we’ll be talking about the type of friends we all have, but Stay tuned, because you might find this little story I have to tell you relatable. A couple of months back, maybe three, my wife and I decided to watch what I think we had put off for way too long and that was the Queen slash Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. You can say that I’ve always been interested in music, well, actually, addicted to music since I was 3 years old. And of course, just like any other person who loves music, Queen is in my top 5 list of best bands ever. So, although it took me a while to finally watch the movie, I was determined to enjoy every bit of it, even though I was almost certain I knew, if not all, most of the stories the movie might have included. In any case, it was a movie about one of the music greats and I wanted to watch it.

So, we went ahead and started watching it. It’s also important to note that I tend to have a really good memory when it comes to remembering really useless stuff. Like fun facts or ridiculous dates and that sort of thing. And however, this memory of mine also helps me remember the people who like a particular band or type of music. Some day we’ll talk about how I like classifying personality types. In any case, while watching the movie I remembered some of my friends from my school times (back in 1994) who loved Queen.

I liked Queen, these friends of mine, loved them. So, I couldn’t help it and started remembering those times I spent, especially with one of my friends, listening to Queen after school, and learning the words to their songs by heart.

I couldn’t help but get very emotional while watching the whole movie, because every song reminded me of a different situation I had spent with my friends. And this friend in particular.

I hadn’t seen this friend in the last 15 years. In fact the last time I saw him was at my wedding. Exactly 15 years ago. Maybe a text message or two might have gone back and forth in those 15 years. Anyways going back to the story. After I dried up my tears once the movie was over, I picked up my phone and Whatsapped (that’s a verb today, right?) my friend after, god knows how long and I wrote. “David, I’ve just finished watching Bohemian Rhapsody and the only person I could think about the whole time while watching it was you, and all those evenings we spent enjoying good music. I thought you should know. A big hug my friend, hope all is well”. To my surprise he replied immediately after almost 15 years and we made plans to meet soon. Youuuu knowww, the typical, we should catch up, we need to have lunch or dinner soon, yada yada yada.

And of course, this got me thinking about the kind of relationships I had with my friends. How I like to keep the connection with the people I consider my friends. And so since I love making lists, lists help me organise things, you will surely see more of that in future podcasts.

So, Like the saying goes, “You can’t choose your family.” With family, the relationships are there whether you like them or not. But friendship, friendship is different. Your friends are people YOU select based on shared values, on your ideals, experiences, interests and beliefs. Your friends ARE your chosen family.

It’s important to have friends who represent the different stages of your life and the paths that you’ve taken. It’s important to surround yourself with friends who know the whole you; a work friend may not know the same you as a friend from college. When you maintain friendships from different stages of your life, you’re able to express more of your real self, isn’t it?

You need different types of friends in the same way that you need food from different food groups. Different types of friends help you nourish and enrich your life in different ways.

And Here are the seven different types of friend you need and we probably all have:

1. The friend who’s up for anything.

This is the friend you can call any time of day or night and ask him or her to either have a drink, a coffee, anything. Ready to spend some time with you. These are friends you’ll need always. There’s a wonderful poster I found one day that read: “Good friends will talk you out of doing silly things, Great friends will tell you ‘when and where are we doing this?”

Next in line is

2. The friend who’s just a little bit cooler than you.

This friend encourages you to step outside of your comfort zone and opens your eyes to things you might not normally see. They are the ones who push you to your full potential and usually by using taunting phrases such as, ‘You have no guts to do this or that’

3. The friend you want to be like

This friend is inspirational as well as aspirational. When you’re with them, you feel like you are a better person. You admire them and they encourage you to be the best you can be. It’s like having your own personal coach.

4. The funny one
There’s always a friend that with their charm, intelligence, and endless sarchasm ready to brighten up your day with their hilarious sense of humour. No matter what the situation might be they just make you laugh until you even pee a little. Those are great friends to have. There’s nothing more uplifting than someone making the effort to make you laugh.

5. The one who’s brutally honest
This friend doesn’t care what might be politically correct or not, he or she will tell you the truth without sugar-coating any bit. Being told what you need to be told is just what we sometimes need to make better decisions.

6. The one who’s always looking on the bright side of life
Yes, these are the ones that don’t want to or can’t see the drama or sad things about life. They tend to always find the good side of things and people, even you, they only see the best side of you. A delight to have.

and the last one:
7. The friend you’ve known longer than you’ve actually known yourself.
These are the friends that appeared in your life at some point and never left. They were always there, those are the ones that even if a few years go by without any contact it seems that nothing had changed, you just pick the conversation where you left off. There’s nothing better than that. Even if life forced you on a different path, it takes very little effort to reconnect and chat about things as if nothing had happened.

