Today we are going to talk about a secret superpower that every english learner has.
Hi, i'm oliver and welcome back to the easy english podcast, and today we have a very exciting topic the power of reading.
Many people tend to think that speaking and listening are the most important for learning english, and that might be true, but reading is an important, powerful tool as well.
From simple stories to daily news, reading can greatly improve your english.
We're going to explore today why reading is so effective, what kind of things that you can read, and how and how to read effectively to boost your English language skills.
Reading is something that we use in our own language every day in our native languages.
So I'm going to show you how to effectively apply reading in English to improve your results.
So before we turn the page and get started, we have some key vocabulary.
If you're new.
This podcast aims to teach you vocabulary, phrases and natural useful English through listening practice.
And to do that part of that teaching is.
At the beginning of each episode I teach you five pieces of key vocabulary that I want you to listen out for during the podcast.
Some of them are easy, some of them are hard, even the ones that you know already.
I want you to actively try to listen for these words, and that allows you to practice your listening and comprehension, even if you know the words already.
Okay, let's look at our key vocabulary.
So the first is to read.
So you know, I expect you all to know this, but I want you to listen out for it as a verb.
So to read means to look at written words and understand their meaning.
Very easy, right?
So I read a book every night before bed.
When you're listening today, pay attention to the tenses, whether it's past tense or present tense.
Have a think about how I'm using this verb, because read sometimes is a bit of a tricky one to read and understand what way it's being used.
So that's why I've selected this word today.
The next word is vocabulary.
Vocabulary, also a word that i'm sure you know, but i want to include it for pronunciation.
Listen to how this word is pronounced vocabulary it's quite a hard word to say, so vocabulary is the words, or i guess vocabulary in general is the words in a language.
Learning new vocabulary is very important for improving your english, continuing to improve your english.
Okay, the third word is grammar.
Grammar, and again i want you to listen for the pronunciation and how this word is used, so the rules for making correct sentences.
Good grammar helps you write clearly.
Our fourth word is comprehension.
Comprehension.
And this is a noun, okay?
And it means your ability to understand something.
Comprehension is like understanding.
My comprehension of difficult English texts has improved with practice.
And finally, the fifth word, an easy word, but a different perhaps.
Context is text text, and this is a noun, and we often use text to describe any written material, like a book, an article or a message.
This newspaper text is quite difficult, so when we want to talk specifically about the writing, about the words, we call this text the text.
So keep these words and phrases in your mind and listen for them as I read and talk to you in today's episode.
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Thank you.
Back to the main episode.
So first off, why is reading so powerful and so important?
Reading is a powerful tool for learning English.
For a start, it expands your vocabulary.
I think this is the most basic point that a lot of people understand regarding reading.
When you read, you are constantly seeing new words in context.
You can often guess their meaning, and this helps you learn new vocabulary quite naturally and in its real state, its real context.
Let's say
How to properly use it.
That's the beauty, I think, of English reading it's vocabulary acquisition, getting new vocabulary, learning new vocabulary and learning it correctly, how to properly use it.
You know, the second reason I want to talk about is improving your grammar.
Not a lot of people connect reading and grammar together.
We think of grammar textbooks, boring exercises, where we change the tenses of words and put them in their correct forms and get the sentence structure correctly.
But generally speaking, when you read a lot, your brain naturally starts to understand how English sentences are built, the grammar structures of those sentences.
You will see correct grammar repeatedly and this helps you to use it correctly without even thinking about the rules.
So don't just think about vocabulary.
Reading is great for improving your grammar, but it also helps your comprehension.
Comprehension reading helps you to understand complex ideas, more complicated ideas and even longer pieces of text.
It trains your brain to follow arguments, understand stories and to understand and maybe even to copy new and different writing styles.
And this goes for any language, whether it's English, whether it's your native language.
Reading helps with comprehension.
It helps with understanding ideas and learning and using the language in different ways.
And I think that's rather exciting, because reading is one of the easiest things that you can do to practice.
Okay, so while reading is of course not speaking, it can still help with your English fluency.
From the points we mentioned before, with improving your vocabulary and your grammar and the natural use of language.
This can indirectly help you become more fluent in English.
And not only that, it will help you to understand English culture a little bit more.
