Hello today I'm going to talk about why so many learners struggle when it comes to English pronunciation. So, this is a weakness for a lot of students. I talk to students, and they tell me that this is an area in which they want to improve, that they feel comfortable with things like grammar, but this is an area in which they have problems. And this lesson is going to focus on why I think that is common in the English language learning world. And then, I'm going to talk about what you can do to solve this problem, what you can do to improve this area of English. And the tips I'm going to give you can be implemented and followed on your own and from anywhere in the world. Now, be sure to stay until the end because I have a question for you. Now, I first noticed this issue when I taught in Spain. So, I taught for a year in Bilbao and then for a year in Valencia, and a lot of the students I came across all had common issues with specific sounds of English, and other areas of pronunciation, too. And I believe that the main reason for this is not enough focus is put on this area of English during general English lessons. So, think about any language classes that you have taken before. I'm pretty certain that the majority of these haven't focused on how to produce the sounds of English, what to do with your tongue, what to do with your lips, what to do with your mouth, in general, to produce the right sounds in the right way. And this is because most classes have multiple students in one class, so it's very difficult for the teacher to listen to problems that people have and to give them one-on-one feedback. And, in some case, the teachers have issues in this area too, and these problems are passed on to their students. Now, just to give you a quick example of this, when I was in Spain, a lot of learners had an issue with the d sound. So, if I asked them to say something like "dad", it was very common to hear "thath" because, in Spain or in Spanish, to make the d sound, your tongue touches your teeth, but, in English, this doesn't happen. Your tongue touches the ridge of your mouth behind your teeth. So, listen to this difference, "thath", "dad". And that's just one example. Now, the students that I taught had never been taught this area. No one had told them, to make this sound put your tongue here and make the sound in this way. They didn't know what to do with their mouth to make the sounds of English. I'm sure you can think of some examples in your native language, where people who are learning English make the same mistakes in this area. It might be a specific sound, it might be word stress, it might be intonation, or other areas of English pronunciation. Now, before we get too deep and too far into this topic, I want to talk about why this area of English is important, and it is important because it's a key element when it comes to reaching the high level of English to be able to speak English fluently and automatically and accurately. Just a quick example of this. If somebody asks you, "How's it going?", and you say, "Not too bad", and you say this perfectly, you say this flawlessly, then the person who asked you this question is going to think that you have a high level of English. They are going to be impressed by the way that you speak. Now, the phrase that you used was quite simple, it was quite basic, "not too bad". A lot of you learned this in your first class. But, I think that the way that you speak leaves a stronger impression than the words that you use. People are going to notice the way you speak more than they're going to notice grammar mistakes or vocabulary errors. So, that is one reason to improve this area.The second reason to work on this area is quite obvious. The better you speak, the better your pronunciation, the better people are going to understand you. And, finally, improving this area of English is going to allow you to speak more naturally and fluently. When you can make the sounds in the correct way, and you can use correct intonation, rhythm and stress, then things are just going to flow. You're going to feel much more relaxed when speaking because you're going to be more confident, as well. So, when you are speaking and you have that confidence of knowing that you can produce the sounds in the right way, then things are just going to flow. You're going to feel confident, and you can focus more on what you need to say instead of how to say it. So, let's talk about how to improve this area of English. Now, the first step is to learn how to make the sounds of English. So, going back to the d sound. Learn how to make the d sound. And then the t sound. Now, people also have problems when it comes to the difference between the f and the v sound. Some Spanish speakers, for example, make the b sound instead of the v sound. They'll say "ban" instead of "van". So, know exactly what to do to make the consonant sounds in English and the vowel sounds in English. I'll leave some resources for you in the description so that you can work on this area on your own. But it just comes down to knowing what to do with your mouth in order to make the sounds. Step two is to practice these sounds and to get feedback on it. So, practice "dad", "dad". Look at my mouth, "dad". Know what to do. Your tongue touches the ridge behind your teeth, "dad". Now let's practice "van". Repeat after me, "van". And this is just all about practicing. But, I want you to get feedback on the way that you say this, too. Now, there are two main ways that you can get feedback. Firstly is for a teacher to tell you if you make mistakes. And, secondly, you can do this on your own by recording your own voice and then comparing your version to the original. So you can find a word online, for example, dad, you can listen to this, repeat it, record your version, and compare your version to the original. And then, from that comparison, you can make changes to the way you say it. And I want you to do this until it's almost identical or identical, to the original version. So try and master these different sounds before you move on to the next step. The next step is to get lots of practice. Because, just like learning a new skill in sports, for example, a golf swing, you learn what to do, but it's the practice that you need to build muscle memory. And getting this muscle memory means that you'll be able to produce these sounds in English automatically when speaking. You won't need to focus on what does my tongue do. It touches the ridge. If you get lots of practice, saying the sounds in the right way, then you can just do this automatically. It will come out naturally when speaking, but you need to get the repetition, you need to get the practice to reach this stage. Now, English pronunciation isn't just about the sounds of English, there are other areas involved here, too. So, things like stress, things like connected speech or relaxed pronunciation. And what I want you to do, to master these different elements, is to imitate native speakers. Here's an example for you to practice. I really wanna give it to her. I really wanna give it to her. So there are a few things there that you can learn just by imitating that one sentence. The first one is that we emphasize really to give it more emphasis. I really, so you notice the stress on the word really. Then we had wanna, instead of want to. And this is an example of relaxed pronunciation. And then we have the connected speech where words link together. Give-it, give-it, give-it. So not give it, but give-it. So, learn these different areas. For example, I have a article tutorial on relaxed pronunciation, and then imitate native speakers. So, find audio in English, repeat after the audio. Again, record your own version and then compare it to the original. The last step is to get lots of natural practice because what we are doing so far is we are training. Now it's time to play a game. So, you can put all of this together and get natural practice. Speak to people, have conversations. And this is going to help you just become more confident in the way that you speak, and it's going to allow you to practice these different areas in a natural way. So, be sure to find the time and to make the effort to get some speaking practice.

You Will NEVER Improve Your English Pronunciation Unless You Do This!

<h1>3 Easy Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Your Homeschool Routine</h1>The routine rhythm, it's really, really important in a homeschool that you have some kind of routine patterns that you follow in your day, in your week, your month, and your year. This is how you show up as a consistent homeschool mom. This is how you are successfully accomplishing all the things that you want to accomplish is by creating routines. But there are some easy, easy, easy mistakes that you can make that I can help you avoid if we go through this article together. So let's just dive right in because if you want your homeschool days to be successful, you're going to need routines that work and we want to help you avoid the mistakes that would make them not work.Number one, what is the first of these three routines? You know, mistakes. What's the first one? Well, number one is expecting to fit in too much. It is so easy to put in so much in our homeschool. Language arts, math, science, history, foreign language, character development, PE, music, art, and that's just the categories, some of the categories. Technology, you know, coding, all of those things. And then within that language arts, you want to do literature, you want to do grammar, you want to do writing, you want to make sure that they are doing punctuation. That can grow and then the math can grow and then the science can grow. And before you know it you have so much going on. Less is more, I promise. It looks like you have to do so much in order to successfully confidently homeschool your kids. But the reality is you don't, you can do a lot less and have more success. A few things done very, very well work much better than a lot of things crammed in. So the first mistake when setting up your routine is trying to have so much in it that it isn't possible to accomplish at all.The second mistake that can happen so easily is expecting that every day will go perfectly. That every day you're going to plan the routine, you're going to know what you're going to do. It's all going to happen. It's all going to play out. No, no. Homeschool days are rarely predictable. There are always things. You're talking about a bunch of human beings all in one space, bumping into each other and doing all this stuff. There are no perfect homeschool days. There are great homeschool days, and I've made articles about how to have good homeschool days and how to avoid bad homeschool days and how to turn bad days into good days, but there are no perfect days. And so when you're setting up your routine, you want to set up your routine in a way that embraces the fact that you're going to have different kinds of days. And if you can do that, then you're going to be able to successfully move into a routine that actually works.Now, the third mistake that's so easy to make is expecting that a routine once working is going to stay the same. Oh, how I wish it was true, how I wish that the perfect routine. You know, I think you could have really good routines. And I would build routines that would be working really, really, really well, and then everything would fall apart. And what I started to notice that no matter what my routine was every four to six months, depending on how we were homeschooling, I would have to revisit the routine and sometimes completely start over. Sometimes I just would have to tweak it, but no routine lasts forever because the people who are using the routine don't stay the same. They change. Your kids get older, your kids get bigger, they need different things, they have different ideas, they're doing different curriculums or they're doing different activities. Things change. The routine has to change. So an easy mistake is to think that once you've found it or that if you can find the right routine, it will suddenly work forever. It just doesn't work. The healthy way to look at routines is to consider what does work in your family. To embrace the change, to be open to the fact that things are going to look different, different days. That's why I talk about this stuff. I hope that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom..

3 Easy Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Your Homeschool Routine.

Hello, welcome back to our homeschool topic. Today I want to talk about three simple steps that you can take to pick out the perfect curriculum. The desire of every homeschool mom to find the perfect curriculum so that your kids will magically want to do everything that you want them to do. This'll be the curriculum that your children will wake up excited to do that they will never complain. They will never whine. They will be thrilled and their learning will exponentially increase. Yeah. Actually the perfect curriculum, "perfect" doesn't exist, but in this article, I am going to give you three simple steps to help you find the best curriculum for your child at this point in time. And you can do a much better job of finding good curriculum without spending a lot of money and a lot of time researching and getting lost in the details. Because the reality is when you're researching curriculum, particularly if you're just starting out, the options are overwhelming. I know it's hard to believe this, but it's actually a good thing. When I started homeschooling over years ago, there just weren't a ton of options out there and the number of people who have created amazing possibilities in the last 16 years while I've been doing this is mind boggling and that's great. That means you can find an option that's going to be a good fit for you and your family and your child. The downside is that means you have so much more to figure out and research. So let's talk about three simple steps to kind of narrow it down to make it just a little bit easier for you. Now the first step, the very first step I recommend is actually getting clear on your vision for your homeschool. Why are you homeschooling? What are you hoping to accomplish and what is your sort of philosophy? What are you, why are you homeschooling? And this is a really important question to answer because different types of curriculum are actually going to feed into different attitudes about education in general. And so if you know what your reason for homeschooling is, you can start to weed out the ones that just don't line up. You know, if you're really, really big on child led learning and discovery, you're not gonna want a rigid curriculum that's just do step A, step B, step C. If you are a family, you're very focused on getting your children into an elite school and having them have the best academic opportunities possible. You may want something that has a more structured classical approach. So it's not about right or wrong, it's about getting clear on what you want. So step number one, get clear on your vision. Step number two, think about your kids. The curriculum is for them, but they're not all going to be the same. No two kids are the same. And certainly there's different kind of categories of kids. So you want to learn and think a little bit about their personality, about their learning styles. Do they need to be up and moving around and wiggling a lot or do they do okay if they're sitting and doing bookwork for awhile? Different curriculums cater to different styles and of course you would hope that curriculum that's designed for younger children, all younger children are more wigley than older kids. But there are some teenagers who that sitting is just not going to work for them in the same way. So get clear on your kid. How do they learn how, what's their personality? What are their needs? As you spend time doing that, what will happen is you will be able to have a better sense of which curriculums are going to line up with the needs of your kid. And don't forget to keep in mind that you're the one teaching the curriculum. So you do want to get clear on are you going to be really involved? You need to have a little bit less involvement. Maybe you're doing this with a kid and so they need to have an outside recorded instructor. Maybe you need to nurture that child so you wanna spend more time together and just what do you need? Do you need something that's a little more structured? Do you want it to be more open ended? You are one of the kids that you need to be looking at. Okay, so that's the second thing. Get to know your kid. Third one get kind of, so you kind of know about the different philosophies of homeschooling. Homeschooling has been around long enough now that it's kind of branched off into different ways. There's classical, there's Charlotte Mason, there's Thomas Jefferson education, there's Waldorf, there's Montessori, there's eclectic, there's world schooling or road schooling. There's unschooling and many, many more. Those are kind of the big ones and getting to know a little bit about each one of those will help you determine what kind of curriculum you want. Because some curriculum is designed specifically for classical education or Charlotte Mason education and you're going to see those words pop up a lot. Also, if you're asking and doing research and reading things and you know that that's not a style that's going to fit for your family, then you can just automatically let go of that particular curriculum choice even if it comes highly recommended cause you know it doesn't fit with what you are looking for. So the third one is you want to review the philosophies and get clear. Now once you have those three steps in place, you can go do research and research is, there's a couple different ways. One, there's a book by Kathy Duffy that I absolutely love. I've done another article on that, a link down below to that article and she has put together a book on the 102 top homeschool picks. Love the book. So worth the purchase. It will actually help you walk through these steps. The second one is your good old friend, Google. If you can put in, I need a reading curriculum for a really wiggly or a kinesthetic kid, that's Charlotte Mason, you're going to get a much more solid set of options to research. Rainbow resources, another really great place to go. A lot of curriculum there and they talk about these things and the different personalities and things like that. A social media is actually a great place to go, particularly Facebook groups that are aligned with your philosophy. You can ask questions about it in just geographic Facebook groups or in specific Facebook groups that aligned with those educational philosophies. All right. Good luck on your curriculum. If you have any comments, you can put those down below. Thank you for reading. See you next time!

3 Simple steps to pick the perfect curriculum

Hello, today I want to talk about four common myths about being a consistent homeschool mom. Consistency, is that something you struggle with? Do you feel like you just never can stick with things? Things are always changing in there and you're always kind of feeling in the throws of this and then this and then this. And you just think, if I could be a consistent homeschool mom, everything would be better. My kids would be learning, things would be humming along, we would just, it would all be going well. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about four myths that you might believe about being a consistent mom that of course are not true. That's why they're myths. And then I'm going to tell you four truths about consistent moms that you can hopefully apply in your homeschool. Okay, so let's get started. What are, what are four common myths that people who are not consistent. Homeschool moms that are not consistent think that consistent homeschool moms are doing? Well, the first myth is that there's this idea that a consistent homeschool mom always has it all together. They've got the meal planning, they've got the house cleaning, they've got the chores, they've got the homeschool. It's all just sort of happening. No. Total myth. Doesn't happen. The most consistent homeschool moms I know feel like they also have plates that are falling. I wish I could show you parts of my house. I consider myself a consistent homeschool mom. I have areas of my house that desperately need organizing and cleaning. We're talking boxes piled ready for me to go through. We're talking about junk in the corner. We're talking about rooms that really do look like storage closets. There are nights when we don't eat dinner and my kids make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. There are times when I look around and I think that cobweb has been in the corner for six months. Homeschool moms don't have it all together. We're figuring it out all the time. It really is a sheen that looks like we have it together, but we don't. Second myth, second myth that you might believe about a consistent homeschool mom that isn't true is that we do the same thing every single day and we do it in the same order. No, no, not even. Not even close. Every day looks different. Yes, I do sort of have rhythms and we're going to talk about that in a minute and other patterns that I follow, but those get thrown out of the window depending on what time kids get up. Our kid's sick. Is there a field trip? Do we have another activity? Is dad home? All kinds of things change what we do, and then on top of that, is the kid having a bad day? Did we struggle with this piece of the plan? Did I think I had something and then I had to change the plan because I didn't buy that thing at the store happens all the time. So consistent homeschool moms are not moms who consistently do the same thing every single day. Consistent homeschool moms they're ones who embrace the variety and are willing to be flexible and come up with something else or be okay with it changing. That's what a consistent homeschool mom does is she shows up every day and embraces the variety. Okay. Third myth, third myth that you might believe about a consistent homeschool mom is that she always finishes what she starts? No, no. You might believe that she picks a curriculum and then she works all the way through it. You might believe that she picks a curriculum and she uses it for several years. No, I can't tell you how many curriculum that sit on my shelf that I started and we didn't finish. The number of math programs we have been through and discarded. The number of books that we started didn't like and didn't finish. Consistent homeschool moms, it's not about picking and forcing your way to the end. It's all about consistently evaluating and deciding if it's working. Now you want to give it long enough to see if it's working and over time and experience you start to see what is actually a long enough time to know. But I'm constantly evaluating. I'm constantly shifting. I'm constantly tweaking and turning and trying to decide what is the best mix for our family. And that is why we're never, it means sometimes we finish things, but not always. Okay. So the fourth myth. Fourth myth is that the consistent homeschool mom always knows what she's doing. This one just makes me laugh. I don't know what I'm doing. I only know what I'm doing to the extent that I seem like I know what I'm doing because I've been doing this for 16 plus years. There are so many things I am still figuring out. I'm still figuring out how to teach higher level math. Do I kind of know how to do elementary math? Well maybe, although I have to wonder, would my higher level math be better if I had done a better job with the lower level math? I dunno. I'm still figuring out how to help my kids write in different kinds of ways. I'm still figuring out how to help my son clean the bathroom consistently every week. I am still figuring it out. So the only thing that a consistent homeschool mom does is shows up. Recognizing that every day she will be learning a little bit more on how to be a little bit better, a little bit more, a little bit better, a little bit more, a little bit better. It's not about always knowing what you're doing, it's recognizing that you're always learning. Okay. So those are the four myths. Let's talk about four truths to be a consistent homeschool mom. So one of the truths that make all consistent homeschool moms work and this is a pattern I see across a lot of different styles and families, is that consistent homeschool moms trust the process. They learn to trust that if they show up every day, something magical will somehow happen by the end. If they are learning and growing and trying to improve and asking questions and constantly striving, they actually will make some kind of progress. Even if it doesn't feel like it in the moment. Second truth is that a consistent mom knows how to push through the initial hard. The part where a kid doesn't like something because it's just new and different and you're all getting used to something. They know how to push through that stage so that they can then get to the stage where they can genuinely evaluate whether something's working or not and some kids require a lot of energy to push through and others don't. It just depends on the kid. The third one, and I've already kind of alluded to this, is that a consistent homeschool mom is constantly learning. That's the fourth truth. She a third truth. She is constantly learning. She's constantly researching, she's constantly asking questions, constantly evaluating. And then the fourth thing is that a consistent homeschool mom finds her own rhythm. She does not depend on someone else telling her exactly how to structure her day or her year. She sits down and she says, what is going to work for us based on our family situation, our family schedule a myriad of experiences and situations that only apply to your family. You know, you have that unique mix and then you find a rhythm that works for you and you're not looking for a schedule. You're looking for a rhythm and a rhythm might be seasonal. A rhythm might be monthly based on how you handle different parts of your month. It might be based on when dad's home and when dad's not home, your rhythm is going to look different, but the rhythm is what keeps you consistent. It's what keeps you consistent over and over and over again through the days, the weeks, the months, and yes, the years. Okay. So is this easy? No, it's not easy to be a consistent homeschool mom, but it is doable. It is doable, particularly when you can put the common myths aside and start to embrace the truth. Now there are some things you can do to make it easier and one of those is to help you develop rhythms by being aware of what's going on in your family, being aware of how to structure your day and onto the week, the month, the year in a way that really does help you find the rhythms. I make these articles every week to help you be a successful and confident homeschool mom.

4 Common Myths about Being a Consistent Homeschooling Mom (+4 TRUTHS)

Hello. Welcome back to our channel, today I want to share four tricky truths that make it tough to be a homeschool mom. Most of the time I make articles that talk about how to be a successful homeschool mom, how to be a confident homeschool mom. But today I want to talk about why being a homeschool mom can be hard. And because I don't want to lie, homeschooling, it's hard. It is not for the faint of heart. It is not easy. And so I want to talk about what makes it hard for the homeschool mom. Why is it that maybe you want to be aware of just some of the things that are coming that might be difficult that, don't get me wrong, I love homeschooling. I've been doing this for a really long time. I am a veteran homeschool mom of 16 years. I've got four kids. This isn't, I've been doing this awhile and these are the things that I find are still, even after 16 years, still hard for me. So the first one, the first thing that's hard is you just never have it all figured out. You think you will. You think that it's 16 years or 18 years or 20 years, at some point, you're going to have it all figured out. But the reality is I am still researching. I am still asking questions. I'm still looking for answers. My kids get older and new questions develop, we enter a new phase of life and suddenly everything that I thought I knew has to change. It's just the reality of changing and growing. You never have it all figured out, and that can be hard. Because you invest all this time, you think at some point, kind of just want to take a break and, and enjoy what I figured out. But the reality is there's always more to learn. There's always ways to improve. There's always things that, big questions that you're trying to figure out. So that's the first thing that I think is hard as being a homeschool mom is and it is a truth. You are never going to have it figured out. So the second truth, the second tricky truth is that you never stop worrying. You just don't. You're gonna worry the entire time you're homeschooling. I've actually made another post that I recommend you watch all about why a little bit of worry is actually good. And you don't ever want to completely let go of the worry. But the truth is you are never going to stop worrying. And that can be frustrating. Guilt and fear they sit on the homeschool mom's shoulders and it takes a lot of work to make them not screaming in your ears. And the guilt is all about what you've done in the past and regret and feeling like you should have done something different. And the fear is all about the future. And it's all about what's going to happen and what am I doing to my kids and are they going to be okay? It's all the future. And these two are sitting on your shoulders and you're just like "Ahhhhhh". So you gotta learn how to turn that off. But you don't want to completely turn off the worry because you do need it. So there's this battle in-between all of that. And me? Yeah, I'm still worrying. I'm still worrying after 16 years about math. I'm still worrying about am I using my time correctly with my different kids. You know, am I figuring out, like should we be going on these field trips? Should we be staying home? Should we be, you know, am I doing enough? Am I not doing enough? I'm always trying to figure that out and there is some worry that I'm going to make the wrong choice. It just is. Okay. So the third tricky truth, the third tricky truth is that it's harder to say goodbye. I didn't even know this. I read everything about how it brought families together and homeschooling creates this environment where everybody is genuinely good friends and that stuff is all true. It's awesome and amazing. But I didn't realize that what that means is that when it's time to let someone go, either just short term because they're going into an activity you're not involved with like a play or something or long term. Like I sent my daughter off to college, it was hard. It was way harder than I thought it was going to be and it was compounded by the fact that we'd always been together. We'd always been a family, so that was hard. The last thing, that's the tricky truth, the last tricky truth is that homeschooling is a huge sacrifice. Huge. It is a sacrifice of time. It is a sacrifice of money. It is a sacrifice of energy. All of it is a sacrifice. And you're going to have to come to grips with that. If you're going to be okay with homeschooling. It is a tricky truth that you are going to be sacrificing. Now, don't get me wrong, it is worth it. All of these tricky truths, all of these things, it is worth it. I love homeschooling. If you need more help with your homeschooling, I do have a homeschool help center full of free resources that you can check out the links up above, down, below, wherever you're reading this article. I hope that that will help you if you are in the process of trying to decide if these tricky truths, if you're willing to embrace them so you can homeschool, or if you're in a place where you just need some help. I'm here, and I make these articles every week so that you can be a successful and confident homeschool mom.

