Podcast 10 – Everyone needs to put English learning at the top of their resolutions list. AGAIN

It’s almost the end of the year and we thought it would be the best time to talk about something that is really important to 73% of the people. And that is. Learning English, and why it should be your priority number 1. It might be to become a better professional, to travel abroad and feel confident, to meet new people to know new cultures. Whatever the reason, it has to be a priority.

Today we want to address the elephant in the room. Today I want to be serious about something, for once. I’m going to be quite direct in this podcast. If you haven’t included English learning at the top of your resolutions list for this new year. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Stay with me for the next few minutes and I’m going to tell you why learning English  should ALWAYS BE at the top of your list and how you can do it.

Welcome to another episode of English Before Going to bed. I’m Rohit and today can be the day that will change the way you practise your English for ever.

If you haven’t realized yet, you need to take up learning English seriously. I’m pretty sure you’ve included learning English before on your previous list of resolutions, but this time it’s going to be different.

I’m almost certain that you’ve studied English at school and that was a disaster. After almost 10 years of studying English you can probably order some food at McDonald’s. Tell me if I’m wrong, you’ve probably joined courses at language schools or even gone abroad for a month, with the only aim to improve your English. And although you may have practised it a lot, you still don’t seem to be confident enough to say what you want to say.

You might even think that your age or your capacity have anything to do with learning English. Oh, English is so difficult, English is this, English is that. There’s always an excuse. 

Today we’ll try to get rid of those excuses. But first I want to tell you that if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re already doing something about your English. And you’re doing something really important, which is practising your listening comprehension.

You see, listening to a podcast is probably the most convenient way to develop your English learning skills, because you can do it on the go. Whether you’re in the gym, or driving, you know we suggest listening to us right before you go to bed. The thing is that you can do it while doing other things. 

But before we go into the tools that you can use to improve and learn your English, I want to prepare you in the right way to actually learn English. You might need to reset your mind to start off fresh. So, the first thing I want you to do is to remove the number 1 excuse everybody tends to use and the one you’ve been using for all these years. The ‘I don’t have time’ excuse. I just mentioned that you can learn English by listening to this very podcast.

So, managing your time shouldn’t be a very difficult thing to do. If you know what you have to do to learn English. So, forget about the excuse “I don’t have enough time”.

A stressful job, your kids, a cloudy day, everything seems to work as an excuse to put English in the last spot within your priorities. 

Put all of those excuses to the side and let’s move on to the second issue, which is super important  you need to think about why English is important to you. What could you do better if you improved your English? Think about it for a couple of seconds. 

Let me guess a few of the answers that you might be thinking. If you improved your English you could probably attend those international conference calls without any fear at work. Probably, you could get the certification you need to work in the company you wanted to. Most likely you could get into the master’s degree you need. Think of the things you could achieve if you only improved your English. Y

ou need to have this clear before starting to learn English in 2020. There are many reasons, choose the most important one for you.

Making English learning a priority is a difficult thing to do, especially when you’ve tried before or have gone through the disastrous experiences at schools. But that was mainly because your goal wasn’t clear enough. Keep you main goal always in mind. ALWAYS. 

The next thing that you could do is write the reason you want to improve your English on a piece of paper. As a headline. This piece of paper is going to be crucial. You’ll see. By writing down your aim, it will be easier for you to visualize your goal. Picture yourself giving that presentation in front of your international clients, or working in the company you so badly want to work for. Write it down, and visualize it.

Keep this piece of paper handy. You’ll need it in a few minutes. 

A lot of the things we do every day are based on motivation. Learning English should be another one. Although motivation factors are personal to each and every one of us, we need to have a little spark every day to do something in English. It doesn’t matter what it is. Try to get your motivation from the things that make you happy and apply those to things to English. I’m sure they’ll make you happier. 

Write down the things that make you happy. If it’s drawing, write it. If it’s watching series, write it down. If it’s riding your mountain bike, make a quick note on your piece of paper. Use this motivation factor and apply it to what you want to learn every day. 