Throughout my life I’ve met incredible people and made incredible friends, all over the world and the two things I’ve realized is that, it takes very little effort to talk to someone again when they’ve been a relevant part of your life and two that it’s never late to check in on how someone is doing. Just one line, “Hey I thought about you, just wrote to say hi” You never know when you might make someone’s day. Trust me, it works.

And going back to my story, if you were wondering whether I met up with my childhood friend, yes we did, and we spent the most delightful time together catching up with the most mundane things that make up our everyday life after 15 years. There’s a picture to prove it. You can visit our blog and you’ll find tons more related to our podcast besides the picture, you’ll find the transcript and the most relevant vocabulary of today’s podcast, a podcast that proves that friends are the people we need to be the best of us.

Thanks so much for listening and we hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. If you want to receive this podcast in your email, don’t forget to subscribe, and you will receive our podcast every Friday with some great extras like the transcript of the podcast and some really useful things from our weekly episode. I’m your host, Rohit and I hope to catch you in our next podcast. The GoGetter Team says SEEYA and don’t forget #beagogetter.

it took me a while

to be up for anything

talk someone out of something

by heart

encourage

hilarious

sugar-coat

pick-up where you left off

Hi and welcome to the podcast that will help you learn English. Yes, we said it. This is it! This is the ultimate podcast for you to make the progress you need in English. 

My name’s Rohit and I’d like to welcome you to our first episode of The English Alternative with Rohit, brought to you by GoGetter English. The main aim of our podcast will be just to do whatever, whatever, no matter what is in our hand to help you learn English, once and for all. It’s about time someone did it.

No, our intention isn’t just to TEACH English, no, we’ll help you overcome those psychological barriers that you yourself have put up and we’ll also try to help you discover how you can learn English in a way that is comfortable and at the same time suitable to you. of course, This doesn’t mean that you are just going to sit back and relax while you listen to this wonderful podcast. What we want you to do is to stop wasting time with the methods that don’t work for you and start investing time in the ones that do. 

So, if you’d let us, we’d love to show you how you can maximize your learning capacity while learning English. So it’s my pleasure to Welcome you to the English Alternative.

I’ll be your host, my name’s Rohit and the first thing I want to do is tell you how we think we might be able to help you. The first thing I must warn you about is that there isn’t a magic potion, no trick to learn English, but I’m sure you know that already. If you want to speak English the way you speak your mother tongue, all you need and can do is PRACTISE. Practise a lot. And this is the stage many people get confused at. People, think practising is simply doing some exercises from a book, watching series and movies, reading books. Well, so yes, these are great ways to practise, but haven’t you noticed, if you’re listening to this, you yourself might think that although you do all the things I just mentioned, these might not be working. Well, the reason for that is very simple, and it’s because, drum roll. 

YOU MIGHT NOT BE DOING IT THE RIGHT WAY. It’s like when you go to the gym and you have no coach to guide you. You end up doing a not-so-great-job while working out. You have all the equipment, machinery, weights, everything, and still you can see your belly hardly working against gravity. Well, then get yourself a coach. With English learning something very similar happens. You have all the resources, really, you literally millions of places you could learn English from, and still you might have trouble with some areas. Well, that’s exactly where we come in. That’s what we’ve been doing for a really long time. We select the best content for you, so you can learn what you want and the way you learn best. Our intention is to also show you other ways in which you can expand your learning abilities especially while learning English.

Of course, we’ll be talking about the best books you can read to improve, the best series, or rather the episodes that you can watch and the movies you can enjoy. We’ll also be talking about apps that will help you learn English, and apps that will help you in general. We’ll also talk about magazines, blogs, youtube, music, everything that can help you learn English faster and better. Anything that we find that is interesting to you, is what we’ll bring you in this weekly podcast. If you’re in for some fun and some learning, this is the place you need to be, this is the place where you’ll learn English.

So let’s go with our first podcast of the season. Todayyy in the English Alternative we’d like to talk about something I just can’t get rid of and I can’t really understand why. Today I’d like to talk about Nostalgia and how inevitably it is to all of us born in the 80s. We tend to be nostalgic about everything. Actually, there were a couple of things that got me thinking about this, and they were basically the Red hot chilly peppers and stranger things. Both these things got me thinking about my younger self and how I spent most of my days as a kid. 

So let’s go down memory lane. 

I’ll start by telling you this. I’ve been a gamer all of my life. Of course, not a real gamer. I’ve always played video games, but I can’t consider myself a real gamer for one, because I don’t think I covered my gamer quota in played hours. For sure, I’ve played Super Mario, Mortal Kombat, and many other classics in the video-game galore. Currently, I occasionally play FIFA. I tend to be up-to-date with the latest edition of the game. That means that I play the latest edition of the game, as soon as its released. The whole point of this being that, there was a time back in the 80s in which we all didn’t have a game console at home and we needed to go, you know that place where you could find video games in which a coin was needed to actually play them. Did you think about the name of those places? DO you know it? Every neighbourhood had one. Well if you thought of the word ARCADE that’s exactly the place I spent a lot of time and unfortunately money. Jesus the amount of money I happily spent there.