4 Tricky Truths that Make it Tough to be a Homeschool Mom

41% of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE is FRENCH

It is so easy for your homeschool schedule to get more and more complicated. It's easy because there are so many options out there for homeschooling. And we as homeschool moms we'll research this and we'll research this and we'll research this. And then we start buying all of these different curriculum or we'd start cobbling together all these cool things that we're seeing on Pinterest, and other people talk about at our co-op and we pull it all together. And before you know it, you have a really complicated homeschool schedule and it is so easy to do this. Why do we do this? Why do we pull from so many different places? Why do we try to cram so many different things into our schedule? Well, it's usually because we're afraid that we're going to leave something out. We're going to miss some important point that our kids need to have. We're going to get our kids into their adult life and they won't know something that they need to know. And so the idea is, well, if we just do as much as possible, we'll somehow cover all the bases and everything will be taken care of. And the reality is that is not only impossible to actually accomplish, it's also detrimental to your entire homeschool. So today I want to talk about the benefits of not doing that. What are the benefits to keeping your homeschool simple because less is more, less allows you to accomplish a lot more than more does. And that's counter intuitive, but it's true. So how do you actually do this? Like we're going to talk about the benefits and we're going to talk about all this, but simplifying your schedule. Well, before I get into the benefits, I do want to talk about the fact that this is something you have to be considering and thinking about on an ongoing basis. I know that about every four months I have to sit down and really think through everything that we're doing and think, should we be doing this? And every time I do that, I usually do it you know, in the fall as we're getting started as I'm planning the homeschool year. I always do it around the holidays as we move into the second half of the school year. And then I'm always looking at our summer and thinking about what does our school life, homeschool life, just life need to look like in the summer. I'm usually doing it in about four month chunks and because I'm doing it every so often, one of the things I have to do is go back and look at the vision for my homeschool. I have to make sure that what I want for my homeschool is what we're actually accomplishing. So let's talk about this.What are the five benefits of simplifying your homeschool schedule? Well, the first one is you're going to be less overwhelmed when you don't have so much to do and so much to think about. And so many things that are falling behind. You actually feel less overwhelmed. When you feel less overwhelmed, you have more fun in your homeschool, you're more excited to homeschool. You show up in just a better way, which means your kids are going to have more fun. And that is actually the second benefit. When you simplify your homeschool schedule, your kids will also be less stressed, less assignments, less to do's, less just feeling that mom is frustrated because not everything is getting done. And depending on the kid, you're either getting pushed back or you're getting a kid who's trying to please you. And either way it creates stress.So the second benefit is your kids are less stressed, which means they're having more fun, which means they're enjoying homeschooling, they're looking forward to it. And when both of you are having a good time and looking forward to homeschool, everything gets better. Okay, so what's the third one? What's the third benefit? You're more likely to do what you actually scheduled, right? If you have 10 things scheduled and you only get to three of them, then not only are you stressed, but you're only getting to three of them, which means you're putting all this effort, mentally at least, into all 10 things, but you're only getting to three. But if you only schedule three things because you recognize that you're trying to simplify and you're just going to dig down deep and do just what really matters, you're going to go in depth. You'll get those three things done because that's what actually fits into your schedule, not what you want to have fit into your schedule. The fourth benefit. The fourth benefit is it is less expensive when you simplify your schedule. Now I know you can homeschool for free. I know there's lots of resources out there and that's almost one of the reasons our homeschools get so complicated is because there are so many free things we can download. But we are also often spending a lot of money on curriculum. Curriculum that you start and you don't finish because you have too much scheduled, so if you simplify and purchase less, you will save money. If you simplify, you will buy fewer supplies for science experiments or activities or art activities that you never get to. You'll only buy what you actually need and you'll own and then you will actually use what you purchase. The fifth benefit, and I think this is one of the best ones after lowering your stress level and your kid's stress level, is that you will actually go deep instead of broad. Instead of skimming the surface of all the different things that you're trying to cover in a frantic way, you'll get to go deep and really dig in to the topics, both that your kids are interested in and the ones that you feel are really important. And in the end, there is more value in really grasping onto some things than skimming over the surface and ultimately forgetting a lot of things. So those are five benefits that I have personally found come from simplifying your homeschool schedule. Huge, huge changes will happen in your homeschool as you find a way to do less to accomplish more. &nbsp;

5 Benefits of Simplifying Your Homeschool Schedule

Maybe it's been a while since you felt like you've had your mojo. Maybe you remember times in the past, maybe several years ago where you actually felt incredible, a lot more incredible than you do now. I feel like all of us, at some point in our lives have had little checkpoints where we remember feeling incredible. Either we were in a flow state where we were inhibited by our social anxiety, or maybe times where you just felt energetic, enthusiastic about life, and motivated to actually take constructive action. In my life, I feel like I have finally entered a period where I feel good. Most days I feel quite good, and that's sort of foreign to me. You know, I'm very prone to negative emotion, I get into my head a lot, and depression runs deep in my family. So I pay special attention to the actions that I do throughout the day, and how that affects my mental health. And recently, I've started doing a few things that have really helped me feel better, and I live my life with more energy, more enthusiasm towards my work, my personal life, and overall, it just feels better to feel this way. So hopefully through this article, if you guys are going through a rough time and you want to enter into a period of your life where you just feel better on average, you're more enthusiastic to wake up in the morning, and you wanna feel like you have your mojo back, then hopefully some of the things that I've started doing can help you as well. Feel free to experiment, take it or leave it, but this is what I've been doing to make me feel really good.So number one is very simple. Every single morning, I've been waking up at the same time every single day, and immediately I walk outside and I smell the fresh air. And bonus points if the sun is shining and you see a little bird flying by and let the hot sun beat down on your pale face. I'm talking about me of course. I have no melanin in my skin whatsoever. And if I wanna take this one step further, I'll actually go for a walk. Before I have my coffee, I'll put on my running shoes and I'll go for a walk around the block. And while this practice may sound overly simple, it's kind of a game changer for me, because I actually feel like endorphins are rushing through my body. My brain is getting flushed with positive neurochemicals. It also gives me a little window of time to not look at my phone and start thinking of the things that I can accomplish today. I can think of the people in my life that I wanna spend time with, I can think of the person that I want to be, and I can be grateful for a fresh start, a new opportunity to restore order and contribute to the world and make a difference hopefully. And this might sound super cheesy to you. I mean, it would for me, if I didn't start going on these morning walks. 'Cause when you're coed up in your house all day and you immediately jump on the internet, it's hard to have cheesy, wholesome thoughts like this. And when someone says something like this to you, you might say, "Oh that sounds overly Disney, "being thankful for a fresh start." But honestly, stepping outside of your house and getting off the internet will do that to you. You will actually start to have positive thoughts again. So first thing in the morning when you wake up, don't go on your phone, don't check Twitter. Walk outside of your room, put on some runners, go walk out your front door. You don't even need to put on shoes. Just walk out your front door, fill your lungs with that fresh, clean air. Look up at the sun, but not too long or you'll go blind, and just take a few seconds to be thankful for a fresh start and a new day. That will set the tone for the entire rest of the day, and you will never regret doing that. And that leads very well into the next thing that I've been doing, which is intentionally doing things and going places that elevate my mood. So this one sounds really obvious, but I actually don't think it is, because so often in our lives, we will do the same things every single day. We'll go to work, we'll come home, we'll sit on the computer. We tend to do the things that we've always done, and we slowly and slowly and slowly might become more cynical. We might start to think that there's no point. You know, what's the point of doing the same thing every single day, waking up and working for the same boss and the same job that you don't like? But every once in a while, your sister might text you and say, "Hey, do you wanna go for a walk on the beach shore?" And you usually say, no, 'cause your super busy, but this one time, you're like, "Okay, sure, let's do it." I haven't hung out with my sister in a long time. So you go for a walk on the beach and you look around and you say, holy smokes, the world isn't so bad. The sounds of the seagulls chirping in the air. I don't know if seagulls chirp, they kind of like squawk. You know, people are walking their dog. This attractive couple is on a very awkward first date and it's fun to people watch them. And you're getting moving, the blood is flowing, and all of a sudden this new experience gives you a fresh perspective and it elevates your mood. But it's so funny because everyone can kind of relate to this story, but then they go back to doing the same thing that they've always done, slowly becoming more cynical until they reach a breaking point and they do the that kind of thing again. But why not implement the things that make you feel good regularly into your life? Why not have a weekly schedule of going for a walk on the beachfront with your sister? Why not actually go to that book group on Friday filled with smiling faces and attractive people of your same age? And this is going to be very different for everybody. You know, what makes me feel good might not necessarily make you feel good. You know the things that kind of break up that pattern and make you kind of excited to be alive again. Make an effort to make that thing a regular part of your life, because those things are the types of things that make life worth living. So try to really evaluate in your life what are the things that make you feel inspired, invigorated, refreshed, and optimistic? I don't know what that is for you, but if there is something that comes to mind, maybe it's something that you haven't done in a long time, make an effort to make that a regular thing in your life. It will give your better thoughts, your more optimistic viewpoint some more air time, and over the course of days and week and months and years, you'll find that giving your more optimistic tendencies more air time will really benefit your mental health in the long run. Okay, so the third thing that I've been doing that has really helped me feel incredible is that I've started to put more effort into my appearance. So this is probably gonna be the most controversial one on this list. I feel like a lot of self improvement advice out there, including some I've probably given as well, has really emphasized the point that external circumstances won't necessarily make you happier. You know, if you buy a new car, you get a fancy house, you get a cool dog that, you know, people compliment you on, you know, these things won't make you a better person, especially if the desire to attain these material possessions comes from a place of insecurity. You know, if you're feeling really bad about yourself, like you have really low self-esteem and low self-worth, then buying a new shirt and spending a bunch of money on a new iPhone probably isn't gonna help you. It'll just distract you for a day. I think everyone knows this, but I think there also is something to be said about dressing in a way and presenting yourself to the world in a more dignified way, in a way that reflects your inherent dignity and worth as a person. So the clothing choices that you have and the fact that you cut your hair and trim your nails isn't necessarily what makes you have value as a person, but it sure as hell reflects it. And as we've talked about in previous articles, your subconscious is very perceptive. It's constantly evaluating other people and making judgment calls about them, but it's also doing the same thing to you. So when you wear clothes that don't fit, if you wear clothes that are extremely kind of drab and uninspiring, you're not showering, you're not trimming your beard or cutting your hair, your subconscious is picking up on these things. It is evaluating your appearance and making a judgment call of your self-worth based on that. So there's almost no avoiding it. It's an automatic mechanism. And it's almost like a chicken or the egg thing, because by getting a fresh haircut, by buying nice clothes that fit you, and by showering and taking care of yourself and appearing well in the world and orderly in the world, your subconscious does look at that and it will feel better about your self-worth. Obviously this isn't a permanent solution, but it all contributes to this feeling of dignity. Man, it really sounds like I'm just rationalizing the fact that I got some new drip recently. I don't know if you need to do this much thinking before buying new clothes, but hopefully you can see where I'm coming from. I do really believe that if you're more proud of the clothes that you put on, the haircut that you have, or the lack of hair, and just keeping shit tight against your head, I do feel like you'll go about the world in a more confident way. It's kind of like making your bed in the morning, and you can't just restore order to the whole kingdom by cleaning the foyer, but cleaning the foyer does reflect the fact that you're an orderly kingdom, or that you on an orderly kingdom or whatever. I don't know. I'm bad at allegory today. But I feel great. Okay, So the fourth thing is that I've been keeping a list to restore order. So in the notes app of my phone, I keep this list called "Things in Order," and I have a giant inventory of all of the main domains of my life that I could be restoring order to. It starts with my physical surroundings. Is my bedroom clean, is the office clean? The top floor, the main floor, the basement? How about my finances, where am I at with that? My habits, how are those? You know, my social life, my spiritual life. I really flesh out each category of my life and what criteria I would have in order for me to consider that domain relatively orderly. So this might seem kind of obsessive, and I feel like there's a self-improvement philosophy that is making its way through the internet that would be tempted. A philosophy that would be tempted. Philosophy, philosophies don't get tempted. But if you hold this philosophy, you might be tempted to say, that's self-obsessive, you're setting yourself up for misery, because that's conditional happiness. You have a big criteria of things and achievements that you have to hit before you can feel totally satisfied in life. But I think that's completely BS, because the world is always and constantly in a state of decay. If you leave things alone, things always get worse and disintegrate rather than stay the same. Some might call it entropy, some may call it the destructive nature of time, but that's just the way the world works. If you neglect taking care of your teeth, your teeth will rot right out of your skull. If you don't clean your kitchen regularly and do the dishes, a stench will start to develop and you'll attract pests. No matter how you spin it, if you're not constantly maintaining order, if you don't live your life in a mode of being that is constructive, then time will naturally destruct. But there's a silver lining to all of this, it's not so hamster wheely and fatalistic, and that silver lining is that it actually feels good to restore order in your life. So when you have this thorough list of things that you have to restore order in your life, to check those boxes feels good on the inside. It makes you feel proud of the existence that you're living. When you put your head on your pillow at night, you can say, "I put my time to good use today." And without that direction in life, without that game plan of what you're actually doing in the present moment and what you're working towards, then by definition, you're directionless, which is kind of synonymous with meaninglessness. Directionless? Meaningless? Either way, it's not good. So one of the most optimistic things that I've done recently by I far is to make this thorough list, and every single day, I try to check a box or check a fraction of a box, and just take inventory of all the things in my life that I have autonomy over, all the things that I can contribute to, and it helps me feel like I'm the master of my fate. The ironic thing is I'm actually kind of tired. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. So if my eyes are puffy and I look kind of miserable, it kind of totally goes against this whole message. You might be reading this article and be like, "Joey says he's okay, "but he doesn't look okay." But I feel great. So the final thing on this list is a no brainer thing, but it absolutely has to be covered, because it's probably the most important thing. You just heard it a million times before. Number Five is that I stop being an absolute dumb dumb with my health. There's no getting around the fact that when you start working out, when you start being active and you get the blood pumping and the iron, when you start juicing? No, don't juice. There's absolutely no getting around the fact that when you start going for runs, you start getting exercise, you feel like a Greek god. When you drink enough water, you feel like Poseidon. The monotonous things in life don't feel so drab and absolutely agonizing to get through. It's because you actually have the mental energy to get through them. So on average, save for last night obviously, I've been getting way more sleep, I've been drinking more water, I've been hitting my very specific supplement stack, which I'll go over right at the end here, I've been working out, I've been doing more cardio, I've been going outside for walks, and taking care of my health like this is the cornerstone of my mental health. You know, your physical health and your mental health are so intimately linked in ways that are beyond our understanding. So let's talk about my supplement stack. That's what everyone's probably dying to know. I kind of covered it in a previous article, but I've kind of modified it. So I am not advocating or prescribing anything to you, I'm just telling you what I take.  So it's just a very pleasant way to start my morning with the confidence that I'm giving my body all the tools that it needs nutritionally to tackle the day with energy. So if you're interested in joining me in this very simple health optimization habit that I've been partaking in for over two years now. If you like this article, make sure that you hit Like. If you hit the Like button, then it actually, the algorithm goes, "Oh, this is a good article. "I will shove this guy's bald head "into other people's homepages, helping them out," which also helps me out, so it's a win-win for everybody involved. So make sure you actually click the button, because I want you to. If you're lurking here, consider subscribing and hitting that, no, don't hit the Bell icon. You don't need any more needless notifications in your life. Yeah, just consider subscribing. It just looks good on paper, and check out the second channel. There's a lot of fun stuff on there, some family vlogs of mine if you wanna get to know me better, there's some Q&amp;A articles, and there's gonna be a lot of fun stuff, potentially even a podcast popping up on there pretty soon. And if you're on Instagram anyways, which you probably shouldn't be, because it's cancerous and brutal, but if you don't follow my advice and you still go on Instagram, then you might as well follow our Instagram, because it's probably slightly less of a waste of time than other people's Instagram. I don't know. That's a bad pitch. We just need more followers I think. But if you don't feel like following it, don't follow it. Cool, but other than that, that is all for today. Thank you so much for reading, and we'll catch you in the next article.

5 habits that make you feel incredible

Hello, welcome back to my homeschool article, today I want to talk about 5 simple ways that you can record your homeschool. So there's a lot of conversation in the homeschool world about planning, about deciding what you're going to do, getting all set up. I don't know that we spend quite as much time talking about recording. And depending on where you live, you may or may not be required to record. And if you're not required to record, then it is something that is easy to not get around to because you're so busy actually doing the homeschool thing. And so today I want to talk about 5 simple ways to do it. And the reason I'm making this article and I'm talking about this is because recording your homeschool can be really important for a couple of reasons. Now, first of all, you may live in a state where you do actually have to keep records and turn those in. And if that's the case, then you're going to need probably a more extensive system than something that I'm going to talk about today. But there's a lot of places where that is not required. So why else would you record your homeschool? Well, first of all, when you record your homeschool, it gives you a place to go back and look on those days -- or even those weeks -- when you're thinking, Why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through the stress and the struggle and the frustration and ... ? Or you're thinking, I'm failing at this. I'm not doing well. We're not making any progress. When you're feeling like that, if you have a record, you can go back and you can look at it and you can remember the high points. You can remember that, Oh yeah, it used to be that my child couldn't read and now they can read. Or it used to be that we were struggling and struggling and struggling to learn how to do, you know, long addition. And now my kid is way past that. You know, whatever it is that you have progressed through, a record helps you remember. Because we as human beings are really bad at remembering. We think we'll remember, but we don't. So having a record helps you do that. The other reason that you might want to keep a record is particularly as your kids get older, they're going to start to apply for things. They're going to want to be in things, and sometimes it's really, really helpful to be able to go back and see what they actually did. And because, again your memory is fallible, which means that it will be helpful if you have something to reference. But having said that, we need to keep record keeping simple, otherwise you can go crazy trying to keep up with the planning and the doing and the record keeping. So now we're going to get into 5 simple ways to do record keeping. You ready?All right, number 1. Get a journal. Doesn't have to be fancy. It can be the cheap one that you picked up at the discount store, or it can be a nice leather bound one, whatever. And just jot down a few things as many as many times a week as you can remember to do it. You might want to set an alarm on your phone or something. And I'm not talking about pages and pages of journal entry. It could simply be the highlight of the day or one thing you noticed, one success, one thing you wish you'd done differently. So it's more of a reflective journal than otherwise. Now you can keep a journal like that in paper form, like I said, or you can also keep it on your phone. You could put it in a Google doc, you could put it in any one of those record keeping systems that store it up in the cloud. And then you just add a little bit every single day or as often as you remember. So the first suggestion I have is to do some kind of just mini journal, mini journal. Remember, we're going to keep this simple.Okay, number 2. The second thing that you could try is take a picture every day with cameras in our pockets and in our hands all day long. Because let's be honest with one another, we all kind of have our phones with us all the time. It's so easy to take a picture. And it doesn't have to be an Instagram worthy picture. It's a picture of whatever you happen to do that day. Maybe it's a picture of the mess after the activity was over. Maybe it's the finished art project. Maybe it's the messy hands. Maybe it's just the kids sitting on the couch reading. Or maybe it's just a selfie that you take with you and your kids as you're driving in the car. If you take a picture, then you start to have a record of just the dailiness of homeschool and all of the things that go along with that. And then you can store those in the cloud again, or you can put them on one place on your computer, hard drive. And you can just go back through those and they can be a recollection of the memories that you've made throughout your homeschooling. So that's number two. Take a picture as often as you can, possibly every day. All right, number 3. The third easy way to do simple record keeping is to make comments on your lesson plan. So if you have somewhere that you're keeping track of what you want to do every day, then in the margins or down-- if there's a space provided, you're just going to jot down again, How did things go today? Well, Johnny read four letters, or I was really excited because we actually had an activity where everybody had a good time. Whatever it is, you're going to just jot a few thoughts. It's similar to number one with the journal except that it's put in the lesson plan. It's combined with the planning so you can go back and you can see not just what you did but also what you had planned to do. The bonus of this particular system is that you can often see how maybe the plan for the day didn't necessarily line up with what actually happened, but maybe it was still good day. And maybe it wasn't. And if it wasn't a good day, jot that too. Because part of the process of record keeping is to see the good, the bad and the ugly. And if you're able to see that there were not such great days but you got through them and then you had another great day, it helps program your mind to remember there's another good day coming. So number three is to just jot a couple notes in the margin or in a space provided in your lesson planner. Number four, the fourth way to do some easy record keeping in your homeschool is to do article or audio. So you get your phone out and you push the little record button on the audio record app that you can put on your phone and you just take a journal -- you just talk for a few minutes about the good and the bad and everything in between. Or you take a article of some of the things that are happening during the day with you narrating in the background. Another way to handle this is to actually hand the phone over to your child or your children and say, Hey, just talk today about what happened. Give a couple of sentences. Again, we're not making this to be a movie. You're making this as a record, as a keepsake. And one of the benefits is that audio and or article capture so much more than words. They capture personality, they capture the tone of the voice, they capture the stages that your child is in. It's kind of like a big trove of family history, all squished into that little homeschool package. And because homeschool does actually bleed into all parts of our lives, you'll actually get a capture-- You'll actually end up capturing what is going on on a regular basis just in your home. And again, we're not doing this all the time. We're doing this whenever you remember. And if it's important to do it regularly because you do want that record, you know, set a reminder on your phone or something like that to help you remember. You just want to put five minutes into this at some point during the day. So number four is actually to use article or audio and then to store that somewhere in one place where you can find it. Okay? Number five, the fifth way that you can do some simple record keeping in your home is to create some kind of portfolio. Now when I say portfolio, sometimes what happens is we think about the kind of portfolio that has to be turned in, which means that it will be beautifully decorated and all formatted and in order. And that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of portfolio where you get a binder and you just have sheet protectors or even a three hole punch and you just throw things in as they're created. This is especially fun to do when your kids are creating lots of things in art or they're sitting down and writing simple stories and as they get older they can put their papers that they write in there or you can print out pictures of things you've done. So it becomes kind of like a scrapbook. Or even simpler -- I think of this as a portfolio, but I think of it as as a vertical portfolio rather than as a book -- is to get a bin and as people, as people in your home, as children create things to put them in the bin and you store it archaeologically. So if you want to be able to go through and see when that program happened or when that child made that art project, what's at the top will be what was created most recently. And then you go down from there and you just store things. And again, don't store everything, right? As prolific artists, prolific writers, you can't store everything. We are going to store the things that have meaning. And anything you store, take a minute to just date and write a sentence on it about what it is. Because again, when you look at it five years from now, you think you'll remember, but you won't. So there you have it. That's the fifth one. Create some kind of portfolio, either either in a notebook or a binder or archeologically in a bin. Five ways to do simple record keeping. Because when you keep records, you remember, and when you remember, you are able to have a better perspective. You're able to have a healthier attitude about your homeschool, and you'll also be able to look back and remember and enjoy all of the good experiences that you are slowly accumulating on your homeschool journey.