For example, if you’re riding your mountain-bike during the weekend and visited a wonderful place, think of a sentence in English that would explain that. For example: “Today, I passed by a beautiful town in Guadalajara”. Think of simple sentences applying them to the things that make you happy. If taking pictures makes you happy, think of a sentence that describes the last picture you took. “Today I took a picture of the decorations on my Christmas tree and posted it on my Instagram feed”.

Slowly, slowly you’ll build up more complex sentences applying your English to the things that make you happy. Do it! You’ll be making speeches and explaining the things you love doing in no time. 

You might think now, Rohit, this is great, but how do I know what I have to do. How do I know which methods work, there are so many out there.

That’s in fact a really good question. There’s something you need to keep in mind when learning English. You only need to develop these three things. Vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Vocabulary, grammar and discourse. 

Three pillars that will hold your English. You might already know what they are, but let me break it down to you so you understand what role each pillar plays. 

Imagine that English was a big building, a skyscraper. Vocabulary acts like the bricks that make up the building. You can consider the grammar the cement that glues all the bricks together and discourse is how tall and big your building is. You need to develop just these three things to improve your English.

The more bricks you have, the taller the building you can build. The better you apply the cement, the stronger the building will be.

There are tons of things you can do to develop these three areas, but no school will teach it the way we have planned it. At GoGetter English we’ve developed a course that can help you improve the three things that you need. It’s a short 10-day course that we’ve called ‘How to learn English Quickly? and it will teach how you can learn and expand your vocabulary, gradually increase your grammar usage and help your discourse in speaking and writing.

This course is super useful and it’s step two of our own methodology to learn English and best of all it’s completely free. Yes, it’s free. We want to tell you how we have helped thousands of students to learn English. I have no problem with that. Sign up and you can learn all the tricks that you need to learn English faster. And remember it’s free.

Think about it, now there are so many things, so many tools to learn English and none of them actually focus properly on these three areas. But you know what the best thing is, it is that you can improve all of them without paying a single dollar. 

Developing your Vocabulary

You can develop your own Vocabulary, by creating a vocabulary journal. Keep a small notebook handy. Write down all the words that you hear in your favourite videos, which you read in your favourite magazines. Do it! Then at the end of the day take a look at them. GoGetter English has been working really hard to develop an app that will help you do this. It will be released in January 2020.

Developing your Grammar

To develop your grammar you can do small transcriptions from youtube. Just pick 30 seconds of your favourite video and try to write it down. Then check how you did by turning on the subtitles. If you do this every day for a month your grammar level will increase at least by 40%. But let me tell you that in 2020 our Transcription course will also be ready for you and also for free. 

Developing your discourse

Once you have established your grammar you will automatically move to make more complex sentences. Sentences in which you can compare and contrast, express your opinions, etc. And you’ll do it faster and better. You can develop your discourse by using linkers, conjunctions or discourse markers.

You can practise by writing down your opinion in English about anything. If it’s a positive opinion better and if it’s about something you like much much better. If you want to, then you can read your essay out loud and record it.

Probably at first you might think: “Oh, my God I sound terrible”, but you have to keep going until you sound more natural. In this case you won’t have a self-checking method, but you might want to count on us to check how you did. Just write us an email at info@gogetterenglish.com and we’ll tell you what you can do.

So remember, if you have removed English from your resolutions list, put it back on, because we have told you how you can develop your English by constantly improving the three most important things. Vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Now you have no excuses left. 

And the last thing I wanted to share with all of you today. The proof that everything I’ve just told you works. Many of you know I live in Madrid Spain, I’m married to a wonderful woman from Spain and I have two incredible children. 

Here’s a small conversation I’ve had with them recently. They haven’t studied English yet, all they’ve been doing is learn English just like I told you. Hear them talk about what they’d like to get for Christmas. 

Thanks so much. So many things today. I hope you’ve probably felt the need to take your English learning more seriously. It would be great if you checked out our blog for loads more strategies to improve your English. Remember that we’ll do whatever, whatever it takes to help you learn English, and we hope we’ve been able to help you a bit.

We’re looking forward to seeing all your great progress in English in 2020 and for being the reason to make us proud. Have a lovely Christmas and new year. Don’t forget to subscribe and see you in our next podcast. 

The whole GoGetter Team says see ya. My name’s Rohit and this was another episode of English before going to bed.