Whether you're interested in the United States, the UK Ireland Australia, New Zealand Canada, whatever English speaking country you're interested in, reading books and texts from that country will help you to understand its people and culture a lot better.
And the number one reason, apart from all of the benefits, Why you should read more in English is it's flexible.
You can do it almost any time.
You can read on a bus, on a break.
You can replace Instagram or I don't know, TikTok or something else, with reading a couple of pages of your book.
It's so easy to do.
It's easy to pick up and do.
And once you've built that habit, that routine, it can become a part of your everyday life, a part that benefits you, a part that helps improve your English.
Okay, so I have some exciting news and it's why I'm talking about reading today.
It's still pretty early, so I haven't released anything yet, but I have started to work on a full course which will be available for you guys to enroll in.
It will be a paid course and this course is going to be around reading in English.
The main idea is that I'm going to teach you more intermediate English, so from lower to upper intermediate and even up to a little bit of C1.
And we're going to learn a lot of vocabulary, phrases and even some grammar a little bit of grammar.
This is a self-taught course.
There's going to be a lot of pre-recorded material, probably hours and hours.
I've just started working on it.
And you will get access to a number of classic English literature books.
And I'm going to read them to you.
I'm going to read sections from these to you.
I'm going to explain them.
I'm going to teach you vocabulary and phrases, native speaker phrases from context, from these stories.
And I'm going to teach you a method on how to properly read, how to effectively read in English through examples, so that you can improve your language skills.
So we're going to follow through this method together on the course.
And by the end of it, with practice, questions and lots of exercises and lots of reading, you will have read and been exposed to some great English literature, as well as having improved your vocabulary, your phrases.
And we will do that journey together.
But it will probably be a month or two until this is released.
But if you're interested, make sure that you have signed up for the newsletter, because you'll hear about it first from the Easy English newsletter.
If you've already signed up, don't worry.
If you haven't, the link is in the description below.
You can go to the stan.store page, scroll down and click the newsletter and sign up for free.
And then you'll get the latest news and find out when the course is on sale.
Because there will be a special discount and promotional discount for listeners at the beginning.
But okay, let's get back to the podcast.
That's just a little bit of exciting news about something that I'm currently working on.
So when we look at reading, there's something for absolutely every level of reading.
You just have to pick the correct level. the correct text.
So if we look at beginners so A1 to A2 most of you listening are probably in that B1 to B2 range and maybe even into C1 as well, which is great.
But for A1 to A2, generally, I would recommend something we call graded readers.
So these books are specifically written for English learners with controlled vocabulary and grammar.
So they're designed for these different levels.
And that's a great structured and easy way to start with English reading.
And I'm sure that a lot of you, a lot of you listening, have used this type of book before to help develop and begin your English reading.
Another great way and it may even be helpful for you in B1 is children's books or stories.
So you're looking for, you know, even picture books, if it's a more complicated topic, or simple story books designed for younger children.
And it sounds stupid, but i have used this method with russian language as well before, both with books and also tv shows.
For example, with TV shows, I used to love listening to Peppa Pig, Sphinx Peppa, and it taught me a lot of verbs and phrases and vocabulary through these simple stories and scenes.
And it's a great way to learn new verbs.
So for intermediate learners, B1 to B2, that's most of you listening.
Simple news websites are great.
There are so many websites that have easy English versions of what they post.
I always recommend if you do like keeping updated with the news, try and do it in English.
Even BBC News, for example, they have quite accessible, so easier language and quite clear.
You don't have to understand everything.
Try to understand the general ideas of what is being said in the text.
The next one I recommend is short stories.
You can find many short stories online or in collections.
And they're often less overwhelming than a full big book because they are smaller, little bite size pieces of text.
So yeah, I don't want to promote too much, but I do recommend as well my book.
The link is in the description below.
So it teaches you English phrasal verbs through short little stories.
One story on each page that helps you to learn those verbs and vocabulary from context.
So if you're interested and you haven't checked that out yet, the link is in the description below.
And now that you're into that B1 to B2 level, you can start to read things that you're interested in, about things that you like, in your own language, perhaps about your hobbies, about topics that you like.
You have the freedom to begin to start to learn and practice and read about those amazing, wonderful things that you love.
And if you feel you want that next challenge, you want to start to push yourself to the next level.