5 Simple Ways to Record Your Homeschool

Hello and welcome to this article where I am going to share seven tips to help you learn English fast. We are going to talk about the different learning strategies that you can implement so you can make faster progress with your English. And we're going to mainly focus on speaking, because that's what most people want to improve. So, let's get started with tip number one. Set a goal and a deadline. Make this ambitious but attainable. So to be very specific with what you want to achieve and also importantly, when you want to achieve this goal. So for example, let's say that you have a B1 level of English, a pre-intermediate level of English. And again, we're gonna focus on speaking here. Now this is a level that a lot of learners have, and a goal for you, if you have this level, is to reach a C1 level, an advanced level of English within nine to 12 months. So to be very specific with what we want to achieve, and if you want to learn more about these different levels then check out the article I made on that. But again, if you have a pre-intermediate level, a B1 level of English, a great goal to set yourself is to reach that advanced level, the C1 level, within nine to 12 months. This goal is ambitious, but it's also attainable. So it's ambitious, but it is realistic. It's something that you can do if you apply yourself, if you do the right things. And having a goal that is ambitious with a deadline will help you create a strategy in order to reach this goal. So basically what we're doing here is we're setting ourself a target to improve at a faster rate than we are doing now. And having this deadline will actually make us, not only come up with a strategy but also take action on that strategy, to actually do the things we need to do. So the first step is to create a goal for yourself. I've given you an example, but depending on your lifestyle, your ambition, and also what you want to do, you might want to be more ambitious or less ambitious. And know that we can change this goal, depending on our progress, but it's good to set a goal and to be very specific with what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve this. So write down your goal, and say exactly what level you want to reach and when you want to reach this goal by then move on to tip number two. Tip number two is Learn English every day. Get into this habit. Once you have your goal, it's now time to come up with the strategy. And I highly recommend committing to the daily practice of learning English. Now know that there are two different types of learning that we can focus on. Two, generally speaking, things that we can do in order to improve. One is more passive. This is where you're reading something. You're reading something in English, or you're listening to something in English. This is where you surround yourself in English, and we're gonna talk about that in tip three. This is easier to implement because you can listen to something in English while doing other things. The second type is more deliberate, it's more active. And this is, for example, working on the sounds of English, getting speaking practice, doing some writing. I will talk about that later, but this is something that you'll have to really dedicate time to doing. Because while you can listen to things in English while doing other things, if you're focusing on some type of language that you need to learn then you need to actually create that environment where you can focus on this. But the key to this tip is the commitment to daily practice. The commitment to actually doing something daily, because in order to improve quickly, in order to make that fast progress, you're going to have to do something every day, and get into the habit of doing something everyday. Tip number three is to surround yourself in English, and we've already talked about that in tip two. But I want to expand on this, and also talk about a mistake that a lot of learners make when they do this. Okay, so you've probably heard of the teachers say, listen to things in English, read things in English, watch things in English. You know, change your life so that it's more surrounded by the English language, which is great advice because it works, and it's something that you need to do in order to improve more quickly. But choose resources that are specific to you and your level. To help me explain this, a lot of learners get in touch with me. They send me emails saying "I can understand your articles, "but I don't understand movies." So when I watch a movie, I don't know what is happening. And this isn't a big surprise because, again, if you have that pre-intermediate level it's going to be difficult for you to understand things that aren't written for English learners, that aren't made for English learners. So native materials like movies and songs and TV shows, they're going to be more difficult to understand than with things that are made for you and your level. So find resources that are suitable for your level. So if you have the B1 level of English again, find graded readers that are made for you and get the audio book too. Find TV shows, podcasts, songs, or books that you are interested in. So that you're learning the type of English that you're going to use, and also ask this question. Am I going to learn the type of English that I need to learn by reading this book or listening to this podcast? As your level increases, you'll be able to expose yourself to native materials and to enjoy movies and TV shows and podcasts that are made for English speakers. But for now, surround yourself in English that you are going to enjoy and the type of English that's suitable for your level, because if it's too difficult for you, you're not going to enjoy it, and if you don't enjoy it, you're not going to continue listening or reading. Tip number four is all about using the most effective methods so that you make the most out of the time you spend studying. Because so far we have set a goal, we have talked about daily practice, we have talked about listening to things that are suitable to you and your level, but now we're going to focus on the studying side. Now I like to talk about deliberate practice when it comes to this, and deliberate practice is focusing on the skills you want to improve and using the best methods in order to improve those skills. And it also includes getting feedback on your output, so that you can make changes, and so that you can improve your English. So this is more active. Tip three surrounding yourself in English is very passive. You're listening, you're reading, but what we're talking about here is being more active with what you do, and this is where you need more concentration. You need to focus on what you're doing in order to get the most out of the different things that you do. Now here are some examples of deliberate practice, and these are the types of things that I recommend you do. The first one is writing. And I made a whole article on how to improve your writing skills, but writing is such a great way for you to improve. Because it gives you the time to think about what you want to say, and how you want to say it. When you're speaking, it's difficult to use the correct pronunciation and to use the right words, and you're constantly interacting with someone. It's a difficult skill to do, but with writing you can take your time and ensure that you are using the right words in the right way. Another example is taking lessons with a teacher. So this is where you can practice your speaking and get feedback on your speaking. Another one is to use the To Fluency Method, which we are going to talk about next.Tip five is to use the To Fluency Method, also known as the LRRC method, and this is how to use it. First you listen to a sentence in English, then you repeat the sentence and record yourself saying it. You then listen to your version and the original, and then you make changes to the way that you say the sentence and you get longterm repetition. Again, focus on the type of English that you want to learn. So get sentences that are specific to you and your level. Then, either use your phone or your computer to record yourself saying these sentences, and then compare them. So listen to the original and then listen to your version, and then notice what you need to do to sound more like the original version. So think about what you need to do with the sounds of English, notice what you have to do when it comes to linking words, or the way you stress different parts of the sentence. And keep doing this until your version is as close as possible to the original. And then once you have done this, use an app like Anki to get longterm repetition, so that you internalize these phrases, and that's a big part of this method. Internalize in the vocabulary and the grammar, so that you can produce it without really thinking about the rules, so that you produce this automatically and naturally. And if you do this with lots of sentences, then you'll be able to be very flexible with the way you speak, and you'll be able to do this without thinking about grammar rules, or sentence structure or anything like that, and without translating. To learn more about this method, again, check the description there will be a link there, and I'll also include one of the cards here on YouTube, so you can watch that article.Tip number six is to get more speaking practice. Now what we have talked about so far with deliberate practice is kind of like football training. So where you work on your heading, you practice dribbling and passing. But then speaking practice and having conversations is like playing the game, and you need both in order to make fast progress. And there are three main ways that you can get speaking practice. The first way is to get a teacher. Now hiring a teacher is great if you can afford it, because a teacher will give you feedback on your mistakes and help you when it comes to deliberate practice. The second way is to join a language exchange, and a language exchange is where you meet with somebody who knows the language you want to learn, so an English speaker. And they also want to learn the language that you know. So if you are from Russia, find an English-speaker who wants to learn Russian, and then you spend half the time speaking in English and half the time speaking in Russian. I'll leave a link in the description to my favorite language exchange app. And then finally, make friends and join clubs. This is a longterm plan because if you just send a message to somebody on Facebook, saying hey do you want to chat with me in English, then 99% of the time they'll say, who are you, I don't know you, no. So take your time to make friends in the city where you live, online, or anywhere else that you go and join clubs too. So if you're in an English speaking country, join clubs that you meet people, and you can easily make friends.Tip number seven is all about the Pareto Principle, the 18, 20 rule. And I think this is such an important thing to think about when it comes to learning English, and it's actually gonna help you with all the tips that we've talked about before. And here is a little stats from the BBC which I'm gonna share with you, and they said, "If you learn only 800 "of the most frequently used lemmas in English." A lemma is like a word family. "You'll be able to understand 75% of the language "as it is spoken in normal life." So this is saying that it's important to learn the most commonly used words and phrases. And this makes sense right, because if you learn the most commonly used words and phrases then you'll be able to have better conversations because those are the words and phrases that people use more often. But also take this a step further by focusing on the language that you specifically are going to need. So for example, let's say that part of your job is to describe charts in English and different graphs and data, then you need to learn the words and phrases related to this. Also if you're taking the IELTS exam then focus on what you need to know for the IELTS exam. So be smart with this, don't waste your time learning things that you won't need to know, especially when it comes to the To Fluency Method that I introduced before. Where you are taking sentences, and you are internalizing them through the repetition and the speaking. So use sentences that you're going to need to know. So with all of that in mind, let me know in the comments section which tip is the most powerful, which tip you're going to start implementing today, and then share your tips. What tips do you have that will help English learners improve at a faster rate? Thank you so much for reading this article. If you enjoyed it then please like and share it, and then also go ahead and read another article that I have made on similar topics.

7 Powerful Tips to Help You Learn English FAST (most learners don't do this)

Today I want to talk about what a typical homeschool day looks like. A typical day. This is a question that I see all the time. I see it in Facebook groups, I hear it at co-ops. So "What does a typical homeschool day look like?" I'm going to start out by sharing a little secret. There is no typical homeschool day. What does a day look like? The reality is they're all really different. And so it's really challenging as a homeschool mom who's been doing this for over years. It can be really challenging for me to say a typical day looks like this because there are so many things that affect a homeschool day. And things that you can control and things that you can't control. So for example, you might have a kid that wakes up sick. You might have a holiday where your husband's home from work or a holiday where you guys decide to travel. You might have a car emergency, you might have a family emergency, you might have a, so those are all things you can't plan for. But then you might also have a field trip or a special activity or you know a moon, a new movie comes out and you really want to go see it as a family or, or it's snowing and you want to take a snow day. home.Like those are all things where you actually kind of plan that those things are going to happen. So you're constantly juggling what a typical day looks like because there really are no typical days, although there are rhythms and patterns to homeschool days. So today I'm not going to talk about a typical day, but I am going to talk about some rhythms and patterns that you can use to kind of get a picture of what homeschooling looks like. All right, so I want to clarify. I've been homeschooling for over 16 years, which means that we started when my youngest was three and a half. They're now all teenagers. What my day looks like now when my youngest is 13, is really, really, really different from what it looked like when all my kids were, you know, eight and under or 10 and under. So I'm going to break this article into a couple parts. We're going to talk about a typical day, a typical rhythm day, a pattern day when I'm home. And we're also going to talk about one when we're out and about, because it kind of divides into those two categories. And under each of those categories, I'm going to tell you what it used to look like when my kids were younger and what it now looks like now that my kids are teenagers. So we're going to cover each of those. Let's start with what it looks like when you stay home with young kids. So staying home means that you don't have a field trip planned. You don't have an outing planned, you're not going to the co-op, you're just staying home and having a homeschool day. Well, the rhythm that we often did when it was sort of like a normal day is that my kids would get up, we would get dressed. We weren't a pajama family. There are homeschool families that are, we weren't. We would eat breakfast. We would then do kind of our chores, the work around the house. I would work with the kids, we would all kind of work together at the same time and then we would gather on the couch. We would do devotional, we would, you know, morning time we would read books, we would do art study or we'd watch an article. It was kind of our gathering time. We would play games together. We'd have kind of our time together and then the kids would kind of separate and we'd have time alone and that's where I would kind of help the kids who might be working on something that they would need help with and then we would be done and they would go off and do their own playing their own passions, their own interests. And that's when I would get my time. Now you might be thinking, well how long is that? While we would get up, and again this is just me, I know homeschool families who are super successful with all kinds of schedules, but we would get up roughly around seven in the morning and I would get up a little bit earlier cause I'm a morning person, but we would get up, we get up around there, we would start homeschool about nine or nine 30 and we'd usually be done about noon. Remember this is again when all my kids were little, maybe one o'clock if they had specific assignments cause they were 10, 11, 12. That's what it looked like when they were younger. Now that they're older, it actually looks a lot different. So first of all, I now work and so I work early, early in the mornings again cause I'm a morning person and my kids don't actually get up and we don't get going until about 10 in the morning. They get up before that if they want to do things. But 10 is when we gather together. That's when we say prayer. We do our gathering time, we do our devotional. That's also when we kind of coordinate the day because now my teenagers are going all over the place and most of the time I'm actually a facilitator of them going directions. Who needs the car? Who needs to be here, who am I driving? So-and-so is, you know, child A driving child D somewhere because some can drive and some can't. So now our day is much more about coordinating after we gather at around 10 and then they go off and do their independent work. And most of what they do now is independent. It doesn't require me anymore. I am available however to answer questions, to help with projects, to help with math problems. If I can still help with math problems to help with writing, things like that. So my day looks really, really different now and my free time is actually different. It's segmented throughout the day when they don't need my help. And sometimes I will schedule with a child and say, okay, we're going to sit down and do this particular assignment right now. Because they'll say, okay, well we'll schedule to meet together at 1:15 and we kind of treat it like that more like tutoring rather than a set time. So that's, and then we wrap up and there's often activities in the afternoon that we're going to, so I'm driving kids to lessons or other kids are driving kids to lessons or going to lessons, you know, and then we finish out the day. So it's very, very different now than when I was, when my kids were younger.. So that's what typical normal days look like when we're. So let's talk about now what they look like when we're out and about. When my kids were little, and again this is all, you know12 and under 11 and under, when we had an outing, whether it was a co -op day or just a field trip. And we're talking like a field trip that takes an hour. I did not do anything else homeschooling other than probably to gather and some kind of devotional. And what I mean devotional, we said prayer, we would get up, we would try to get the work done. If that happened, I would feed my children. So we'd get up, we'd have breakfast, probably get the work done and then we would go on the outing. And that was the day. Because by the time I got everybody ready, got in the car, went to the outing and got home, I was tired and I didn't have the energy. And it was so hard to like trying to get back into our routine. And so I was very careful and intentional about how I would plan my school day and my school year, recognizing we were going to take lots of those days and I would have different kinds of expectations about how much we would accomplish with our book work or our reading book or our games or whatever. Because if we went somewhere that was it. Now my kids are older, right, so getting ready to go somewhere is easier, but because they're independent, I actually let them decide when and how they want to get their independent work done and I cancel the classes I'm still in charge of, so I'm still doing math with a couple of my kids on days when there's outings on days when there's other things, we just don't do math because again, I recognize that by the time we get there we do the thing and we come home. It just does not work my rhythm to put those classes and try to do them at, you know, four in the afternoon or six at night. Maybe some moms do, I don't. I'm just going to own it and say that's how it works for me. So that's what typical days look like when kids are younger, typical days look older. And lest you think, I'm just talking from my own experience, having been around for 16 years, I've read a lot of people who have written out their schedules. I've probably read, Oh I probably have read a conversation or had a conversation or read at least a hundred different examples of days. And these are really the patterns that I see across the board. I see very few people who are super rigid and structured every day no matter what. Now this is one piece of being a successful homeschool mom is, how do you structure your day? It is like you got to figure out how you kind of want the day to go. Because the day is the block, the building block of the week, the year, the month, the year and beyond. So if you're still in the research phase and you're trying to figure this out or you're thinking, "I have tried to be homeschooling, I'm trying to structure my day, I have no idea how to do it.” I hope that you will figure it out and become a confident and successful homeschool mom.

A Typical Homeschool Day: What Does It Look Like

Our world tells time in a variety of ways. It has for a long time. How many hours are in a day? Which direction is clockwise? Do days just touch or can they... overlap? The way you answer those depends on your culture and your language. Zanzibar, Tanzania. The tallest building when you get off the ferry in Stone Town is a famous local landmark called the House of Wonders. On the top there's a clock that might throw off your sense of time. At noon when the sun is directly overhead, its hands read 6 o'clock. At 9am it actually says 3:00! Hm, strange. But you manage to house your wonders and go enjoy tea with a local friend. (Chai time!) You notice her watch and ask for the time. She glances down. You're relieved to see her hands read the same time as yours, 10am. But without stopping to think she nods her head back up to you and says, "4 o'clock." What's going on here? Well a hint: you're near the equator, where the sun rises around the same time every morning, 6 in the local time zone. Everyone's up and starting their day at seven. With such a reliable natural standard timekeeper, that winds up being 1 o'clock Swahili Time. Even though your friend sets her watch "normally", like other Swahili speakers, ask her what time it is and she mentally winds back the hour hand. Watch says one thing, person says another. Here you're surrounded by clocks that read standard time and people who adjust it to Swahili time. Do not get disoriented. This is normal. Like people around the world, their days are repeating cycles. Swahili Time just shifts when the cycle starts. Or maybe you're the shifty one? Well, Swahili time may rotate that circle , but it still splits it into two rounds of 12 hours, with each hour striking twice per day. Surely you're aware of one alternative to this, the 24 hour clock, each hour once per day. But have you taken a tour of Italy and seen all the beautiful campanili? I haven't. If you have, did you find any unusual medieval clocks? I hear there remain some six hour clocks that still tick on like this one. But you don't have to take a trip to the past. Go to Thailand, and you'll meet six hour time tellers there, too. In the Thai way of keeping time, you count the hours from one to six four times a day. So even a standard 24 hour day around the world might be one round of 24 hours, two rounds of twelve, or four rounds of six hours. And that's assuming we're using the new kind of hours... Inside an enormous shopping mall in Dubai there's a huge mechanical elephant clock, a replica of a contraption invented over eight hundred years ago by al-Jazari. Want to know one of the biggest hurdles this clock had to overcome? The way hours shrink and grow. An hour isn't always an hour long. Since ancient times many people have counted hours of daylight. This Egyptian sundial divides sunlight, from sunrise to sunset, into twelve segments. But Egypt like most of the world - and unlike Zanzibar - gets much more light in summer and much less in winter, so the hours on this sundial expand and contract, breathing with the seasons. Technically called "temporal hours" now, they were once considered the true hours versus today's standard "equal hours". Go to Greece and say the word "water thief": klepsydra. Nowadays people will think you mean this, an hourglass. Once though, long ago, it meant this, a water clock. In ancient and medieval times, inventors tinkered tirelessly with these devices, eventually leading to al-Jazari's sophisticated clocks that could keep up with these changing temporal hours. A sidenote I find interesting at this point. In many languages the words for day and day, daylight hours, have different roots. In Swahili, siku versus mchana. In Chinese, two different characters (日 vs 昼). In English, however, day is its own hyperonym! The first Chinese character there is for one full day-night cycle. Traditionally, that was counted in twelve shí, sometimes translated "double hours". So only twelve hours total in a day, and since now we know the fancy term I can say equal hours! But instead of subdividing these hours into minutes, a separate decimal system ran concurrently, splitting the day into hundredths, a hundred kè per day. Then you could cut those into smaller fēn. (Something like that would happen later in the French Revolution.) All three of these words continue to be used today, fitted onto more modern units: twenty four hours, each with four quarter hours and sixty minutes. Subtract one of those double hours and you're reckoning time the old Nāhua way. They divided the daylight day into four parts and the night into seven. They also have a different understanding of the word clockwise. So do this. Face north. Point to the sun, following it from east to west. Counterclockwise. See, circles in this part of the world cycle the other way, like on the famous sunstone unearthed from the streets of Mexico City, symbols run this direction. Now off to northern India, where for ages the day has been ritually divided into eight pahar. These determine the ceremonial and musical theme of the moment, but they're also practical, which you can still see in the Hindustani word for "afternoon". Break it down, it means "two pahar". There are actually many, many smaller and larger units of time. Take the muhūrt, of which there are thirty in a day. Divisible all the way down to fractions of microseconds. You know who else has 30 hour days? Kind of. In Japan, timekeeping has ditched the unequal hours that once characterized Japanese clocks, which count backwards for six temporal hours twice a day. Well, there is this one watchmaker who's crafted a temporal hour watch, but otherwise, Japan fully embraces the 12 and 24 hour clock. And they found a way to top it. (Apply break time limit!) Late night events can stretch to 25 o'clock, 29 o'clock, all the way up to 30. Maybe you feel like if you're up past midnight, it's not tomorrow yet. Not really, I mean, you haven't even gone to bed. The 30 hour clock taps into that sentiment, with the interesting result that the last six hours of the day overlap with what will have been the technical start of your 24 hour day when you wake up tomorrow. To close this out, let's circle back once more to Africa, but a very different place. In Ilé-Ifẹ̀ I'm told there's an old sundial with a circle divided into sixteen segments. But even though the Yorùbá language natively has plenty of numerals up into the millions, you won't catch this farmer rigidly using the numbers one to sixteen to talk about time. Instead he knows the names of birds that routinely cry out at the same moment every day. See in many languages, the time you tell isn't merely a number. The sun, moon, beasts and sequences of human events help keep natural time. Thanks for getting wound up about linguistic clocks with me. Thanks to patrons for supporting this, I hope you enjoy the background sketches, seeing your names in the outro and the other rewards I enjoyed preparing. And thank you for sticking around for language.