The money thing was a real issue. Whatever pocket money I got from relatives, I was investing it on a game I wasn’t even decent at. I was either at the arcade or the candy store right next to it, where I was spending my hard-earned treasures But going back to the arcade there was something about that place, right? They all smelled kind of the same. There used to always be a man with a pouch who would not be very ready to give you the change you need it to play your favourite games, ironically, he would always be in such a bad mood. Then I don’t know if you recall that, but there was some kind of code that wasn’t written anywhere from which you knew who was next in line. The code  was simply whoever was next in line would just place their coin (usually a quarter) in a place where you could see it and that’s it. You just knew who was next in line and that was all. Never got into a fight with someone for cutting in line, it was just the code and it was sacred.

But there was one game that for me ruled them all. I was lucky to grow up in Spain. and there was one game that demanded some respect. It was THE GAME. For me it was the most beautiful and fun game of all. and that was the foosball table, or how we like to call it in Spain el futbolin. That game really demanded another level of skill, accuracy, power and teamwork. It was just perfect. And there were different levels of players. You came to know of this when you joined a game and someone set the rules, like no scoring with midfield players, no scoring with the inner-most striker. Stuff like that. Those were some of the most enjoyable moments for me as a kid. You had a great time with friends, and if you didn’t have any friends, it literally took a minute to make some. As you may have guessed, any nostalgic from the 80s misses those days at the arcade for sure.

Hmmm that was nice. It felt really good to talk about arcades with you. It felt great! Let’s see what else we could talk about? Well yeah, there’s this thing that gets me really nostalgic, well, I don’t really know if it’s nostalgia, or me just missing my childhood. Wow that sounds tragic, but well, you know what I feel really nostalgic about making a mix tape. Do you remember those? It would a total act of love when you made a mix-tape for someone. It meant you really liked the person you were making it for. A mixed tape consisted of a cassette you recorded for someone with songs you thought he or she would like. It took a lot of time and effort to actually make a tape, because you needed to record each and every song. 

All mixed tapes started as a blank tape you got from the store or most of the times from a tape you had lying around at home. It could be either a 60-minute-tape or a 90 minute-tape. There was something you essentially needed and that was a tape recorder with an FM or AM dial. You’ll see in just a few seconds why this is important or you could have a double-deck stereo system. People were really successful if they had a stereo system at home that had a double deck. Now, you had two ways to go about filling up that tape. 1. you had all the original songs on different tapes and you needed to play each song on your double-deck, let’s say that deck A would play the original song you wanted to record and deck B would record that song onto your tape. So, if you wanted to record a song, let’s say Billie Jean from Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, you had to search for the song on the original tape and push play on deck A and push record on Deck B to transfer the song onto the new tape you were making for someone special. You needed to stay until the end of the song and stop both deck A and Deck B at the same time. You would often listen to the click of stopping the recording on your mixed tape. Complicated right? Well, that’s all the trouble we went through when showing someone how much you cared. But wait there was another way to record a mixed tape and that was from the radio. Yes, we used to record the songs we didn’t own straight from the radio. The process was quite dodgy, if you will, first you needed to listen to the radio all the time until they played the song you wanted to record, once the radio host announced that your song was coming on, you got the tape ready at the exact position you wanted it to be recorded and then you needed to wait for the bloody host to stop introducing the song and once he did you just hit the record button. The most common thing was to lose the first few seconds of the song. Jesus, That was the struggle back then, and it was real.

Usually a mixed tape was made up of 12 or 13 songs no more and you had to repeat the whole process we just talked about 12 or 13 times that is assuming that all of your tries were successful, it was long, and painstaking, but it was beautiful when you finished one. But the process didn’t just end there, no. The next step was getting creative with the covers. All the tapes we made back then needed to have our signature design. It was a way of saying I made this for you. So, it wasn’t just a collection of songs you put together, it was a work of art. Besides having a top taste in music, my artwork on the covers wasn’t too shabby either. I must say. 

Those were the good old days, weren’t they? I don’t know why I always feel that. Even though now we have playstations and Spotify. Why do I still feel so attached to the past? I have a feeling it was because I was naively happy with the things I used to do. 

Well, well, well, that was our first podcast episode. We really hoped you liked it. It would be great if you could tell me what you liked and what you didn’t about our Podcast, and we promise we’ll try to have a podcast every week. Remember listening to as much English as you can is the best way to learn, and if you listen to us much better.

My name’s Rohit and I’ll catch you in our next episode. The GoGetter Team says see you and don’t forget #beagogetter

tend to be

galore

pocket-money

to recall

come to know

the struggle is real