That's when you want to start looking at more advanced reading materials.
And that's what we will be looking at in the course that I'm working on.
And this includes original novels.
So looking more at shorter simpler, real English literature and you can gradually build up the amount that you're reading.
These can be short stories too, but proper big literature, short stories.
You can start reading more complicated news and political articles, maybe academic articles, and try to look at that special type of English that maybe you want to improve in, whether it's education politics, maybe some type of media that you're interested in books, I guess.
And there's so many ways that you can take your English learning practice.
And it's amazing.
OK, so I want to go now to one of my favorite parts.
I'm just going to get my list here of this podcast.
And that is looking at the listener spotlight.
So every week, every episode or so, I like to ask questions and i like to ask questions and get you guys to answer them and i read out a few of those in each episode of the podcast.
Okay, in the last episode i asked about, you know, maybe a mistake that you make in english that you have either fixed or you're working on, so some mistakes or problems that you make, And I had a answer.
It was from, I think, Gyro.
And he said, I've made many mistakes that I try to correct, especially when I write.
One of them is that I often forget to put the verb in the past, different past forms.
Actually, I still struggle with that.
That's great.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
I think that it's very difficult.
Verb tenses are difficult and a lot of native English speakers don't realize how difficult verb tenses are to learn in English.
Because when we learn at school, so as a native speaker, you might be interested to hear this.
When we learn English at school, we only get taught that there are free verb tenses.
You know, you have...
Past, present and future.
We don't learn, you know, past perfective, past continuous.
We don't learn all of these different types that you guys learn.
We learn from context.
So we learn context free tenses and we learn all the different forms from context.
We naturally acquire them through reading, through speaking and input.
So it just shows you that you don't actually need to stress about the structure as much.
It's good to learn it, But stressing about it is not the best thing always.
You will naturally improve.
And from context, you will start to acquire those different forms.
So keep it up.
And there's always going to be little things that we will struggle with for a long time.
Different parts of language are difficult for different people.
So keep going, keep on learning and you will beat whatever it is that you're struggling with with your English.
So the next comment I had was from Rodrigo and he said, the mistakes in English are real.
In my travel for London, I needed to talk a lot in English.
It was funny.
I can speak with the people there.
Portuguese, total different in English, so is often to feel fear.
Thanks teacher, I learn a lot with your classes.
So I think what Rodrigo is saying here is that he had to talk a lot in English on his trip to London.
And I guess it can be quite scary.
And those mistakes that you're making when you're practicing can cause a lot of fear, but it's very brave to do so.
And when I hear someone speaking in English that is a non-native speaker, a tourist, someone visiting, I think wow, good for them.
You think Great.
It's great that they're practicing and they're learning.
I have a lot of respect for those people.
So do not feel scared or ashamed or embarrassed because so many English speakers do not speak another language.
They've never really learned one.
So you're already doing better than most of us native English speakers, okay?
Be proud of your progress and be proud that you do speak another language.
And you're listening to me right now, so I can tell you you do speak English and you do understand English.
No matter how much you understand, you're learning and you're using the language.
And I think that's amazing.
So my question for you for the next episode, I want you to comment on this episode.
Do you read books?
Do you read books?
And if yes, what type of books do you like?
Okay, and tell me why.
So if you're on Patreon, comment there.
If you're on Spotify, you can comment as well on the episode.
If you're on YouTube, leave a comment there.
Practice your writing and don't worry about how well you write.
It doesn't matter, i'm not going to correct you.
I'm going to try to understand what you're saying and i'm going to reply to your answers live on the podcast.
So leave a comment to that question do you read books?
If yes, what type of books do you like?
And I will answer some of you guys in the next episode.
So today we have explored the power of reading in English.
And I hope it gives you a little taste of what I want to do in this upcoming course.
So make sure you've signed up for the newsletter and I will keep you guys updated.
I think that reading is something that we can all improve.
There are always more difficult texts out there that can improve our vocabulary, our phrases and really help with pushing ourselves along.
So thank you so much for listening and supporting this podcast.
Make sure that you're following and subscribed and that you've rated the podcast five stars.
It really helps.
And if you're on Apple Podcasts, leave a nice review.
That helps too.
Thank you so much for listening and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day.
Goodbye.