Clocks around the world: how other languages tell time

Let's talk about a problem you might have when listening to English, especially when reading a movie: You don't understand what you hear. And this is not because you don't know the vocabulary. If you read the transcript or the subtitles, you will understand the material just fine. So you already know the words being used. You just don't recognize them when listening. So what should you do? According to many research studies, an effective way to deal with this problem is to practice listening through easy-to-hard training. In one study, participants were trained to perform a task related to hearing. And there were three levels of difficulty - easy, normal, and difficult. The participants were divided into two groups. The first group was trained to perform only the difficult version of that task. The second group, however, started with the easy and normal versions first before performing the difficult version. The researchers wanted to know which group would perform the difficult version better. So what was the result? Well, despite having less training with the difficult version, the second group actually performed better. Practically speaking, this finding suggests that if you have difficulty doing something, instead of just keep doing that, it's more effective to start with something easy and then slowly increase the difficulty as you improve. So how can you apply this knowledge to improve your listening? I'll tell you. First you have to make it easy in the beginning. For example, if you listen to podcasts in English on your smartphone, find an app that lets you change playback speed so that you can slow down or speed up what you're listening to. If you listen on your computer, there are programs that can do that as well. Then, whenever you have trouble understanding, use the app to slow down the audio like this: So now it gets easier, right? You have more time to think. You have more time to make out words that aren't pronounced clearly. You have more time to guess the meanings of new words and phrases. The idea here is to make it easy in the beginning. Listen at slower speeds. Listen to speakers that are easy to understand. Listen to easy stuff like podcasts and interviews as opposed to movies. Start small. But you're not done yet. Easy-to-hard training requires you to go from easy to difficult. So once your listening skills improve, you have to gradually increase the difficulty. For example, if you're listening to a speaker that speaks slowly and you can understand everything, instead of listening at the normal speed, speed it up like this: Now, after you speed it up, you must still be able to understand the content but you should feel a little uncomfortable. This will help you become more familiar with listening to fast speakers. The idea here is to keep pushing yourself. If you keep listening to something easy, your listening skills will stop improving. So you have to keep challenging yourself. So listen at faster speeds. Also, don't keep listening to the same person. Listen to different people with different speaking styles. And then...start reading movies without subtitles. If it's still difficult, you can slow down the movie by 5% or 10%. Or you can slow it down even more if you don't mind the slowness. Once you get used to it, you can then start reading movies at normal speed. Alright, that concludes this article.

English Listening Practice: How to Understand Movies Without Subtitles

&nbsp;Did you know that about 5% of English words originate from Old Norse? Yes, those were the Vikings. These include common words such as give, get, knife, window, which means wind eye and husband, which means master of the house, though not wife that comes from Anglo-Saxon. It is estimated that between 600 and 900 hundred modern English words come from Old Norse. How did this happen? Today on Let Them Talk TV. We look at the history and if English is not your first language, I'll show you how you can improve your level of English and your understanding of English with words and expressions of Viking origin . So get into your longship. If you don't have a longship, then a chair will do and let's go. As you can see from this chart, Old Norse makes up about 5% of English words, far less than old English, also called Anglo-Saxon or French or Latin, but nevertheless a quite significant amount. And some of the most common words in the English language are from Old Norse. They are given an ugly steak knife. There you are, I just made up a sentence almost entirely made up of Old Norse vocabulary as well as ARE and THE, THEIR and THEM. So really fundamental words. By the way, I explain why I use these statistics in a separate article. Definitely check it out if you want to know more about the origin of English words. Back to the Vikings. Let's start with a little linguistic history of Britain. Now, Britain had been invaded several times before the Vikings arrived. Various Celtic tribes inhabited these islands from the first millennium, B.C..The Brittonic TribesAnd they were called the Britons. They spoke a Celtic language which historians refer to as Brittonic. The Brittonic language was the ancestor of the Celtic languages, which you still find in the British islands today. Welsh and Scots Gaelic and Irish, as well as Breton in Brittany in France and other Celtic languages include Manx, spoken on the Isle of Man and CORNISH spoken in Cornwall, and these two languages had all but become extinct. But there has been an effort to revive them in recent years.The RomansIn AD43, the Romans invaded and they stuck around for about 400 years, finally abandoning the shores in A.D. 410. A huge number of English words entered English through Latin, but only a very small number of these words can be traced back to the Roman occupation. The vast majority entered the language much later, especially after the Norman conquest of 1066. Let's move on to the next part of our linguistic journey, and that is the migration of perhaps invasions of Germanic tribes to Britain.The Anglo-SaxonsThese took place after the departure of the Romans until the early eighth century, and these were the Angles. The Saxons and the Jutes among other tribes will refer to them here as the Anglo-Saxons. During this period, Celtic tribes got kind of squeezed out or pushed to the west, to the western part of England, to Wales, Cornwall and parts of Scotland. And the angles and the Saxons gave us their language. Anglo Saxon, which as I already said, is also referred to as Old English. And if you look at our chart, it makes up about 30% of English words which can be traced back to Anglo Saxon or old English. Most, but not all of the most basic words come from Anglo Saxon the verb TO BE conjunctions AND BE prepositions WITH OF etc. and much more. And if you want to know more about the Scots language, check out this article here.The VikingsAnd finally, we get to the Vikings. When exactly the Vikings arrived in Britain is a matter of historical debate, but most historians put it that the raiding of the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 AD over the next few centuries, the Vikings consolidated their hold on Britain. England got divided into the areas controlled by the Vikings and the areas controlled by the Anglo-Saxons. The Viking controlled areas became known as the Danelaw. Look at this map. It shows how much land the Vikings controlled at their peak at the time of Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon King. In 888 AD, Wessex was controlled by Alfred, but the rest of the country was controlled by the Vikings.Viking names in modern BritainThe Vikings first conquered England more than 1200 years ago. But if we look at this map of modern Britain, we'll see that the names of Scandinavian towns and settlements are still with us today. In the areas once under the Danelaw, for example, -BY meant a village such as in Derby. Borough meant Fortress such as in Scarborough. Kirk meant church such as in Falkirk. NesS meant a headland such as in Skegness. Thorpe meant farm such as in Scunthorpe and Toft meant homestead such as in Lowestoft. Surnames ending -son such as Peterson, Johnson, Donaldson are Viking and to this day the prevalence of these names are higher in the areas once controlled by the Vikings.Old Norse influence on Modern EnglishSo how has Old Norse influenced modern English? The Vikings ruled and colonized large areas of England from the ninth to the 11th centuries. The rest of England was ruled by Anglo-Saxons. However, the king in Danelaw might have been Viking. But Anglo-Saxon villages and towns continued to exist alongside Viking settlements. There was significant trade between the Danelaw and Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon parts. The Vikings would have interacted with the Anglo-Saxons on a daily basis. There would have been intermarriages. There would have been children who were bilingual in both languages. They mixed at every level. Anglo-Saxons and Old Norse were similar languages. They are both Germanic languages. Anglo-Saxon as West Germanic and Old Norse, North Germanic or Scandinavian. So they could have understood each other to some degree. How much so is hard to tell. And what happens when two people who speak similar languages come together? A modern day equivalent would be a Spaniard and an Italian or a German and a Dutch speaker. Well, they simplify their languages. They talk in a way that makes it easy for the interlocutor to understand. Old English was a complex language. It was a highly inflected language, which means that the words change according to the person. Gender, number. Mood, voice. Old English had masculine, feminine and neuter nouns. By the 13th century, there had been an enormous simplification of English and all this was gone. Modern English is an analytical language, which means that sentences are based more on word, order and prepositions. In modern English, there is no grammatical gender. Unlike other European languages, gender only continues to exist for nouns referring to persons of a particular sex such as widow, widower or waiter waitress. Grammatical cases no longer exist in modern English, with the exception of the Saxon genitive. Also known as the possessive case. That's why we say Bob's guitar and not the guitar of Bob. Anglo-Saxon grammar was more complex than Old Norse, but the mixing of communities led to its simplification. Most linguists consider English to be a West Germanic language, along with German and Dutch. And then this branches off to the Anglo Frisian group, which includes English, Frisian and Scots. Modern English, it is argued, is a direct descendant of Anglo Saxon with a huge amount of French and Latin vocabulary thrown in. Do watch our other article. For more on the French influence on English, most linguists consider Old Norse to have influenced modern English only to a limited extent, and that essentially English is still a West Germanic language. However, there is a theoryIs English a Scandinavian language?that English is in fact a Scandinavian language and that it should be classified in the same group as Swedish, Danish, Norwegian , Faroese and Icelandic. The argument goes as follows Modern English is not a Germanic language influenced by Old Norse with a large French vocabulary, but rather a Scandinavian language influenced by Anglo-Saxon. Of course, a large French influence. They say that old English died out, but contributed a great deal of vocabulary to modern English. But the Danes or Vikings, or whatever we call them, ruled England for a long time. And they point out that the area where modern English developed was the South East Midlands region, and this was the most densely populated area by the Danes. These were the areas today around Leicester and Peterborough and these have been declared by some linguists as the birthplace of modern standard English. It was the largest and most prosperous area of England. It's far easier for a Norwegian to learn English than even for a German or a Dutch person. And the reason for this is that its structure is so remarkably similar. The argument was put forward by Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo. This is what he says. There are many English words that resemble ours, but there is something more. Its fundamental structure is strikingly similar to Norwegian. We avoid many of the usual mistakes because the grammar is more or less the same. Norwegians find it easy to learn English because of the similarities to their language. We often find that when grammar in modern English is different from other West Germanic languages such as Frisian, our supposed closest cousin or Dutch is the same as in the Scandinavian language. It's very unusual for a language to borrow syntax from another language. For example, word order in English and Scandinavian. The object is placed after the verb. I have read the book. Eg har lese boka German and Dutch and old English put the verb at the end. Ich habe das Buch gelesen English and Scandinavian can have a preposition at the end of the sentence. This we talked about  Dette har vi snakka om English and Scandinavian can have a split infinitive. That is when we insert a word between the infinitive marker and the verb. I promise to never do it again. Eg lovar å ikkje gjera det igjen Group genitive. The Queen of England's hands. Dronninga av Englands hatt. All of this is impossible in German or Dutch. And these kind of structures are very unlikely to change within a language. The only reasonable explanation, then, is that English is in fact a Scandinavian language, and the continuation of the Norwegian Danish language, which was used in England during the Middle Ages. But why the inhabitants of the British Isles chose the Scandinavian grammar is something we can only speculate on. Do I think English is a Scandinavian language? Well, frankly, I have no idea. I read the debate with interest, but as I don't know any Scandinavian or Germanic language apart from English, I can't really say. But let us know in the comments what you think. Let's look at a little more vocabulary and an English idiom, which is over a thousand years old.Old English/Old Norse doubletsFirst of all, I want to show you how close the vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse were. Here are a few doublets. Doublets are when two words from different languages have the same etymological roots. So in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, the root would have been proto Germanic. In modern English, the meanings have something in common, but they are different. So we get in old English ditch in Old Norse dike. In Old English shin in Old Norse skin. In Old English shirt, in Old Norse skirt and also shriek and screech in whole and hale. You'll notice that words with a SH sound often come from old English and words with a SK sound come from Old Norse. Other examples of this are ship and shell and fish from old English, while sky, scrape and scrub come from Old Norse.The ill- prefix I'm sure you know that in English we have two words with a very similar meaning. Ill and sick. Why do we have two words which are virtually interchangeable? I feel sick. I feel ill. Same meaning in the context of feeling unwell. So what's happening here? Sick is an Anglo-Saxon word and has always had the meaning of well, sick. Ill is an Old Norse word. And originally it meant bad. And somewhere along the line, it took on the meaning of sick. However, when we put ill before an adjective, it still has the meaning of bad or badly. For example, if you come into the room at the wrong moment, I'd say that your entrance was ill-timed. And there are many English words which have this prefix ill. If you try to reach the top of the mountain wearing a t-shirt and flip flops, I would say that you are ill-prepared for the climb, or perhaps that you are ill advised if somebody told you that this was the suitable attire for a hike. If your hairdresser tries to cut your hair with a nail scissors, I'd say that he or she is ill-equipped to do the job. If you're walking in a dark alley late at night in a city you don't know, you might feel ill-at-ease. If your neighbor robs a bank, I'd say that the money he got from the robbery or his ill-gotten-gains and this is a noun, by the way, are the words with this ill prefix include ill-afford. I'm very busy. I can ill-afford wasting time reading YouTube articles except this channel of course, ill-fated the Titanic. Now, that was an ill-fated voyage. Ill-mannered. I've had enough of your ill-mannered children. Get them away from me. Do you know the phrasal verb to egg on?Egg on and Scot freeIt means to encourage in a bad way or to incite. For example, I'm not the type of person to get drunk and cause trouble, but my friends, my so-called friends egged me on. And you're thinking of eggs. Got to do with encouraging someone to do something in a bad way. Well, nothing actually egg in this context comes from the old Norse word egje, which means to incite, actually an egg. The actual egg that the pen lays also comes from Old Norse. Have you ever heard the idiom to get off scot free? It means to escape without punishment. So, for example, the corrupt politician had €500 million in a Swiss bank account, but they decided not to press charges. He got away scot free for a long time, until quite recently. I wondered, what has a Scots got to do with escaping punishment? Well, nothing, actually. The phrase has nothing to do with Scotland or Scottish people. Scot was the Old Norse word for a tax, and as far back as the 10th century, the Scot was a municipal tax levied for poor relief. So somebody who didn't pay or is not liable to pay the tax was scot free. So yeah. Wow, this expression is more than a thousand years old and it's still in use today in modern English.Viking words to improve your vocabularyAnd here are some other words of Old Norse origin that you can use to spice up your vocabulary if you're learning English . Awkward. You know, several meanings. One of which means to feel ill at ease. Uncomfortable in a situation. For example, they asked me to make a speech, but I felt a bit awkward speaking in public. To haggle this means to negotiate, usually for smaller items, the sort of thing you might do on holiday when you're in the markets . They wanted $500 for the ring, but I managed to haggle them down to 300. Oh, no, no, I just paid you. Burt yeah, this bloke Barnacle won't go to ransack, which means to go through a place in a disorderly and chaotic way. Often used about thieves who break into a property while I was out. Some thieves ransacked my apartment and stole the ring I had bought in the market. Just this means a sudden and strong wind. I was walking down the road when a gust of wind carried away my hat. Muggy, this is another word you might hear on the weather forecast. It means unpleasantly warm and humid. The winters are mild in Tokyo. But the summers are hot and muggy. Thwart. Which means prevent someone from reaching their objective. We wanted to take our group on a world tour last year, but the COVID epidemic thwarted our plans. Blunder, which means a stupid mistake. Leaving the window open was a serious blunder. And that's how the thieves got in and stole my ring. Teem. Which means to be full of or swarming with something. LetThemTalkTV. is teeming with good articles about the English language. Stagger another word with several meanings, and it can also mean a great surprise. He was staggered to find out that it was his wife who had tried to poison him. Snub which means to be ignored and not in a nice way. Despite all my hard work, I was snubbed for a promotion when they gave the job to the boss's nephew. Nigel. Damn Nigel. So we can see that Old NorseNorn and Nynornhad a great influence on modern English. But did you know that a descendant of Old Norse Norn continued to be spoken on the British Isles until 1850? Norn was spoken in the far north of Scotland and on the Shetland Islands and the Orkney Islands. They formed part of the Kingdom of Norway until 1470, after which they were pledged to Scotland. Gradually the use of Norn declined. But as I said, the last native speaker died in the Shetland Islands in 1850. Today only a few place names in Shetland and openly have Norn names as well as a few dialect works. There has been an attempt to revive Norn and this language is called Nynorn New Norn, but has so far met with limited success. But who knows if it does. If it is successful, then the Viking tongue could soon be spoken once again in the United Kingdom. And how cool would that be? I hope you enjoy that article. A big shout out to Ina-Marlene Hanssen from Tromso for providing the Norwegian in this article. Have a great day. See you soon. Bye.&nbsp;

How the Vikings Changed the English Language

Today we're going to look at how to answer some common interview questions. Now this article is one of a series I've made on interview technique. How to write a cover letter? and all the skills you need to get a job check out the playlist up here somewhere and in previous articles we've already answered the questions; can you tell me about yourself? and do you have any questions for us? so we won't be looking at these questions today. And if English is not your first language remember focus first on the content and getting your message across - that's the most important thing, much much, more important than making a small grammar mistake. So be authentic and don't memorize your answers and I'll try to give you some tips on how you can turn the fact that you are English learner to your advantage to find out more stay tuned. Let's get started. Let's choose the first question which is this one: What do you know about the company? what do you know about the company don't say "your company well you tell me I'm here to find out aren't I" no god no this question is a biggie, this job is your career you'll be working there every weekday maybe weekends too for years. Now if you couldn't even be bothered to find out who they are then it shows a lack of respect, a lack of interest and frankly you've lost the interview right there. You've got no excuse for this one you've got the internet to do some research online find two or three items that you found relevant and perhaps flatter them a little and ask a question. Start by saying what they do how long they've been around. So for example, you're going for a job at hotel reception for a famous hotel chain "I know that you're one of the leading hotel brands in the world you run hotels in 58 countries according to your website (but only 57 according to Wikipedia I wonder which one is correct maybe you can clarify that one for me) I know that you've got over 4,000 employees, I know most importantly that you have a great training program for new starters and a proven career path for those who are ambitious enough and that's why I'm here today." Next question let's choose this one: Why did you leave your last job? why did you leave your last job good question. "Well my manager was an idiot, I hated my coworkers and they didn't pay me enough". Don't say that no. Negativity NO BADMOUTHING. Negativity will never get you the job even if it's true okay there are lots of reasons you want to leave. You could say "I've had several good years at the Purple Elephant and it will be sad to leave because I've built some good relationships there but the job you're offering is quite exciting and these types of positions don't come up so often so I thought I should step out my comfort zone and grasp the opportunity. I believe it's a role where I could make a difference. If I stayed at the purple elephant, yes, I could carry on as before but it would be less interesting." ok a bit of a bull** answer but it doesn't matter as long as you don't badmouth your previous employers. Also there are many legitimate reasons for leaving your current job. For example, the commute could be too long or you might be made redundant and that's ok just be positive about the job you are leaving behind. What's next: What are your strengths? So try and be honest here. Yes have a look at the job specification and find out what they need. However what you shouldn't do is give a personal trait unless it's particularly relevant to the job so don't say for example "I work hard" this is expected it's suspected to be normal don't say "I'm very honest" again this is a given it's expected or don't say "I'm a team player" everyone's a team player so say a real strengths and give an example so if you're going for that job in hotel reception you could say "I'm good at learning languages at the moment I'm learning Russian I won't call myself fluent but in my last position I was able to give directions to an elderly Russian lady who didn't speak any English and she was really appreciative and gave me a gift of some tea at the end of a stay." Also you can give an example which is always nice. If English is not your first language but you've learnt it to an advanced level you could talk about that too. Let me give you an exactly another example. If you're applying for job as a web designer you could say "I'm very good at the ergonomic side of web design often developers focus on the functionality and the look of the site these are, of course, important but making a site easy to use and easy to navigate is at least of equal importance. Recently I read a book called 'Human Factors in Web Design' and it taught me a lot and, I must say, I've gained a lot of expertise on this subject over the last few years so I would say that I'm good at making websites that are not only good to look at but also a joy to use as well". And if you don't have many technical skills or experience you can still give a good answer. For example you could say that you are good at anticipating people's needs or something like that of course it should be a true strength and you should always give an example. Turn it into a story. We all love stories. Next question. Well logically we should do this one: What are your weaknesses? Personally I hate this question I hate this question I don't know why recruiters ask it it's a really dumb question but answered they they do. So don't give some negative that is are positive don't say "I'm a perfectionist" Don't say "I work too hard" Please god no these clichés will make you sound like an idiot. Don't talk about failings that are unrelated to your work so don't say "I'm a terrible ukulele player", "I'm not very good at Jenga" ok don't say something that could lose you the job. "Sometimes I lose my temper and I get violent" "I'm always late." no, no, no, don't say anything like that. Tell them a true weakness but not one that will impact negatively on the job and show them what you're doing about it okay I personally (believe it or not) I have many weaknesses hard to believe, let me give you a true weakness of mine: I'm not good at timekeeping. This is in spite of the fact that earlier in my career I went on several time management courses. I used to laugh about it and say 'you cannot manage time, time manages you' but I realized at some point that this was inefficient and this inefficiency wasn't good and someone recommended something called the Pomodoro method and you can look it up okay you look it up on Google and although I'm not cured it's helped a lot. Basically you divide your day into 20-minute slots and each slot is called a pomodoro and you take a small break between each Pomodoro and a long break after three Pomodoros or is it pomodori? I don't know anyway you get the picture and actually it's been quite effective so I'm not perfect but I've definitely improved. By the way if you're not a native English speaker you could say that to: "My English is not quite as good as I would like it to be but I'm studying hard to improve it.Next question: Where do you see yourself in five years' time ? where do you see yourself in five years time some things not to say. "Well I plan to be a consultant earning lots of money somewhere else". "Actually I'm just using this job as a stepping-stone to reach the place where I want to get to." yes of course don't say that. Personally I hate this question because it almost always obliges you to lie. Secondly, who knows where you're going to be in five years' time I don't even know what I'm going to have for lunch. One thing we know for certain about the future is that it's uncertain. It's a dumb question but I would answer it something something like this: "I hope you don't mind if I don't answer that question directly, I would rather just focus on the present. This job is a great opportunity and what I want to do is to make it my own to the best of my ability. I hope to learn and grow in this position and as for the future, who knows? Maybe a senior role, a managerial role or, I might want to specialize in an XYZ field or maybe something totally different. Jobs change, people change, technology changes, 'Social media consultant' that job didn't even exist five years ago. so we shall see, what we shall see." So that might not be a perfect answer but at least it has a ring of truth to it. Ok let's see what have we here: "What are your salary expectations? Difficult one. Don't answer this question directly. If you ask for too much you could be eliminated. If you ask for too little you'll either get a low offer or you'll be eliminated they might think that you're valuing yourself well below expectations and that's not good. So what do you say? Two strategies: "I'm not thinking about sell right now I'm thinking about the career but I'm sure your offer will be in line with the industry average and that's fine." Later on, once you receive an offer, then that's the starting point of your negotiation and you can nudge it up a little but it should be them that gives the first number. secondly, "at this moment I've been thinking more about the job and the interview than the salary. Could you give me the salary range for this position? "Once you get that you can either say that it's acceptable or, once again, you can try and nudge it up higher. if this is the time for negotiation. For example, they say forty-five thousand something dollars, pounds whatever you could say "That's a good offer but given my experience in this field would you consider going up to fifty thousand and the this additional five thousand could be conditional on my meeting certain sales targets within the first year." ok the last part about meeting targets might not work for them but it's another way of framing your commitments to the job which will help you pass the interview.Let's look at the next question the final question in fact: Why should we hire you? Good question so the subtext here is what makes you different? why are you better than the other candidates? so what is your unique selling point your USP? Don't start rattling off all your experience and qualifications they already have your CV. Just pick up on one or two points that make you stand out and back it up with something about your motivation or key personality traits that will work for them. This is particularly true if you don't have much work experience. Learn your answer but don't script it. The way you express yourself is really important here so let it come from a heart. So for example let's say you're a recent graduate without much experience "There are three good reasons why you should hire me. Firstly you can see that I have a good academic record I excelled at university in my chosen field and secondly I have one years' experience in this field yes one year doesn't see much but during that time I significantly improved my technical skills I learned a lot of key software and worked with some important clients in the sector such as [...name the clients] thirdly let me, if I may, draw your attention to my personal qualities I'm hardworking and creative and I can bring something unique to your team and looking at the job description you can see that I'm perfectly suited and I relish the challenge to make my mark. My past experience is limited but my future potential is unlimited.

