Well, hello and welcome to this English lesson, where I'm going to talk about three very important things that you should be doing if you're learning a language like the English language.
And I'm going to sound a little bit like a broken record because I make this lesson about once a year, but I think it's worth repeating.
And that brings me to the first point.
The first thing that is important when you are learning a language is that you should use repetition.
If you're wondering why I'm walking funny, it's because the snow is a little bit deep.
Someone else walked out here earlier.
You can kind of see my feet are going in a little bit.
Not too bad, but they are definitely kind of going in.
Let me spin you back around here.
Repetition.
I like to compare this to learning to play a musical instrument.
If you are someone who has learned to play a musical instrument in the past, you know that practice is important.
And a lot of the practice that you do is repetitive.
There's a lot of repetition.
If you learn to play the piano, you'll play scales.
If you learn to play the guitar, you'll practice playing your chords and strumming.
And you'll do that over and over again, because repetition is somehow one of the things that helps us remember how to do something.
I remember too that when I was learning how to hammer a nail in when I did construction work in the summer, you had to practice.
You had to do it over and over again.
And then the more you did it, the better you got at it.
So again, it's something about how our brains work.
Repetition, doing things over and over again, is just very, very helpful.
And then with language learning, you can do this a number of ways.
And by the way, repetition, it's usually kind of boring. but it's very, very effective.
One way you can do it is by reading everything twice.
You can also watch English lessons on YouTube and watch them twice or watch them three times.
You can add some variation with that.
You can watch the video with the subtitles on and then wait a day and watch the video with the subtitles off.
All of that is very, very helpful.
So number one, repetition is a very good thing to do.
Number two, consistency.
Consistency means that you do it regularly.
You practice your English every day, or you practice your English five days a week, and you do this all the time.
You are very, very consistent.
I know.
For me, when I was practicing my French, meeting with a person once a week, having that consistency and speaking French with them was very, very helpful.
It also had a little bit of repetition in it, didn't it?
And so that is just very, very important as well.
Why am I spinning you around?
I'm not sure if you can see, but the river is frozen and it has turned into kind of a highway for snowmobiles on the weekend.
They were coming past quite regularly through Saturday and Sunday of this week.
So consistency, just a really good thing to do.
If you were a basketball player and you wanted to perfect your shooting, you would A do a lot of repetition and B you would do that consistently.
You would find time multiple days per week in order to do that.
So number one, repetition, number two, consistency.
And then number three, you need to challenge yourself.
If you think about it, if you are a kid, you read kids' books, but eventually you start reading books that are written for adults.
And eventually you start reading books that are more and more difficult.
Maybe you even read some of the classics, which are very, very hard to read.
So you need to challenge yourself with your English learning as well.
If you think about it.
Another thing that people do to challenge themselves is when they go to the gym.
They don't just lift same weight all the time.
Sorry, i know this has nothing to do with the lesson, but here we have a few snowmobiles going by, A couple of people out enjoying the Canadian winter.
If you think about it, when you go to the gym, you don't just lift three pound weights.
You lift three pound weights and then five pound weights and then eight pound weights.
And I'm up to eight pound weights by the way.
And then 10 and then 12 and then 15.
You challenge yourself.
You don't just do the same thing. every time.
So three things.
I know I've mentioned these over and over again in the past.
Usually once a year you probably have seen a video like this, but I do think they are the fundamentals.
They are the important base layer to learning English.
You need to have repetition, even though it can be boring.
You need to have consistency.
You need to do it every day and you need to do it five or six days a week over and over again.
And then you need to, of course, challenge yourself.
If you've done a lot of reading and you've done a lot of listening, but you haven't done a lot of writing or speaking.
You should challenge yourself to do more of that.
So once again, repetition, consistency, and challenge yourself.
Those are three ingredients for the recipe of learning the English language.
Anyways, thanks for hanging out with me on this not as cold as it was last week, winter day.
It's only minus eight right now.
You can see I have my thinner gloves on.
If this is your first time here, don't forget to click that red subscribe button.
Give me a thumbs up and leave a comment.
And I'll see you next week with another English lesson.
Bye.