How to Answer 5 COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

So you sent off your CV and your covering letter for that dream job and they're impressed! You're called to the interview they welcome you, you shake hands and they ask you the first question "Tell me about yourself?" what do you do? what do you say? where do you begin? well this question will be asked at almost every interview and let me tell you that this is a trick question they are NOT asking you to tell you about yourself. To find out why stay tuned Hello and welcome to LetThemTalk and today we're going to look at how to answer the interview question tell me about yourself we've got some general tips and if English is not your first language we'll look at how you can approach it if you're not so confident about your English level. As I said at the beginning this is kind of a trick question they are not asking you to tell them your life story and they're not asking you to talk, in detail, about your professional and educational experience and background why should they do that they got your CV they've read your covering letter, they know all there is to know, so why should they ask this question? What they want to know is if you possess the art of communication can you engage? can you keep them interested? can you tell a story? the question beneath the question is we know you have got what it takes to do the job on paper but let's see what you're like as a candidate. And this is your chance to make a good first impression so let's look at how to answer the question. Rule number one: Keep it brief. Very important keep it brief one,two, three minutes should be enough I would say five minutes is too long ten minutes way too long you could probably say goodbye to the job don't tell your life story, you don't get any points for giving a long answer and you risk alienating the interviewers you do not need to talk about everything on your CV this is just the first question and if you forget something, if you get something important, it doesn't matter you can discuss it later in the interview. Your answer should pique curiosity and the interviewer should be thinking "I want to know more" and not "I already know too much". So what's the content of your answer you should basically tell them a story about your professional background and educational background if it relates to the current position. now you should mention some of these things: so start by giving some adjectives to describe yourself, especially ones that are relevant to the job you're seeking say something about how you started you could mention an accomplishment you could talk about your motivation tell them a story of how you changed something or made a difference in your previous job or at university tell them what you can do for them and what you want for the future and why you're best suited for the job. So you can cover some of those points that'll be great and finally give some personal detail to add colour or to show that you are and all rounded individual and your life doesn't revolve exclusively around work but this should be very brief, very brief just a few words. I know that some recruitment advisors say that you shouldn't say anything personal when answering this question but personally I think it's good to show that you have a life outside of work and if one of your interviews shares the same interest it can help you bond. but as I said keep it very short so that's essentially the WHAT but HOW you tell it is much, much more important as I said the question is a challenge to you to engage with them and to connect with them on an emotional level. Often the words you use are less important than how you say them so remember Rule number Two maintain good eye contact throughout. This seems obvious but I've seen so many candidates who don't look you in the eye and it's quite disengaging. Have a good tone of voice with nice rolling intonation not flat so that you sound like a robot. When you get passionate raise your voice a little don't shout though. You can speed up, you can slow down, you can use hand gestures. personally I like that some people sit with their hands on their lap but I think it's good to look a little animated and speak informally your covering letter and your CV is probably written in formal English but when you speak make it sound more conversational if it sounds too formal you can sound distant and unapproachable and for the same reason don't memorize your answer learn the key points, yes, but let the words come out naturally and leave room for spontaneity. If English is not your first language you might be worried about your grammar mistakes well certainly you shouldn't be. First of all, the interviewers are not grammar teachers (unless of course you're going for a job as an English language teacher and that's a different story) I assure you that they won't notice any small grammar mistakes they want to know that you can communicate in English. You can have perfect grammar and be a bad communicator and you can have not good grammar and be a great communicator and that's what they want and, as I said, the words you use are much less important than the way you communicate and the story you tell. So even if your level of English is not that great you can answer this question and it will put you in a good position for the rest of the interview. OK I've talked enough about this so let me just finish by giving an example so imagine I'm a project manager at an interview for a new job so "Tell me about yourself" I would describe myself as someone who is versatile and determined and someone who loves learning. I'm creative, open-minded and easygoing and I enjoy working with others and I try to use all these qualities in my professional life for the last six years I've been working at XYZ company I started out at the help desk where I worked closely with clients and I built some good relationships. After that I did a number of roles in the company and have been promoted several times now for the last three years I've been working as a project manager. The company has been pretty successful and I'd like to think that I contributed to that success my team has been developing accounting software for the publishing industry and within two years we came from nowhere to being the number one product in the field. And you know actually I wasn't looking for a new job I'm quite happy where I am and I kind of came across your job ad by accident but it really captivated my imagination your company is renowned for being one of the most innovative in the sector. And I know this is a more senior than my current position but I do have the skills and the experience and the passion you need and I do believe I can make a positive impact and that's why I'm here today. So in a nutshell that's who I am professionally and when I'm not working I like to go hiking at weekends and I like reading books. OK that's it I hope you found that useful and if you have any tips of your own about how to answer this question do put them in the comments and good luck with the interview stay mellow and I'll see you next time.

How to answer TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF interview question

I've been teaching English for more than 15 years and one of the most common questions I get is "how do I become fluent in English?" That's an interesting question and yes I do have the answer. So today I've chosen the 8 key things you can start doing right now that will make a spectacular improvement to your English level. If you follow these steps I promise you, I promise you that you will become fluent. I'm going to start by saying what you don't need. Firstly, you don't need to be young. I know this from my many years of teaching and I have students in there 50, 60s and 70s who learn very quickly. They say that younger people have a quicker brain and that might be true but older people have experience and that's important. My great uncle was going to evening classes to learn Italian when he was 90 years old. And he was making progress. Having said that there was a problem - not with the grammar or vocabulary but he was deaf - he couldn't here the teacher. So whatever age you are you can do it. But if you are 90 GET YOURSELF A HEARING AID! Secondly. I here many people say that in order to speak English you need to live in an English speaking country. This is completely false I know many, many people who speak excellent English but have never even set foot in an English speaking country. Of course, if you are in England or another English speaking country that's useful if you're listening to English all the time. But these days there are so many resources online you can still speak really well in your own country. Far and away the most important thing is motivation. If you're motivated and you do the necessary work that's all you need. Let me ask you asking. Imagine you live in, Bogota (unless you live in Bogota in which case you don't need to imagine) and you're learning English and your passionate about English and you spend all your free time learning and studying, or you go to Toronto to learn English but you're not motivated. You skip your class, You meet your friends, you watch tv, you take some selfies, you watch TV Where are you going to learn English quicker? Yes, Bogota. of course So it doesn't matter where you are in the world If you're motivated. You will learn. End of story. If you're not motivated you won't learn. So my First tip is. find the passion, love English love learning and it will become a piece of cake and you WILL , you WILL succeed . Don't tell me don't have the time. If you love doing something you'll find the time.My Second tip is reading: I can't stress how important reading is: You know when I have a new student in the class within a few minutes of talking with them I know if they read a lot in English. It's clear from the vocabulary and they expressions they use. So find a subject that interests you and read. It doesn't matter if it's a book or a magazine or something on the web just read every day. Make sure that it's something just a little too difficult for you so that get that challenge but not so difficult that you give up after 5 minutes. So that's my tip - read. The Third tip is find a good language school or teacher: Of course you can learn English without going to school or without a teacher but a good school and a good teacher can help you in so many ways and really make a huge difference. You wouldn't try to become a tennis champion without a coach would you? and it's the same with English. A good teacher can focus on your needs can correct your mistakes, teach you things you don't know, improve your grammar, your pronunciation and so much more. Of course I work at the best language school in the world. If you are in Paris you should definitely study there and bring all your friends and family. But if you can't then I'm sure that in your town you can find yourself a good teacher. Someone who knows the grammar, knows the language and can explain and that will really, really make a difference so my tip is find a good teacher or a good language school. Number Four: write. So this is a story I often see. Somebody speaks quite confidently, quite fluently in English. But then one day you see his or her written English. And it's a disaster it's like it was written by a child of 5. So writing is quite a different skill to speaking. And I'm sure it's the same in your language the vocabulary and the expressions you use in writing are not exactly the same as when you speak. So, you need to write. It'll challenge you, it will get you to think about the words and the construction of the sentences. And not only will it be beneficial to your written English but it'll help when speaking too. So write something every day and don't just write things that you already know. Challenge yourself Even if you're just writing an email. Sit down, reflect, choose your words carefully maybe write some nice expressions you've learnt It doesn't matter if you a mistake. People will forgive grammar mistakes. But you don't want to sound childish so my tip is - write. Number Five is: listening This point is easy so I'm not going to say much about it. But listen to the radio, watch TV shows in the original language (without subtitles, or with English subtitles if you must). Listen to something like TED talks that's a great resource (at ted.com) whatever. Just one important thing that I mentioned before. Listen to stuff that's challenging and a little difficult make a note of the vocabulary you didn't understand and then listen or watch it again and again and again until you understand everything. So my tip is - listening. Number Six is speaking. Now try and speak as much as you can. If you've got English speaking friends that's good, or if you can join some English conversation groups in your area that's fantastic. But even if you can't then practice with your non-native friends speak to your mother. Even if there is no one and you live in a hut in the mountains with nobody else around then speak to the goats speak to the trees or to yourself. As long as you get the brain working and mechanically getting the words out so that it becomes natural and fluent. You can't learn how to drive a car from a book and you can't speak English without speaking. So speak every day. And the last one is get a good dictionary and use it! Whenever you come across a new word, a word that you don't know look it up! It doesn't matter if it's online or a physical dictionary. Find out the meaning, find some examples. Look up the etymology, and then use it in conversation or in writing. That way you will remember it and it'll boost your vocabulary. So here's a word DISCOMBOBULATE there you are that's a challenge for you. If you don't know what it means look it up, write an example in the comments or use it with your friends. So have realistic goals. You cannot learn to play a musical instrument or learn advanced computing or become a great tennis player in a few days, or a few weeks and it's the same with learning a language. Any complex task takes time, takes effort, takes hard word so don't be unrealistic with your goals. Don't look into the future and say - "In six months I want to be fluent in English". Instead focus on the now. Every day, learn 10 new words, learn a couple of idioms, learn a new piece of grammar. Read, write listen and speak. And I promise you that you will make rapid progress. So There you are. I hope I haven't discombobulated you with so much information. So follow these rules and you will be fluent. Simple? Thank you for reading and I'll catch you next time

HOW TO BECOME FLUENT IN ENGLISH: 7 Things You Must Do

s I spend some time at home with my family this Christmas season, I'm reminded yet again how quickly time flies. It's the end of the year again. Not really sure how that happened. But naturally it gets me thinking about the year I just had and whether or not I liked that year. What are some things that I did well? What are some things that I want to improve on? And do I really like the direction that my life is going in? And for the most part, probably more than any other late December pondering, that answer is yes. You know, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at right now, but it wasn't easy to get here. And I remember so many times in my life where that answer was no, where I really didn't like the person that I was when I thought about it. I really had some deep regrets about the year that I just had. I made some mistakes that I really wanted to correct. I wanted to break some bad habits. I wanted to start new habits. But the problem is it seemed like the same story every year. I didn't really know where to start. I didn't really know the secret to getting change to stick, and I'd watch YouTube articles, just like this one, trying to figure out the magic formula that will help me stick to my goals and truly start a new chapter in my life. But the bottom line is you're not gonna change a thing if you don't want to change. If you just feel like you should make a New Year's resolution, or you want to change some aspect of your life because somebody told you that it was a good idea, then you kind of defeat yourself before you even start. You need to combine a very strong will to change with a good strategy. And I can't provide you with that will, but I can provide you with a strategy. So in this article, I want to cover some things that helped me really transform my life, not in sort of an overnight kind of way, as we'll go over, but as a consistent mechanism that served me day after day. So that over the course of months, I was in a better position that I was the previous year. And these things that I'm gonna go over, don't just apply to New Year's. You might be reading this article in July. It doesn't really matter. If you have a strong feeling that there's something in particular that you want to change about your life, then hopefully some of these things that I'm gonna over will help you do just that. So the first thing is to pick one thing to focus on. It's extremely tempting to try to let your mind run irresponsibly wild with all the things that you want to change about your life, in your mental health, your physical health, your social life, blah bidy, blah bidy, blah. And this is good. This motivation and this drive to improve is extremely useful, but you should dedicate all of this emotion to changing one thing about your life. Later down the line as this thing becomes a habit, it might only take 30 days for you to have this thing locked in. Then you can think about adding more things. So what thing do you pick? Well, I think the first thing you should do is write down a list of things that you want to change about your life in several different areas and be very detailed and specific. Where do you want to be five years from now? Where do you want to be in your financial life, your social life? What do you want your mental health to be like? Be very specific about this and detailed. And if you were to boil down one of these things into a daily habit that you could implement, what would that look like? An obvious example is if you want to have some ripped beach body and have crazy muscle mass and low body fat, then obviously probably the most important thing that will help you get there is to develop a consistent gym habit. So the actionable process to achieve that hypothetical goal is to go to the gym four or five times a week, or whatever you think works for you. And once you've determined what the actionable process to achieve that eventual goal is, it's really important to reflect on whether or not you are comfortable with doing that process day after day after day. Is this something that is realistic to you? Is this something that you think you could stick to? Because this process is what you're gonna be interacting with 100% of the time. You're not gonna be interacting with the goal. Once you get there, your goal will change. The process itself is what that thing will feel like. It'll never feel like you are living that goal. You know what I'm saying? You have to learn to fall in love with the process itself. And that is possible because a lot of that satisfaction comes from the quiet understanding that you're trending your life in the direction that you want to trend it in. Part of the reason why going to the gym feels so good is because you know that going to the gym is good for you. And by going to the gym, you're becoming someone you are proud of. You are operating on a day-to-day basis as a more authentic version of yourself. And the gym specifically feels really good because of the endorphin rush and the feeling of power you get when you lift heavy weights. You know, that's a bonus. Pretty much anybody who's ever been consistent with the gym knows that they're consistent, not because they're thinking about this end goal all the time. It's just because they really like the way going to the gym makes them feel, both physically and mentally and emotionally. It's just so good for you. This is a big ad for going to the gym. If being well-read and well-versed in literature is extremely important to you, and you decide that this is the one thing that you want to work on, you want to read a book a month or whatever, then anybody who's actually been successful with that will know that the thing that kept them going wasn't this vague concept or this vague sentiment of getting smarter. They just learn to enjoy reading for what it is. The microcosm of their end goal became the enjoyable thing to interact with. So decide what exactly about your life you want to change. What does that look like specifically? Then determine what that thing looks like on a day-to-day basis. Then try to figure out whether or not you're ready to strap on the boots and do that thing every single day. Because that thing is the thing. If you can't find enjoyment and fulfillment in the daily process of getting to where you want to be in life, then not only are you probably not gonna stick with this change, but your overall just gonna live a less enjoyable life. If everything you do on a day-to-day basis is just a means to an end, then your life is just a means to an end. All right, the second point I want to make is that forcing yourself is a good thing a lot of the time. Right off the bat, you might have alarm bells going, "Joey, what about toxic hustle culture? What about getting burnt out? This toxic self-improvement is really taking over your mind, Joey." But I think that's all BS to a certain extent. Almost everything worthwhile in life requires some form of sacrifice. A lot of the time, you're not going to want to go to the gym. A lot of the time, you're not going to want to read books. You're not going to want to drink more water, or whatever the hell you decided is the best thing for you. But you should never determine the value that something has in your life before you do it. Not never. I mean, that's probably not a concrete rule. Like you shouldn't . You shouldn't just do drugs and then evaluate afterwards whether it was good for you or not. Like, you know? You can use your judgment. But we're not talking about doing crack here. We're talking about doing things that you've already determined are good for you and will help you be where you want to be in life and help you be someone you're proud of. And a lot of the times, even though these things are extremely good for you, before you do them, you're gonna have tons of this emotional and physical resistance in the way of doing that thing. And a lot of the time, these rationalizations will say stuff like, "You're getting burnt out. You need to just take a break today." But in these particular situations, what you'll find is that almost 100% of the time, if you just do the thing anyways, you'll realize that those rationalizations were bullshit. If you're super tired, you're super stressed from work, and you have this voice in your head saying, "No, you're burnt out. Just take a break. Don't pick up those sneakers and go for a run." But you do it anyways. You just go and put on your sweat pants. You put on your running shoes, and you go for a run anyways. Pretty much 100% of the time, you'll say, "Wow, I'm so glad I didn't listen to that rationalization. I feel invigorated and proud of myself because I didn't fall for that." And on that topic of burnout or feeling lethargic or depressed, it's extremely hard to feel that way by consistently taking constructive action. Far more draining on your will and your existence is the slow creep of existential dread as you sit around and do nothing and let opportunities pass you by, That's far more draining on your existence than forcing yourself to go to the gym even though you're a little tired. So use your brain. I'm not saying punish yourself for messing up or make your feet bleed and call yourself a bitch if you don't run 10 miles and take cold showers in the morning or something stupid like that. Obviously you can take it too far, but it is healthy to force yourself past the resistance and the rationalizations holding you back from doing something that you already know is good for you. And the final point I want to mention is that you can make the processes work for you. There is a way to make the processes genuinely more enjoyable, and there's a lot of methods that you can employ to make this happen. It's important to realize that you're on your own side. You don't want to punish yourself for messing up. You don't want participate in activities that you find absolutely unenjoyable to your core. There are ways to make these things that are good for you also feel good in the moment. A really good example of this is I wanted to start doing deadlifts, but I hate deadlifts. And I know that dead lifts are super good for you, and they're one of the most useful compound exercises you can implement. But I do not find any enjoyment in doing deadlifts whatsoever. I kind of have low back pain and allegedly deadlifts are supposed to help your low back pain 'cause you can strengthen your low back by doing them. But if your low back hurts so much that you can't do them anyways, I don't know. It's always just been a mess for me, but I recently discovered the hex bar. And even though the hex bar is kind of frowned upon with like powerlifting purists or whatever, who gives a shit? I tried it, and I found it so much more comfortable to do the lift. I could load up more weight on it. The weight was distributed to my hips and not to my low back off the initial pickup. And now hex bar deadlifts are a staple of my back day routine. It's something that I actually look forward to doing. Another example is reading books. Maybe you actually hate sitting down to read a book. So instead you might want to try audio books. This article is not sponsored by Audible, by the way. I've mentioned habit bunching on this channel. Maybe you want to implement a writing habit every single morning. Maybe you create a rule with yourself where you can't have your first sip of coffee unless you have written your first sentence of writing. And as you're writing, you get to enjoy this nice hot cup of coffee. Do not be afraid to modify your approach and modify the habit so that it is something that is more enjoyable to you. And if the process itself is something that you look forward to doing, then I guarantee you it'll be no problem sticking with that change for the longterm. So the bottom line is, if you want to substantially change your life in one year, take it one habit at a time. Figure out why you want to do that habit and what the end goal of that habit is. Then try to make that habit as enjoyable as possible for yourself. And once you do that, do it anyways. Regardless of what your rationalizations are, evaluate whether that thing was good for you after you do it, not before you do it. And you can start compounding this month after month. Once you have one habit locked in after one month, add a new habit the second month. And by the end of a year, you might have 12 new habits, which might be overkill at that point. You might only need a few cornerstone habits that will change your life forever. But honestly, over the course of one year, the sky is the limit. You can be in a substantially better place this time next year, if you implement this strategy, combined with your motivation and will to change. So good luck to all of you guys, no matter whether it's New Year's or July, August, September or whatever. Whenever you're reading this article, this advice applies to youThank you so much for reading. Happy New Year, and we'll catch you in the next article.

How to change your life in a year

Hello, welcome back to our homeschool topicl, today I want to talk about how to have a really good homeschool day. Do you know what it takes to have a really good homeschool day? Well stick around because that's what we're talking about.Now I know that not every day can be amazing. But you can actually significantly shift how many good homeschool days you have if you adjust one thing. And that is expectations and you don't have to adjust it one way or the other. You just have to get clear on the expectations that you have about your homeschool day. Let's talk for a minute about expectations. Expectations are what you hope to have happen, and then what actually happens during the day is either going to be less or more or right in alignment with those expectations. And it actually isn't how much gets accomplished during the day that determines whether or not you have a good day. It's where how much gets accomplished lines up with your expectations. So, for example, if your expectations are here and you and your kids only get this much done, then you're not going to feel like it was a very good day. If your expectations are here and you actually do this much, you're going to feel like it was an amazing day. So let's talk about how do you get your expectations to be in a place where you can consistently have really good days.Okay, so let's talk about expectations. There's two kinds of expectations that you really do need to get clear on in order to have a good day. The first one is you need to get clear on your expectations for your kids. If you guys, your expectations are there, whether or not you stated them. What you hope will happen, what you want them to be doing. And if you aren't clearly letting your kids know what it is you want them to do and how you hope the day will run, there is no way for them to meet you in the middle and even begin to remotely do it. It'll be very hit or miss, so you want to be really, really clear. What do you want them to do? How do you want them to show up? What kinds of activities do you want them to do? What kind of attitude do you want? Have you had those conversations? Now, don't get me wrong, I do not believe that just if you have those conversations, suddenly everybody's going to fall in line and you're going to have an amazing day. Don't get me, I'm not going there because believe me, that is not how it worked in my home it's not how it does work in my home. However, when we get clear expectations you have a better chance of then having a conversation if something doesn't line up. So what were some of the expectations I had or I have in my homeschool? Well, when my kids were little, and now my kids are all teenagers, but when my kids were little, the expectation was you'll come sit on the couch and you'll read with us and you'll have a good attitude. You won't whine and complain. When we play a game, you will show up and be kind to your siblings. You will be respectful about the time that I've put into preparing this, even if you don't love it. And again, they didn't always meet it, but we had systems in place for when they didn't meet it, it was called discipline. So once we set up the expectation, I knew what to do if it wasn't being met. And it wasn't like we were being drill sergeants. It wasn't like I was making them do lots and lots of things. I was setting up fun and engaging and exciting things to do, but sometimes they just didn't want to do it. So the expectation was, please show up, have a good attitude, we're going to do it for this amount of time and then you're free to go do things the rest of the day, and that worked really, really well.Now, I didn't always have something planned and so if I were to describe my baseline for any type of good homeschool day, I would say it was engaging in productive, meaningful learning activities. That's the expectation I have for my children. So now that they're even older and I'm not as involved in the little itty bitty days of their lives, they're much more self sufficient. They're doing a lot of the learning on their own or they have outside classes that they're engaging with that give them the education. Now that we're more engaged that way, my expectation is the same even though the activities have changed and that is, are they engaged in productive, meaningful learning experiences? Now your expectations for your kids might be completely different. It might be a certain amount of time. It might be completing certain types of activities. It might be did everyone just get along today? Depending on where the baseline is is in your family right now. But regardless, it's that expectations piece that lets me know whether or not I'm having a good day based on wether that sort of thing can happen. Now this is the trick. You have your expectations that you have for your kids. The other expectations that you have to work on is your own expectations. How do you perceive what is happening and how do you feel when it doesn't line up? This one is a little bit trickier because it has to, you know, all sorts of things play into expectations, guilt, fear, desire, hope, and those are really, really deep, powerful emotions that can impact how you feel about your day. But setting realistic expectations. Yes, I want everything to run perfectly. Yes, I want everyone to get along. Yes, I would love it if everyone were leaping for joy. Every time I put something in front of them, I would love that, but it's not realistic. So the second piece is getting realistic with my expectations. And that means I have to do two things that are not easy, but super important. The first one is I have to allow agency. Whether your kid is four or whether your kid is 17 they want agency. They want to be able to make their own choices. And even if they don't like what they're being asked to do and maybe they don't want to do it, I have to allow them the space to make the choice whether or not they're going to engage. Now some behavior's not okay. There are consequences. There's discipline. Absolutely. And that's a subject for another article. But agency means the kid actually gets to choose. And when I'm being realistic, I'm allowing them the freedom to make the choice. Not easy because in my like, non-agency world, I want to force them to do all the good things because I think I know best. But the reality is it doesn't work that way. And now the second thing about adjusting realistic to realistic expectations is remembering not every day is going to be an amazing day. Not every day can be. And every kid in your family is going to have their own mix of good, not so good and terrible days. Every single kid. And unfortunately not every kid has the same mix. I've got one kid who has a great day, probably seven out of 10 there's a couple of rough patches there and that's always been true. Seven out of 10 most of the time I know that kid is going to show up. I got another kid who hits good days about every three and 10 which means there is a lot of days where they're struggling for some reason, whether it's emotional, whether it's academic, whether it's whatever. They just came with a different package. Days are harder for them and we're working with that. Right? It's not like I get to pick and choose how they show up. I get to pick and choose how I react to what they show up with, so knowing that some are going to be more likely to have good days than others, helps me adjust my expectations and be more realistic. Now once in a blue moon, once in a blue moon, everybody has a fantastic day and those are the red letter days that you write down and you remember and you journal about. But I'd like to say that usually you can hit a good day about one in 10. About one in 10 is when everybody shows up fairly high on the show up happy level. Everybody's kind of humming along, things are moving well. One in 10 so if you're having one really good day in 10 mama, you are a successful homeschool mom. And your expectations, adjusting those to that level. Maybe that will help just a little bit. Now if you are struggling, there are lots of ways to try to get the expectations and everything else in a better place. Make sure you check out my free homeschool help center lots and lots of free resources there to help you. So many different opportunities to learn different things. In the end, homeschooling is a journey and setting your expectations so you can have good days is one piece of being a successful homeschooler.

How to have a really good homeschool day

I think you already know that if you want to improve your English speaking skills, you have to practice, right? You have to speak. Studying grammar will never improve your speaking. Listening to English alone will never improve your speaking. You have to actually speak. But what if you don't have someone to talk to in English? How can you practice then? Well, there's a technique that allows you to learn to speak English by yourself. No speaking partner is required. This technique can help improve many aspects of your spoken English: your sentence structure, your grammar, your vocabulary, and most importantly, your ability to express your thoughts and ideas effectively. So what is this technique? Well, here's what it is... Learning to speak English through imitation. When I say imitation, I'm not talking about repeating after native speakers using the exact same words to improve your pronunciation. I'm talking about something a little more advanced than that. Here's how it works: you listen to a conversation, a story, or some kind of speech, and then try to deliver that speech in your own words. Let's see this technique in action: When I was a child When he was a child my parents liked to pretend, like many other parents his parents liked to pretend, like many other parents that Santa Claus would bring us presents at Christmas. His parents liked to pretend that Santa Claus would bring them presents at Christmas. So when my siblings and I would wake up on Christmas morning So when he and his siblings would wake up on Christmas morning there'd be a bunch of presents, from supposedly Santa Claus, sitting in front of the fireplace. there'd be a bunch of presents, from supposedly Santa Claus, sitting in front of the fireplace. So that's how it works. But that's just one way to do it. There're other ways too. For example, instead of imitating small portions of speech like phrases and short sentences, you can imitate larger portions of speech. So in this case, you wait until the speaker completes a thought or an idea, then pause and try to express that idea yourself. Another approach is to simply listen to the whole speech and then try to deliver that entire speech yourself. So there are several ways to go about it, but what I recommend is to combine them all together, and I call this approach easy-to-hard imitation. Easy-to-hard imitation is based on the concept of progressive training. The idea is that you start with something easy and then increase the difficulty of the activity, forcing yourself to get better. A number of studies have found this kind of training to be very effective. Here's how you can apply this concept: start by imitating small portions of speech first like phrases and short sentences, then move on to imitating larger portions of speech like long sentences or even groups of sentences, and finally, try to deliver the entire speech on your own. This technique offers many benefits. You get to listen and imitate correct English, which helps you learn to form sentences properly. You get to learn idioms, expressions, and other speaking patterns that are used in day-to-day conversations. you get to learn grammar. When you imitate other people, you're learning grammar through a process called implicit learning. This is the process where the learning happens without your awareness. This is how babies and children learn the grammar rules of their first language. When you imitate, you don't think about grammar. You're not trying to understand why the present perfect tense is used in this situation or in that situation. Instead, you're focused on communication — on understanding and expressing ideas. You're still learning grammar but you're not aware that it's happening. This is one of the proper ways to learn grammar. OK, that concludes this article.To help you get started, I've put together a step-by-step tutorial on this technique. If you're interested, click <a href="https://pbn.passemall.com/the-imitation-technique-tutorial/">here</a> to go to that tutorial.

How to improve your English speaking skills (by yourself)

So you've got an interview for your dream job coming up you want to shine. Well I've got good news you've come to the right place because today we've got 8 tips that will help you feel more at ease at the interview, be more confident, help you answer those difficult questions oh and by the way don't forget to show up you know what they say 80% of success is showing up. So that's 9 tips for you today. And remember not to have any pieces of spinach between your teeth or anything like that when you see the interviewer - that looks really bad. OK so That's 10 tips. 10 tips for you today. A nice round number. Today we've some tips to help you get that job. And we've also got a bonus tip at the end so stay tuned for that. Now, in this article we've got some general tips about passing the interview and if English is not your first language we've also got some hacks about how to optimize your English at the interview. Start with confidence. They say that an interview is decided in the first 30 seconds so you'd better get that introduction right. We'll go into what you say later but the best way to start is with a smile, maintain good eye contact and give a strong handshake. ok but not so strong that you crush your interviews hand and they have to get rushed off to the hospital for an x-ray for a suspected cracked wrist. As far as your voice is concerned keep the tone down - a falling tone So "hi I'm Gideon" and not "hi I'm Gideon" A rising tone so you want to sound friendly but serious. There is an old much quoted piece of research that says that 93% of communication is non-verbal and while that might be an exaggeration it's certainly true that it's extremely important. So make that you sit upright with open body language. Not a closed one like this. Keep good eye contact throughout. Use hand gestures if that's your style. And my top tip is if they ask you if you want something to drink at the beginning of the interview ask for a glass of water. This will help in 3 ways. Firstly, It'll give you something to do with your hands instead of keeping them frozen in concrete or resting your knees or stop you from fidgeting. Secondly, it'll give you thinking time if they ask you a difficult question. And thirdly, you have something to drink if you're thirsty. The interviewer is sitting there thinking what can you do for for our company and not what can I do to help this person and your answers should always reflect this. They should always focus on why it's a good idea to hire you. So for example if the question is "Why did you leave your last job?" Never, criticise your former boss or your former colleagues always keep things positive. "My last boss was stupid and my colleagues were all baskets they didn't appreciate my genius and now I want to progress my career and hopefully become a manager within the next 2 years.". No, no, no. Instead always put a positive spin on things and what you can do for them. "Although I enjoy working at my current position, I feel that after three amazing years, I've come as far as I can at this company so when I saw your advertisement I thought wow this is a great position I've got the skills, I've got the experience, it's a company with an excellent reputation and It's a place where I can really make a positive contribution. ". So the answer is what you will do for them and not why it's good for me. Everyone likes a story and your interviewer is no different. By giving lots of examples, throughout the interview you'll sound more interesting and give a color to your expression instead of talking in generalizations about your experience. So for example. Instead of saying "I worked in the production department where I developed systems using XYZ" make your example come to life. "When I worked in the production department I wrote a new system which automated some boring repetitive tasks that they had previously had to do by hand. it saved my co-workers about 12 hours each per month each My company were delighted and my co-workers too because time they were able to spend their time on more creative things." Your USP is your unique selling point. What makes you different from the rest of the pack? What can you offer that the other candidates can't? Often the candidate with the best experience and qualifications is not the person who gets the job in the job. Perhaps you can demonstrate that you're a quick learner that you're versatile, you're a team player, you speak foreign languages. So throughout the interview make sure you let them know what makes you unique and why they shouldn't let you go. This is often overlooked but studies have shown this to be one of the most important factors for influencing people. To put it simply if the interviewer likes on a personal level you're more likely to get the job. Who would you give the job too the highly qualified candidate that you don't like or the less qualified candidate that you like? If you have to work with the person every day in your team then you would probably choose the less well qualified candidate and then train them up. So try to connect with the interviewer get into his or her mindset and if you find something that you both have in common that can help you too to bond with that person. So my next tip is learn key phrases but don't memorize. Do your research well prepare for the interview but don't memorize your answers. It won't work. Instead speak naturally and clearly. However, if you are not confident about your English level if English is not your first language here is a hack. Here are some phrases you can use to enrich your English expression. By using them the interviewer will get the impression that you can express yourself with subtlety in English. So for example Instead of using "a lot", or "very" or "much" or "many" you could say A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT- "I did a significant amount of work on the project" or A GREAT DEAL - "It required a great deal of effort but I succeeded" you can use CONSIDERABLY - "It was considerably more difficult than I imagined." Instead of say "a little" or "a bit" or "quite" you could use RATHER "Although it was rather difficult I managed to complete the task." and to show a nuance use SOMEWHAT "His response was somewhat surprising. " Instead of "completely" say WHOLEHEARTEDLY "She thought this was the best course of action and I wholeheartedly agreed. " These are just some examples: But do your own research. But it's good to have a few key words and key expressions to impress the interviewer if English is not your first language. If English is not your first language you might be worried about making grammar mistakes. Well you shouldn't be. The interviewer is not a grammar teacher and will probably, not even notice your grammar mistakes (unless of course you're going for a job as an English teacher of course). But generally He or she has invited you in to the interview because they've seen you CV and they know you have the skills they know you have the qualifications and they know English is not your first language. They don't care about that as long as you can express yourself clearly and precisely. And here's the bonus tip Enjoy yourself. Try not to see the interview as an interrogation but rather as an interaction between two people in the same field. Have a good conversation emphasise your friendliness and enjoy yourself. If you manage to do that you'll come across as more relaxed, more affable and they are more likely to want to work with you So there you are if' you have nay interesting job interview experiences then put them in the comments. And thank you for reading and when can I start?

HOW TO PASS A JOB INTERVIEW: The top 10 tips

What's the best way to improve your listening? In this article, I'm going share with you the technique I use to improve my listening. This technique works. And I wish I had known this technique a lot sooner. Because it's easy to do and very effective. So let's get started. First, let's talk about why most people fail to improve their listening. Improving your listening skills takes time. It's a long-term process. But most people forget that or they just don't know. So when they practice listening, they use methods that are inconvenient -- something that is not easy to do. So, it's impossible for them to continue doing it for a long time. As a result, most people quit before they get any results. But how do I know this? Well, I know this because I've made the same mistake. I've tried several methods that were inconvenient like reading the same movie twice, with subtitles first and then without subtitles. That was so boring so I quit after the fourth movie. I also tried listening and then writing down what I heard. But that was too much work and I was too busy. So let's take this back to you. How do you make sure that you don't fail like I did? Well, if you want to succeed, the method you use must be convenient. It must be easy to do. If it's not, you'll probably quit before you see an improvement. So let me share with you the most convenient way to improve your listening. It's very simple. There are only two steps that you need to take. Here's the first step: Download a lot of listening materials to your phone or mp3 player. Now, the best listening materials are the ones where people are just talking naturally. They're just having real conversations. When you use this kind of materials, you're listening to a lot of common, everyday words that people use in real life. Now don't worry. At the end of this article, I'm going to give you a resource you can go to to download this kind of materials for free. So that's the first step. The next step is very important. Do not miss this step. The next step is to listen to the materials. But here's the key: DO NOT do it in your free time. Instead, do it when you're already doing something else. Something that doesn't require much of your attention. Listen to the materials while commuting, while waiting in line, while exercising, and so on. Use those times to practice listening. So that you don't have to spend extra time. Now, why do we have to do this? Well, the reason is that we want to make it convenient. When it's easy to do, you're likely to do it for a long time. And if you do it long enough, your listening skills will definitely improve. Now let me show you something that might shock you. Let's compare this technique with reading movies, which is how many people improve their listening. If you start using this technique today, and if you do it for 30 minutes per day, one year from now, you will have listened to 10,950 minutes of real English conversations. That's a lot of listening. And because you're not doing it in your free time, the amount of extra time spent is zero. That's awesome. What about reading movies? First of all, in a movie, there isn't a conversation or a dialogue in every part, right? If you watch an action movie, you might see a fight scene, an explosion, a car chase scene, and so on. So let's say that on average, the length of a movie is 100 minutes. 50% of those are conversations. The rest is something else. If you watch 4 movies a week or 208 movies a year, in one year, you will have listened to 10,400 minutes of fake English conversations. Now here's worst part: because each movie is 100 minutes long, this method requires you to spend as much as 20,800 minutes of your free time. This is really, really sad. Now let's compare the two methods side-by-side. Now I have a question for you. If you use this technique instead of reading movies, and you save over 20,000 minutes per year, how would you spend these 20,000 minutes? Reading English books to increase your vocabulary? Practicing speaking? Or something else? Leave a comment and let me know. So now you know the power of this technique. Let me repeat something important. This is a long term process. It takes time. So please be patient. Fortunately, now you know this technique. So I know that you'll succeed. <ol> 	<li> Now it's time for me to share some listening materials with you. But first, I want to ask you a favor. It took me several days to create this article and find some materials for you. If you find this article useful, take a few seconds and share it with one English learning community. You'll not only help them but help me also. And then, just click here to get some free listening materials. </li></ol>

How to practice English listening skills (without spending extra time)

If you're anything like me you like the idea of reading but when it actually comes time to buckle down sit on a chair pick up a book and read you have a hard time focusing let alone really enjoying it. And maybe you've thought to yourself "Well, I guess I'm just not a reader. I'm more of an action-based learner, you know, I learn by doing." But deep down you know that by not reading books you're missing out on some of the important, in depth and profound insights ever recorded. So how can people like us, people who aren't naturally bookworms, actually read books, retain their information, and actually learn to enjoy it? Well in this article I'm going over 5 powerful strategies that will help you not only read more, but find that you enjoy reading more than you ever possibly thought you ever could. Tip number one: If you want to start reading, don't overachieve. It's very easy to say "yeah I'm gonna read a book a week from now on." But your past is telling. You're not going to. So in order to break into the habit of reading, you need to set your standards almost comically low. I'm talking one page a day. Reading one page only takes about 60 seconds if you're an average-speed reader, and, well, it's an extremely easy task. But remember: It's just as easy not to do, so make sure you do it. Don't make not doing it an option. And if you want to keep reading after you've read your daily page - go for it, but the important thing is to get that one page in. Tip number two is: read before going on the internet. You don't need me to tell you that the internet is an ADHD inducing place full of cheap dopamine highs and shallow thinking. Checking your Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Reddit before reading a good book is like binge eating Skittles before tasting a fine wine. The wine will taste way worse and you'll feel too sick to drink it anyways. Point being - read books before your brain is zapped by the internet. A great way to do this, obviously, is to read first thing in the morning. Which brings me right to my next tip. Tip number three is bunch your habits. Habit bunching is when you pair an already existing habit that you enjoy doing with a habit that you're trying to work on. If it's a habit for you to drink a nice hot cup of coffee in the morning, then pair that habit with reading. An easy way to do this is to put the book you want to read next to your coffee maker in the morning so when you get up and make yourself a cup of coffee you'll see the book and you'll grab it and go. By bunching an already existing habit with one you're trying to work on, not only will it be easier to work on that new habit but the enjoyability of the first habit may even rub off on the second one. Tip number four is: Try audiobooks. Listening to audiobooks is a great way to soak in the information of a book while still being able to multitask. One of my favorite things to do, especially if I have to read a book for school, is to listen to the book while I'm working out. If you enjoy working out like I do this counts as habit bunching. My camera just overheated. Where was I. Audible is personal favorite place to get audiobooks and while the subscription isn't free. Oh yeah! So if you find yourself at about a book-a-month pace then audible's free book system pays for itself. I think that math checks out. My fifth and final tip is: Change your attitude. And this tip, while it may seem not very practical or hands on, it's probably the most important. Because if you self-identify as someone who hates reading, you're building up unnecessary mental resistance towards something you're trying to do more of. That's dumb. So if you start identifying as someone who enjoys reading, you'll break down mental barriers, and you'll find the previous four tips a lot easier to do. So there you go. Hopefully you find these tips as useful as I currently do. I used to be someone who didn't like reading... Reading is not a hard activity in and of itself because you're just kind of looking and understanding paper. But in this day and age with so many distractions, especially because of the internet - it definitely is a lot more difficult to eliminate those distractions and just focus on doing something a little slower-paced for a while. And while I'm definitely not a book worm right now, these tips definitely helped me get to a point where I'm regularly reading good books and making myself smarter and I feel a lot better because of it. If you liked this article be sure to hit that like button. If you like articles like these in general hit that subscribe button. Leave a comment because I love seeing your comments and I respond to all of them I don't know why I'm doing so many hand gestures.. Thanks for reading and we'll catch you in the next article.

How to Read When You Hate Reading - 5 Tips and Tricks

Hello, everybody. In this article, I'm going to share with you a technique that you can use to remember English vocabulary. And the reason that I recommend this technique is that it's pretty effective. I actually did a small experiment. I created two lists of words that I didn't know and I just tried to memorize the words in each list. I did not use any technique to memorize the first list. It was just pure repetition. But for the second list, I used the technique that you're about to learn. The next day I tried to recall the meanings of the words in both lists. For the first list, I was able to recall only 12%. But for the second list, I recalled as much as 50%. This is pretty impressive considering the fact that I spent only one minute memorizing each word. So let me explain the technique and then at the end of this article, I will give you a link to an exercise that you can do to practice this technique. So let say we want to remember the word "adroit", which means "clever or skillful at something; really good at something". The first thing we need to do is to come up with another word that sounds similar to this word. And that word must refer to something that we can visualize - something that we can see in our mind. So for this word, the substitute word could be the word 'android' which means "a robot." Right? Adroit and android sound pretty close to each other. We could also use the phrase "a drawing". That sounds similar as well. Adroit. A drawing. What these words have in common is that they refer to something that we can visualize. And this is a very important point and you're going find out why soon. So we have two options here but let's use the word 'android' as the substitute word. Now visualize an android. You know...a robot that looks like a human. Next, we have to associate this image to the meaning of the word that we want to remember. And again the meaning is "skillful at something. That's the meaning. So perhaps we can imagine the android doing something that requires a lot of skill. Maybe we can imagine the android playing the guitar on stage. Maybe there's a competition going on and we can imagine other guitarists come up on stage and try to compete with the android. But everybody loses because the android is very good at playing the guitar. The android is adroit at playing the guitar. So what we're doing here is associate the pronunciation with the meaning through an image or a story. We're creating an association between them. So when you come across this word again, the pronunciation will remind you of the association and therefore the meaning of the word. Let's take a look at one more example. Suppose we want to memorize the word "lambaste," which means "to criticize (someone or something) harshly" For the first syllable 'lam,' we can use "lamb" - the animal, or "lamp" - the thing that generates light, as the substitute word. For the second syllable "baste," we can use "bass" - the musical instrument. And I also happen to have a friend named "Bass". So personally, I can use his name as the substitute word as well. But let's use "lamb" the animal and "bass" the musical instrument together. So we can imagine a lamb playing the bass. But unfortunately, the lamb is really terrible at playing the bass. So the bass gets angry and starts criticizing the lamb. The bass is lambasting the lamb. OK. That's it! I hope you find this article useful.

How to remember English vocabulary

This is how you're going to improve your English today with Google's Home Assistant. This is part of a series entitled 'Learning English without Humans' so in future episodes we'll be learning English with plants, animals and aliens but today it's Google Assistant. As you know Google knows everything ok Google what's the population of Botswana in 2018 the population of Botswana was two million two hundred and fifty four thousand one hundred and twenty six Who's a prime minister of Tuvalu? Enele Sopoaga is the Prime Minister of Tuvalu Who's the best English teacher on YouTube I found a list on the website Vark c-.com top three most popular English teachers on YouTube Jennifer from English OK Google stop - OK It doesn't know everything just forget that happened There is a serious point here because I get a lot of messages from people telling me that where they are they just don't have the opportunity to practise English either with native speakers or with people who speak English to a high level and although that would be the ideal situation Google assistance can help and I'll show you how you can improve your fluency, your comprehension and your pronunciation. Today we are going to look at some of the tricks and how you can improve your fluency, your grammar and your pronunciation with Google home. This might work with Alexa. I don't know, I haven't tried it but today we're using Google Home assistant so let's get into it. So first of all the settings what you need to do is to set Google Home to respond to two languages. You can do that on the app, I'm not going to go through all the technical stuff, now but it's pretty easy to set up so I suggest you do that first. To get the most out of this lesson and for the purposes of this demonstration I'm using English and Spanish because we have a lot of viewers who speak Spanish and I know a little bit of Spanish myself but you don't need to know Spanish, by the way, to follow this lesson I'm just giving you one or two examples in the language. So first of all you can use Google Home as a dictionary either as an English dictionary or English to another language as an English dictionary just use the keyword "Define" followed by what you want in order to find out the meaning. Here are few advanced words that I picked up from my reading this morning. OK Google: define QUAGMIRE this is the definition of quagmire: a soft boggy area of land that gives way underfoot. define "LOPSIDED here's the definition of lopsided: with one side lower or smaller than the other Define HAYDAY this is the definition of heyday: the period of a person's or thing's greatest success popularity activity or vigor. Now if you still don't know the meaning of the word you can ask Google to translate it into your own language using "how do you say...in" and the name of the language so for example how do you say WENCH in French? in French you would say 'jeune fille' how do you say ABSENT-MINDED in Indonesian? In Indonesian you would say [???] How do you say lacklustre in Swedish? in Swedish that's mate. and saying these words also obliges you to pronounce them correctly otherwise Google will all not recognize them and even I sometimes have problems getting Google to understand me. The software's not hundred percent perfect as long as you're aware of that, it's not 100% perfect, but it works most of the time and by the way you can also use this for idioms so let's have an example OK Google how do you say "to be caught red-handed" in Italian? In Italian that's essere catturati in flagrante. If you want to check the pronunciation of a word that you know, say it in your language and ask Google to say it in English, for example this word here. I don't know how to pronounce it as I said I've got Google Home set to Spanish so I'll say the word in Spanish and see if I can get the English pronunciation ok Google como se dice jerarquía en inglés? en inglés es HIERARCHY With an American accent thouh 'hierarchy' there you are now you know 'hierarchy' with a K - CH because it's from Greek. It also works for phrases all you need to do is say 'how do you say...?' and then you say the phrase that you want translated into English. For demonstration purposes I'm going to do it the other way around. I'm going to translate into another language OK Google how do you say 'have a nice day' in Chinese? in Chinese that's [speaking Chinese] [speaking Chinese] Not even close. How do you say 'where is the station? in Hindi? in Hindi you would say [speaking Hindi] How do you say 'there are zombies on the streets of London' in French? in French you would say 'il y a des zombies dans les rues de Londres' How do you say 'I left my hat in the fishmongers' in Russian? in Russian that's [speaking Russian] I'm not even going to try. How do you say 'thank you' in Korean? in Korean you would say I'm sorry [speaking Korean] Now what have you got a really long piece of text? A page from a book, a page from a website, a poem, the lyrics from a song that you want translated into English? Well yes you can do that using the keywords ``be my English interpreter" for demonstration purposes I'm going to it into another language so this is useful because you have to say it correctly, you have to check the translation because if it's not correct Google is going to get it wrong so it forces you to give the correct English. Let's try it. What shall I do? Well let's do French because I live in France so let's try that OK Google be my french interpreter okay before you start talking make sure to wait until you hear this sound let's start Once upon a time you dressed so fine, you threw the bums a dime in your prime didn't you? [speaking French] People called you and said 'beware, doll you're bound to fall' you thought they were all kidding you. [speaking French] okay Google .... not a great translation Now we're going to look at some ways you can use this for pronunciation and we're going to look at minimal pairs yes that's right, minimal pairs and these are pairs of words that sound similar but they're just a little bit different and if you're learning English sometimes they can be very confusing and the thing about minimal pairs is the mistakes that are made with them can be different depending on your first language. Here you are. Here's a list of minimal pairs and we're just going to go through a few of them. So what you need to do is say the word and ask for the definition either in English or translate it and if Google translates it incorrectly it knows that you've made a mistake so for example if we're looking at the difference between ship and sheep. If you're doing SHIP we want a definition of a boat and not a mammal with a woolly coat okay. if it says that, you've got it wrong. I hope I can get it right.OK Google define SHIP This is the definition of ship a large boat for transporting people or goods by sea define SHEEP Here's the definition of sheep a domesticated ruminant mammal with a thick woolly coat and, typically only in the male, curving horns it is kept in flocks for its wool or meat and this proverbial from its tendency to follow others in the flock. Define chip Here's the definition of chip: a small piece of something removed in the course of chopping, cutting or breaking a hard material such as wood or stone. Define CHEAP this is the definition of sheep .... shut up You see even I get it wrong sometimes. don't worry, don't get traumatized if Google gives you the wrong answer as you can see as you can see even I didn't manage that why didn't.... what? why did they get it wrong cheap, sheep I said that correctly I'm going to try that once more the volumes a bit loud ok Google volume down the volumes at 7 OK Google define CHEAP here's the definition of sheep **** off! Ok Google shut up. Why didn't it like CHEAP I think I'm saying correctly. I promise you I'm saying correctly 'cheap' you don't trust me now I'm your English teacher but trust me, trust me that's how you say it. There's something wrong with the machine. Blame the machine, don't blame me, blame the machine ok Shall we do one or two more you can do you need to do better than me you do better than me did better than me I'm not happy about that I'm traumatized by that so try some of these at home Define cat This is the definition of cat: a small domesticated carnivorous mammal with soft fur a short snout and retractable claws it is widely kept as a pet or for catching mice and many breeds have been developed I think it's easier if I just ask for the translation because the definition is too long so I think I'm going to change this I'm going to ask for the translation and let's see who happens ok Google how do you say CAT in Arabic in Arabic that's [?] how do you say WALK in Hindi? in Hindi that's [speaking Hindi] I don't know if that's correct actually I hope so. Okay let's try WORK. How do you say work in Portuguese? In Portuguese you would say ' trabalhos' . Trabalhos sounds ok for speakers of Japanese and Chinese. Sometimes the R and the L are confused so let's try this one, the classic one. How do you say FRY in Japanese? in Japanese that's [speaks Japanese] how do you say FLY in Japanese In Japanese you would say [speaking Japanese] Maybe I should have just said it in a language I know how do you say ANKLE in Polish In Polish that's 'wujek' How do you say UNCLE in Polish? In Polish that's: 'wujek' How do you say ANKLE in Italian? In Italian you would say 'zio' , which isn't right to define an ankle. Here's the definition of ankle: the joint connecting the foot with the leg. That's correct! How do you say ANKLE in Italian? In Italian that's 'zio' How do you say ANKLE in French? In French you would say 'oncle' not oncle, ankle. Why okay I give up okay it's not working okay has its uses but as you can see it has its drawbacks too I've done my best. I'm never going to work with machines again okay so next time we're doing it with aliens. Thank you, stay healthy.&nbsp;

Learn English without Humans with Google Home Assistant

Hello, today I want to share my five biggest regrets that I have since I've been to homeschooling.The first one, Simple is better. I've been homeschooling for 15 years and I am a collector. I'm not a hoarder but maybe with curriculum I am. Every time I saw a new book or a new curriculum or a new idea I would pick it up and I would read it and I would devour it. I think I want to put this in my home school and some years I would fill our schedule with so many different ideas. But over the years what I found is that the years where I was willing to go really simple were actually the best years. Because I wasn't as stressed my kids weren't as stressed and it was easier to keep track of everything. I'd kept it simple the years where I was trying to do different kinds of curriculum and I thought I had to cover all the bases in every type of curriculum those are the years where I stressed myself out and I stressed my kids.The second regret, I have is over trusting the experts. I know that's funny to say because I know some of you watch these articles and you see me as an expert and it still blows my mind that I sit in that dead space for some of you. I really do feel like I'm figuring it out as I go along just like the rest of you. I just have some things to share but I know that I was really good at trusting the experts I would read certain homeschool philosophies and I think that's the way to do it and I would be tried to follow all of the things they said and in some cases it worked out really well but in other cases it didn't. And I held on to certain ideas far longer than I should have because the expert told me to instead I wish I wish I wish I had trusted my gut I wish that I'd looked at my kid in his eyes or her eyes and said nope you need something different and I backed away from the experts. and I'd created a home school that really was designed specifically for my children and I tried to do that but I was still listening far too much to the experts. So my suggestion is please trust yourself if you don't see something working it's okay to change even if the expert says what you're doing is absolutely wrong. Because in the end you are the expert on your child.Number three - the biggest regret I have is that I got too involved and I helped too much with the learning it was really easy they were home, they needed help and I was there. We were doing activities, we were engaged and when they were little that was awesome but as they got older I was still engaged I was still doing the activities, I was still doing everything with them and because I knew more than they did. I was often helping too much and what I found looking back is that some of my children on more than others ended up being less independent as a learner. I needed to transition them to owning their own learning and putting them it responsible for making that learning happen whether it was in a curriculum or whether it was searching things on their own. I needed to do that sooner they were capable of it far sooner than I expected it would have been messy. It would have been yucky. It would have looked like not learning probably longer than I would have been comfortable within the moment but it would have paid dividends later on and now we're playing catch-up with some of my kids who needed those lessons a lot earlier. And it's always easier to teach a kid a lesson sooner rather than later so that's my third regret - I just held on to the responsibility of the learning far too long.Number four I didn't keep a consistent journal. I had different ways of record-keeping. Sometimes I would write in the lesson plan. Sometimes I actually had like a journal. I was tracking things. Sometimes we would write a report at the end of the week I have all kinds of things but I didn't keep something consistently and I wish I had I wish that I had one place I could go back. And 15 years is a long time I wish I could go back and look at what we were doing at any given time and maybe that's a dream. Maybe that's not realistic and maybe maybe I just need to let go of the expectation that that would be possible but I wish I'd found an easy way to do it and to do it consistently. Because if I had I think I would love to go back. I know I would love to go back and look at my kids when they're younger and see the things we were doing and learning and I would be able to look at the whole picture and say wow we really did accomplish a lot. So that's my fourth regret is that we didn't keep a consistent journal.My fifth regret is I worried too much will they turn out okay. I worried and I worried and I worried and I have told myself not to worry. I have told you not to worry we have talked about worry a lot I still worry too much. every year I look back and I watched my kids progressing and I think it was gonna be okay why was I so worried but I keep it is so hard to let that go. And I I worry about some kids for some reasons, I worry about some of my kids for other reasons and I'm learning more and more that worry enlarge quote doses just doesn't serve you any great purpose a little bit is good and I've talked about that in the past but any great worry not really so I really think if if there's a way to worry less to trust that it will turn out okay whether you take it from me. And from other homeschool moms have been doing this for a while whether you turn to the Lord and get answers through prayer whether you turn to other resources however you get answers seeking the peace that comes from it will be okay helps your home school move along better. And I have wasted over the course of my home school experience a lot of hours of worry both in conversation and privately that could have been better served in other ways. So those are my five biggest regrets maybe you can take something out of this hopefully just a little bit and it will help move the needle for you and that way you will have fewer regrets as you go on your homeschool journey.

My 5 Biggest Regrets after 15 Years of Homeschooling

Today we are going to talk about the power of repetition and why this is so important for you as an English learner. The power of repetition. So recently I made an article talking about the power of input and why input is such an important part of being able to express yourself freely in English, and to be able to understand other people when they speak. Now it works like this, when you get lots of inputs you can store sentences in your brain. And then, when it comes to speaking, you can take parts of all those sentences that you have learned and express yourself in a natural way. This means you'll be able to speak English without thinking about grammar rules, without having to look for that phrase that you want to use. It'll just come out naturally. So this is a stage I want you to reach. I want you to get to this stage because it just makes everything so much easier. So I talked about the power of input and how you can read lots of things in English, how you need to listen to English all the time to get the input that you need so that you can store these sentences in your brain. But there is another way to do this, too, another way to store sentences in your brain and to be really efficient about how you do it. And it works like this. Firstly, you take sentences relevant to you. So you find sentences that are relevant to the way you want to speak English and what you need to learn. A good example of this is using high-frequency-used phrases. So phrases that people use in everyday English. Again, step one is to find sentences specific to you. Step two is to make digital flashcards. Now I much prefer digital flashcards because as we're going to see soon, we can use software that is going to give us the sentences when we need to see them. The problem of writing down your own flashcards is that it's very difficult to create a system so that you're doing things effectively. Whereas software is going to take care of this for you. Step three is to repeat these sentences in the most effective way. Again, this is a huge part of it because our time is limited. We only have so much time to do the things we want to do in a day. So we don't want to spend time unnecessarily learning sentences. We want to do it in an effective way. And that's where the software we're going to talk about comes into play, that's where we're going to start using this software. But again, the key point is to be really effective with this. Now before we go deep into this method, I want to give you three sentences and then look at some of the examples that we can create based on internalizing these three sentences. Okay, so look at these sentences. I'm not excited about going to the party. He was excited about seeing her. Do you think you're going to be excited about it later? Now let's say that you store these sentences in your brain, that you repeat them enough so that you know them off by heart. You know them naturally. Because we learned things in chunks, because we can take parts of sentences and construct them together, it means that you'll have so many different phrases to use just based on these three sentences. So for example, you'll be able to take part of the first sentence and the second sentence and say, "I'm not excited about seeing her." Or, "He was excited about going to the party." But not only that, you're going to notice rules. You're going to notice patterns. And this is different from learning grammar rules. Instead you're going to just notice them in a more natural way. So looking at those sentences again, you can see after about we use the gerund. Okay, about going, about seeing. So when you see lots and lots of similar sentences, instead of just saying things like, "He was excited about seeing her." You'll be able to say, "I was excited "about meeting them." And you can see all the different combinations of this sentence that you can use. But you can only do this if you internalize sentences first. You need to internalize lots of sentences in order to speak in this flexible way and to do so naturally without thinking about grammar rules, without being in that moment when you're thinking about the grammar rules that you need to use. Instead, you just internalize it and it comes out more naturally. Now if you do this properly and you stay consistent with it, if you take sentences that you need to know, powerful sentences, if you repeat them in an effective way, and if you just work on your speaking as well at the same time, then you'll be able to produce English at the right time, the right English at the right time without thinking about rules, without making too many mistakes, and you'll be a much more confident English speaker. Now repetition is a big part of this. And again, it's important to repeat things when you need to repeat them. And the forgetting curve explains this in a very clear way. So this is the key to repetition. It's going to allow you to remember things much better.. And then finally, I just want to know your thoughts on this method. So leave a comment below. Tell me what you think about this method, if you have used it before, and if you are going to start using it now if you haven't done it. So leave a comment below and tell me what you think. And then if you are new here, then subscribe to this channel. We release an article at least once a week every Wednesday. And also please share this article with your friends. I'll be very grateful if you did that. And then, while you're here, why not watch another article. They'll be on your screen now. Thank you again for reading.

No.1 Technique for Learning New English Words and Speaking English Fluently (10 mins per day)

Do you think you got the best start in life? Did you end-up in a school that might have resembled a zoo more than it felt like an institution of higher learning? Perhaps in the past, getting by without a lot of pieces of paper to defend your intelligence may have been harder, given that nowadays we can learn so much online and that many of the world’s leading and richest entrepreneurs dropped out of university. Had they dropped out of high school, that could have been a different matter, but many great minds have not been too keen on school. One of those minds was Albert Einstein, who famously said, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” So does it matter where you go? That’s what we’ll find out today, in this article, Private School vs. Public SchoolFirst of all, we should say that by “public school” we mean schools that are run by the government. This could be confusing for Brits as when they say public school, they are not thinking of schools run by the public sector, but selective institutions that demand private payment. Basically, private school as Americans know it, is public school in the UK. It’s another case of “my tom-ate-o” and your “tom-art-o”. We’ll base this article on the U.S. today, as covering the globe’s schools would be impossible, and some of the things we will discuss are relevant globally. You might be surprised to know that in the USA, according to the Council for American Private Education, there are 33,619 private schools in the United States. There are around 5.1 million students enrolled in these schools. It’s said that private schools are home to almost 10 percent of all school students in the U.S. The same source states that there are 441,496 teachers working full-time in private schools. As much as 79% of these schools have a religious affiliation. The Washington Post reported in 2016 that these schools are “virtually all-white”, with non-white students only making up around 10 percent of students across the country.As for public schools, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 50.7 million public school students will be studying in one of them from prekindergarten to grade 12 in fall 2017. Teaching all those kids will be 3.2 million full-time teachers, which is a ratio of 16 students for every teacher. The ratio in private schools is 12 students for one teacher. One of the main differences of public school is the mixed ethnicity of students. Public schools in America are made up of 24.4 million white kids, 13.6 million Hispanic students, 8.0 million black students, 2.8 million Asian/Pacific Islander students, 0.5 million American Indian/Alaska Native students, and 1.5 million mixed race students.What about costs? Well, the government pays for public schools. In 2017-18 it’s projected that the budget for public schools will be $623.5 billion. This means that each student will cost on average $12,300. Taxes will pay for this. Private schools are a different matter, and they are funded by tuition fees. Tuition costs will change depending on the school. For the year 2017-18, the national average for private school tuition is $9,975 per year, which is $8,918 per year for elementary schooling and $13,524 per year for high school. The state of Vermont had the highest average, with high school being $31,543 per year on average. If you are looking for cheap private schooling, head to West Virginia where the average cost for high school is currently $5,262. We should add that a handful of private schools cost around the $50,000 a year mark. So, what do you get for your money besides pretty gardens and obviously top-notch facilities at a private school, and perhaps metal detectors and patrolling policemen in some wayward public schools? Well, when it comes to the syllabi, public schools have to adhere to state standards while private schools have much more flexibility. This is seen as getting a better and more diverse education. The good news for not so wealthy people is that high school graduation rates in public schools have gone up recently. It reached its highest during the Obama administration in 2015 at 83.2 percent of students graduating. At the same time, 95 percent of private school students graduate. According to the website College Admission, just about all of those private school grads will attend a university, whereas only 49 percent of public school graduates will enter further education at college. If you want to get into an Ivy League University, there’s no reason why you can’t get in after attending public school. Top Tier Admissions tells us that roughly 25 percent of successful applicants to those top universities came from private schools, and 60-70 percent from public schools. The rest were homeschooled. Private school does work for a lot of people. The richest man in the world, Bill Gates, went to a private prep school…but then he later dropped out of Harvard. On the other hand, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went to a public school. When researching how private school graduates out earn other kids in the future, most of the stories are about the UK and how private (or public) school there seems to create most of the UK’s millionaires. The U.S. playing field might be a bit more level, after all, Dr. Dre didn’t go to private school. It seems in the U.S. if you actually get to university, it might not matter where you studied in high school in terms of “making it”. At the same time, studies have found that being born with a silver spoon usually means you’ll be passing that spoon on, and poorer folks with degrees don’t usually jump up a class. Your background makes all the difference. A college degree, says one report, is no great equalizer. Why is this? “There are a host of possibilities, from family resources during childhood and the place where one grew up, to the colleges that low-income students attend,” said the report. Then you have rich folks that dropped out of high school, such as the billionaire Tumblr founder David Karp, who dropped out of high school at 15 years old. Joining him as a high school dropout is Facebook’s former product manager Mike Hudack and filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. In light of the last person, success in the arts or sport probably is not related to if you went to public or private school, but if you want “social mobility” then it’s probably better your parents paid the cash for your education. It also seems that the filmmaker is the only one of the three to have come from a humble background. You may have some unique skills, or be a natural autodidact (learn by yourself), and so school doesn’t matter much even if you are poor.Nonetheless, we can’t ignore some statistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that people without a high school diploma will earn on average $25,636 per year if in full-time employment. 8 percent of high school dropouts are currently unemployed. If you have a high school diploma and nothing else, the average wage is $35,256 per year with 5.4 percent of those people currently unemployed. If you have a bachelor’s degree, you might earn an average of $59,124 per year. Only 2.8 percent of Americans with a bachelor’s degree are unemployed, much less than the 4.4 percent of Americans currently out of a job. In conclusion, it’s odds on that if you went to private school then you most certainly went to university, and with some family wealth behind you, it’s also pretty much a certainty you fell into one of these higher wage brackets. Then again, if you are brilliant, or spend more time reading than scrolling, then it is likely nothing will hold you back. So, what do you think...is private school worth the extra dough, or is it all just a bunch of hoo-ey? Let us know in the comments!Thanks for reading. See you next time!

Private School vs Public School - How Do The Students Compare

You don’t have the cash to send your child to private school, where most kids seem to do very well in terms of academic performance, and benefit from the sometimes-lucrative relationships made there. Then again, the local public school in your neighborhood doesn't feel up to snuff; the class sizes are too big, and it doesn’t have a great reputation. So, who’s to say your child won’t benefit from your own knowledge, that you secretly consider to be superior to the average teacher’s. But you worry: not giving your child the opportunity to socialize with other kids might take away an important part of growing up? Is homeschool worth it? That’s what we’ll find out in this article:Traditional School vs Homeschool.First of all, let’s take a look at some statistics. According to the National Home Education Research Institute, and indeed any source you look at on the subject, homeschooling – at least in the USA – is becoming more and more popular. In the USA alone, there were 2.3 million home-educated students in 2015, which was up from 2 million in 2010. NHERI tells us the increase over the last several years has been anywhere from 2 to 8 percent per year. This increase isn’t just happening in the U.S., but also in the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, and Kenya. Indeed, we checked out a Kenyan newspaper article on the benefits of homeschooling. It was very positive about taking this educational route. One professor in Kenya was quoted as saying, “Home-schooling focuses on learning and mastering concepts, not scoring good grades.” One mother who was homeschooling her kid said that the system, “limits ability and potential because it is geared towards passing exams.” Many homeschool advocates will insist that traditional schooling doesn’t always roundly educate, but rather teaches students only to do well on tests.Are we teaching kids to become cogs in machines? To be good workers, but lacking in curiosity and critical acumen? This is a far cry from how famed American philosopher John Dewey saw the best kind of education, which he believed was not just remembering things, but reflecting on them. He once said, “Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” In the UK, it’s well-known that there is a teacher hiring crisis. Teachers are leaving in droves, and according to The Guardian in 2017, around half of teachers are thinking about leaving. This is mostly due to an intense workload based on constant tracking of students, never-ending tests, and all the extra work that is not really about what happens in the classroom, but centered around passing exams. Teachers themselves are said to be suffering from fatigue and mental illness, while it was widely reported in 2018 that UK students were suffering from anxiety and depression due to recent exams. So, with all that workload and anxiety, are traditionally schooled students any more educated than homeschooled students? We looked at SAT results for kids in 2014. Take a look at the following numbers: Critical Reading Score Traditional School: 492 Homeschool: 535 Mathematics Score Traditional School: 501 Homeschool: 580 Writing Score Traditional School: 478 Homeschool: 542 Home schooled students scored better in all 3 categories. NHERI tells that, “The home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests.” It added, “A 2015 study found Black homeschool students to be scoring 23 to 42 percentile points above Black public-school students.” Often, homeschooled students are in the 80th percentile, while public school kids are in the 50th percentile. Just about any resource you read will cite statistics telling you homeschooled kids do very well. You’ll hear things like: “Stanford University accepted 26% of the 35 homeschoolers who applied--nearly double its overall acceptance rate.”Such quotes of course aren't representative; with such a small testing group, there is a high standard deviation which means it isn't reliable, but it is, however, interesting. Why are they doing so well? The main reason is, all the attention is on one child, or at most, a few children. But the parent can focus on that child’s weaknesses. If the parent knows what he/she is doing, the kid will more easily get through difficulties they face. Education becomes made to order. There are no class clowns and exterior attractions getting in the way of study. The child can spend every day totally focused on the subjects at hand. Parents can also inculcate, and ensure the importance of self-study, reading books, and being curious. It’s not as if the child has many escape routes or can proffer those ‘dog ate my homework’ excuses. Another thing other than creating your own course based on your child’s needs is knowing how best your child learns.There are lots of pedagogical approaches and we all respond differently to them. A teacher in high school has one approach for the entire class, which of course is not his or her fault. But that approach might not work for your kid. There are other benefits, too. Taxpayers in the U.S. pay around $12,000 per year for every pupil that goes through public school (though the cost differs dramatically per state). You save the people money by home-schooling. The average cost of homeschooling is said to be somewhere between $500-$2000 for books and materials. And if you were thinking about private school – the costs can be oppressive – think of all the money you could save! What else do the people say that promote homeschooling? They tell us the parent-child bond will grow stronger. On top of that, some schools are not full of little angels, as we know. At home, it’s unlikely your child will be skipping classes to smoke weed behind the basketball courts. It’s unlikely they’ll face bullying or get into fights, within the confines of their own home. They won’t experience racism or prejudice; they won’t have to undergo the stresses of being popular, all those childish hierarchies that can be a minefield for young folks. They likely won’t get a bullet in the back delivered from a quiet kid whose hobby was cutting the wings off trapped birds. They won’t spend a year depressed because they got dumped by a girl in chemistry class, and they certainly won’t be sneaking to the bathroom to see if their pregnancy test is positive. Well, they could still get pregnant of course, but perhaps it’s less likely if they are not surrounded by the opposite sex day after day in school.The question is: Is keeping your child away from these apparent dangers in itself a possible danger to the development of said child? After all, the workplace, the rat race, the dating game, they can all be minefields, too. Does a child need school in order to learn how to navigate tricky social and workplace situations? It is the loss of social interaction where most people say homeschool finds its negative. Not to mention, your child might resent the hell out of you for taking him or her away from their friends, from pulling them from the football team, the after school photography group, high school prom, and perhaps even a first kiss? Will the parent-child bond grow and flourish, or will being next to each other all day foment some feelings of animosity? Have you ever tried being with someone non-stop? Arguments often happen, only because of the lack of space. We might also ask if the parent is cut out to be a teacher. One not only requires knowledge, but also patience. If there is a lack of patience, unlike at school, where the teacher is gone when the bell rings, the child is stuck with the target of their ire. Then again, if you’re a super cool parent and you’re fit for the job, you might realize when things are getting tough and just say ‘school is over for the day; go out and enjoy yourself!’ Not something that happens in a traditional school setting. Home schooling offers flexibility. There is of course the negative of homeschooling costing money in other ways. You must have a fair bit of cash to do it, as it means one parent can no longer work outside the home. You’ll need some relative comfort to take this on. If you have that, then you also have to be the kind of parent who fully understands subjects such as physics, chemistry, calculus, the industrial revolution, and at the same time be able to decipher some great works of literature or know how to write a compelling short story. Not all math gurus are creatives, and vice versa. Can you even teach your kid to swing a baseball bat? Do you even have time to visit a field and help your child work out? Do you understand the rules of football and tennis? can you teach chess strategies, or do you know how search engine optimization works? Your kids might not study some of these things, but during the socialization process in school, much can learned from other kids. Basically, you must be damn talented if you want to homeschool kids, especially when they get older. But the statistics don’t lie, and homeschooled kids do tend to do better than traditionally schooled kids.So, what do you think? Is homeschool a better way to educate children? Or are homeschooled kids destined to be socially awkward freaks? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! Also, be sure to check out our other article called Private School vs Public School - How Do The Students CompareThanks for reading. See you next time!

School vs Homeschool: Which Student Does Better

Really really really really really really REALLY is one of the most overused words in the English language. Of course you can use it, I use it myself but don't use it all the time. It's annoying, it's a rather lazy way of speaking and writing. So what I want to talk to you about today is alternative words and expressions to replace really now these are small changes that you can make today that will raise your English level. So if you want to improve your English, if you want to impress your listeners and readers with your command of the English language then use a richer, more interesting vocabulary today we will show you how so stay tuned it was a really strange evening I had last night with Sonia. Sonia, if you don't know her is my girlfriend and she's really nice, really intelligent and really sweet. It was Sonia's birthday and I decided to take her to this really trendy restaurant in the West End called Artful Dodger's its speciality is London Street food which is really weird because it's really posh and it's not on the street it's on the 50th floor of this really tall building the place and the decor is really original and really interesting it's really much better than any other place I know. I went to The Shed the other day, a restaurant that was really recommended on TripAdvisor and I was really disappointed. Anyway we were expecting really complicated food. In fact, it was really simple and really good. The main course was avocado on toast. Although I really liked it I thought it was really overpriced I mean £50 for two servings of grilled bread some mashed avocado and a sprinkling of pomegranate seeds scattered on top I could do at home and it would be really much cheaper anyway I complained to the waiter that it was really expensive and he got really angry with me but he was really, really nice with Sonia and Sonia was really, really nice with him. I really wanted to to fight him but he was really big and really muscular. In the end he let me keep my 50 pounds but he kept Sonia the whole thing was really annoying. So your mission is (if you choose to accept it) is to rewrite the story replacing the word REALLY either with another words or you could rewrite the REALLY and the adjective with completely different word or expression and you can find the PDF in the description okay anyway there is no one correct answer but this is a good exercise in getting you to think about better ways of expressing yourself in written and spoken English so for this exercise you can use a dictionary you can use this a thesaurus (a thesaurus by the way, is a dictionary of synonyms) and I recommend thesaurus.com but you can find other sources. you can use whatever you want, you can use an app, you can ask a friend, you can phone your grandmother it doesn't matter it's all ok. The objective here is just to make the story sound better. I have my version which I'll show you in a few minutes. I'll wait here while you complete the task so come back when you have finished. So here's my version as I said it's not the definitive version. Maybe you can do better, you probably can so let's have a look. It was such a strange evening I had last night with Sonia Sonia if you don't know her is my girlfriend and is so nice so I'm using SUCH before an adjective and a noun as an intensifier "such a strange evening" and you would use SO before an adjective on its own and is so nice and if you want to know more about the difference between SO and SUCH we do have article about that you can find a link to that in the description ...and is so nice remarkably intelligent and terribly sweet it was Sonia's birthday and I decided to take her to this seriously trendy restaurant in the West End called artful Dodgers its speciality is London Street food which is dead weird I'm using dead here as the intensifier which has a similar meaning to VERY and you can put it before an adjective (a gradable adjectives) I'll give you another example "it's dead hot today". "The film was dead good", "I'm dead tired" in this case it was dead weird because it's awfully posh and it's not on the street. It's on the 50th floor of this extremely tall building. The place and the deco is strikingly original and rather interesting. Now I'm using RATHER here to mean "to a high degree" RATHER is one of those words which can have a different meaning, a nuance of meaning depending on how you pronounce it but I'm using it to mean "to a high degree". It was rather interesting. It's miles better than in any other place I know. Now MILES means a great amount or a long way and it's very common to learn it. I'll give you another example "his new record is miles better than his old one" so it's miles better than any other place I know. I went to the shed the other day and that restaurant there was highly recommended on TripAdvisor and I was hugely disappointed anyway. We were expecting fairly complicated food. FAIRLY like RATHER can change its meaning a little bit depending on how you pronounce it but here I mean "to a high degree" just like REALLY so it's fairly complicated but in fact it was really simple now there you are I said that you shouldn't use REALLY too much but it's to use once or twice so I've used it just once in the story and here it is. It was really simple and quite exceptional. QUITE is another word where the meaning changes depending on the adjective it precedes so here it proceeds exceptional which is a non gradable adjective. a non-gradable adjective is is an adjective which cannot be preceded by VERY and here QUITE has the meaning of COMPLETELY so "quite exceptional" means "completely exceptional". the main course was avocado on toast which although I did like it. here I'm using the emphatic DO. I'm putting DID before a verb in the affirmative for stress, for emphasis and we do have a article about that too the emphatic DO. I'll put a link to it in the description. I thought it was way overpriced. Now WAY you can use that to mean a considerable extent or distance and you can use it before an adverb and it's often used before TOO so for example "you are driving way too fast". "you're way too old to be a professional footballer". So I thought it was WAY overpriced I mean £50 for two servings of grilled bread some mashed avocado and a sprinkling of pomegranate seeds scattered on top that's completely ridiculous I can do it at home and it would be significantly cheaper anyway I complained to the waiter that it was unbelievably expensive and he became furious. I've changed the wording a bit here rather than "really angry" I've changed the word to FURIOUS which means "really angry" he became furious of me but he was exceedingly friendly with Sonia and Sonia was very friendly with him. now VERY is a word like REALLY that is often overused but again if you use it once or twice that's okay so I'll use it just once in the story. so Sonia was very friendly with him. I was itching to fight him. here I've changed the wording a bit I like the word ITCHING so I've used it. ITCHING means "to have a strong desire to do something" so I was itching to fight him but he was pretty big. PRETTY just like FAIRLY or RATHER can have a different meaning depending on how you pronounce it but it has the meaning here "to a great extent" so. He's pretty big and incredibly muscular in the end he let me keep my £50 but he kept Sonia. The whole thing was bloody annoying. I'm using BLOODY here which is a form of mild swearing it's not offensive but it's very common so do use it and once again we have a article about mild swearing you can find a link to that in the description. So as I said this is just my version I'm sure your version is just as good if not better what I hope this exercise did was to get you thinking about the way you express yourself in English. By the way the the PDF of the second version of the story you can find also in the description so you can download that if you wish. So REALLY is such a useful word sometimes easy to use all over the place but I think you can see here that if you make an effort, which is difficult in the beginning but becomes easier as you practise using different adjectives we looked at and over time it will all become much easier.

Stop saying REALLY: Building a Better English Vocabulary

Who eats the most eggs? At first, I thought of America - Fresh scrambled eggs... pancakes, eggs... Denny's, those two strips of bacon, two eggs and two fluffy... but I was surprised to learn that Japan eats way more eggs - at 320 eggs per person in 2017, that’s 70 more eggs than Americans. By weight, Japan ate more eggs than chicken, pork or beef. Japan was the number #1 egg consumer in the world for quite a while until China took the lead in 2014. So why all the eggs? I’ve lived in Japan for 10 years now and there’s a bunch of creative and delicious dishes with cooked and raw egg here: A popular breakfast is tamago kake gohan, just rice with a raw egg mixed in with a little soy sauce. The popular rice bowl fast food chains Yoshinoya, Sukiya and Matsuya all have raw and soft boiled egg available for order. The dipping sauce for the mea dish sukiyaki has raw egg, and of course you get boiled egg in ramen and the popular winter soup oden… and eggs show up in all kinds of bentos. After the war, thanks to the Leghorn chicken with a high egg lay rate coming to Japan... "the chicken of tomorrow." ... and the government and media recommending protein and calcium rich eggs to help with the damaged health of the post-war Japanese population, egg consumption boomed and the once rare egg became a household staple by the 1960’s. So, while it it was advertised early on to Japanese people that eggs will rebuild their strength, Americans didn’t hear too much about eggs other than that cholesterol rich eggs are bad for your heart. and While Japan held the #1 position for egg consumption for 30 years from 1984, American egg consumption has mostly declined since the 60’s. Eggs are a very low cost source of protein, vitamin A, iron, vitamin B12, riboflavin, choline, zinc and calcium. Actually, Egg has some amount of every single nutrient - vitamins and minerals, except for vitamin C. These nutrients are good news for Japan whose egg consumption continues to rise... Anytime someone’s got a hankering for some egg, they can walk into a convenience store and pick up some tamagoyaki or ramen style boiled eggs. There is a huge variety of chicken eggs here. I went to three different supermarket chains nearby and counted up 34 different types of eggs among them. Japan has a lot of what are called “designer eggs.” The cool thing about chickens is they are opportunistic omnivores, so you can feed them all kinds of stuff. Actually, chickens are known to eat plenty of bugs, and if the opportunity arises they will eat small lizards and mice. So designer eggs are when Certain foods are deliberately given to chickens to enhance the texture, taste or nutrients of the egg. For example the chickens of these eggs were fed scraps of tuna to enhance the brain enriching nutrient DHA. So you get various types of eggs where the chicken was feed things like molasses, flax seed oil, carrots and pumpkin… these were fed various types of herbs including basil, rosemary and cinnamon. So you get eggs with higher vitamin levels - these have twice the vitamin B6 and 2.5 times the vitamin E of normal eggs. "Egg." The most expensive eggs I could find were 70 dollars for a pack of ten. These are from chickens that were fed bits of fish, seaweed, ground sesame, turmeric, red peppers and 25 different types of Chinese herbs and the chickens were treated very well of course. I wonder what they fed to make the shell so strong, it’s kind of hard to break it and there’s a thick membrane you need to bust through. Under a microscope The shell even has a much different appearance from that of a normal egg. The egg white and yolk seem a lot thicker and there’s a much richer color with the expensive egg. These eggs are actually meant to be eaten raw, so I asked my friend Jasmine to come by and eat a bunch of raw eggs. "Mmm! Whoah. It's sweet." "Really?" "Yea, it's actually - yea it's actually reallly sweet. I wouldn't think it's egg." "Egg yolk... a deep orange..." "Whoa, it doesn't really taste like egg... much. It tastes like an egg but it's really rich, and thick and woody almost? It's really good. I think this is the better egg, I'm already assuming." "Yolk... a normal egg color." "Tastes like... a normal egg to me. Yup." "but the other one was pretty significantly different?" "Yea, significantly different. The other one was like potent. The other one tasted a lot richer. It was more delicious, it was actually really good. This just tastes like an egg to me." Because of excellent regulations on egg production in Japan, raw eggs are actually very safe. With a salmonella infection rate of only .0029%, a Japanese person can expect to get sick once every ...two lifetimes. For the record, Japanese people don't just eat raw eggs with spoons. This is the simplest raw egg dish - tamago kake gohan. "Mmm... huhuhu it's good. Huhuhu." Actually before these arrived I tried the yolk of these 5 different brands of egg - - they were all quite mild and some were slightly richer than others, but the yolk of the expensive egg is actually quite different from all of them. It's really rich and has a sort of nutty flavor to it. It's just better but it's hard to put your finger on. I tried the egg cooked sunny side up and unfortunately you lose some of the flavor by cooking it but it was a lot better than a normal egg. I don’t have data on the egg’s nutritional differences, but because the yolk is so rich and has a deep redness to it we can expect that there’s a lot of vitamin A in these eggs. This is one of chickens’ super powers. They take carotenoids, the inferior plant derived vitamin A precursor, and convert it for us into the better absorbed more biologically active form of vitamin A - retinol. "Are you just eating raw egg and rice?" "Hai." "That's gross!" "Oishii yo." If you’re not used to eating eggs raw - you might be grossed out, but you’d be surprised how well raw egg goes with some foods. Before you eat raw eggs, look into the safety of raw eggs in your country. There’s actually health benefits to not heating the egg - particularly the egg yolk. A couple years back when I first got into a low carbohydrate diet, I was on an egg kick - I ate tons of eggs, often scrambled. But, too many scrambled eggs would always make my stomach a little queasy. At some point, I picked up a pack of these lightly cooked onsen tamago one day, had three of them in a huge salad and my stomach felt fine. So the next day I ran a little experiment - I straight up had 8 raw eggs by themselves and my stomach was totally fine. What I think the issue was is cooking the egg too much oxidizes the fats in the egg yolk. "Stop! Stop! He's already dead." Eggs, particularly those from cage free pastured chickens, have the healthy omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. But omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids are very prone to oxidation and oxidized fats are unhealthy. This is why you definitely don’t want to cook with polyunsaturated vegetable oils like canola, soybean, sunflower, peanut oil and others. But anyways, my point is that if you can, you don’t want to heat your egg yolk too much because oxidized fats are bad news and cause an inflammatory response in the body. This is not to say that raw eggs are good and cooked eggs are bad, cooked eggs will still have all the benefits and nutrients discussed above. Cooked eggs are good, but eggs with the yolk not overcooked are better. Recently I ran a poll and it seems 46% of you think eggs are healthy enough that ten a day is no problem and while 19% of you weren’t sure but owned a tamagotchi in middle school, 35% of you at least thought that 10 eggs was too much and the rest of you still need to hit the subscribe and bell button. Sure, 10 eggs is a lot of food, about 800 calories, but if they're good quality pastured eggs, what’s wrong with a bunch of eggs? The 2015 US Dietary Guidelines said you don’t have to worry about eating too much cholesterol. 85% of the cholesterol in your blood comes from the body making it. So, if you eat too much, your body will just make less cholesterol. This is why most people can eat ridiculous amounts of cholesterol and have normal blood cholesterol, like these 8 burn patients who ate 35 eggs a day for a month. Or this 88 year old who ate 25 eggs a day for 15 years. Actually, evidence is showing we don’t need to worry about cholesterol, and triglycerides are more important but that’s a story for another time. Today we still have headlines saying things like eggs will increase your risk of heart disease, diabetes and death. But the studies these are based on have terrible designs, for example this very professional looking 2019 study saying eggs increase heart disease and death got their data by giving people a multiple choice questionnaire asking them to remember about how many eggs they ate in all of last year - who accurately keeps track of their egg intake for a whole year? The data in the “eggs give you diabetes” study is totally muddled because the people eating the most eggs happened to smoke the most, eat the most calories, exercise the least and drink the most alcohol. The type of people to eat a bunch of eggs despite dietary guidelines saying eggs are bad are probably the type of people who ignore health advice in general. I’m not a dietician, I’m not a doctor, and I’m not recommending everyone eat 10 eggs a day But personally I think these anti-egg claims need to stop "But then I found a study suggesting that eating just one egg a day can be as bad as smoking 5 cigarettes per day for life expectancy." Eggs are a cheap source of protein and valuable nutrients. Harvard says one egg a day is fine, Healthline says 3 a day is fine but why? but What’s wrong even with 5 or 6? 42% of Americans are vitamin D deficient. Along with all these other nutrients, 10 normal eggs would give you 100% of your vitamin D requirement... Just sayin’. And with that I’d like to introduce the channel’s first piece of merch celebrating the awesome power and beneficial status effects of eggs.

The #1 Egg consumer is Japan. Here's why

What is the best way to improve your vocabulary? If you ask this question to English teachers or other English learners, they will tell you the same thing. They'll tell you that the best way to build your vocabulary is to learn vocabulary in context by listening and reading a lot. And I completely agree with that. That is the best way to increase your vocabulary. So this is common sense, right? Everybody knows that. This topic is so boring. But there's a problem. Common sense is not common action. Everybody knows how to improve their vocabulary, but most people don't do it. Because they spend too much time on things like social media and funny cat articles. Now, if regular listening and reading is a common practice for you, then congratulations. You don't need to watch this article. But if it's not a common practice for you yet, let me convince you to start listening and reading on a regular basis. I'm going to share with you two other benefits you'll get from applying this habit. I'm also going to share with you some listening and reading materials at the end of this article.So let's get stared. The first benefit you'll get is "intuition." What is intuition? Well, let's say that you come across a multiple choice question about English grammar. You look at the choices and you know immediately what the correct answer is. You don't know the grammar rule that explains it. There's no reasoning behind it. It just feels right. That's intuition. It comes from taking in a lot of input by listening and reading. Unfortunately, some people don't appreciate the power of intuition. They learn vocabulary in a very strange way. They don't learn words in context. Instead, they find a list of words and memorize the meaning of each word one by one. This seems like a good idea. They're learning a lot of new words in a short period of time. There's only one problem with this. It's stupid. Just because we know the meaning of a word doesn't mean that we can use it. It's not enough. We also need to know how the word is used. Now, I'm sure that you already know this, right? You're not one of those people. You already know that it's much better to learn vocabulary by listening and reading. Because when you do that, you're not only improving your vocabulary but also grammar, sentence structure, and so on. Over time, you will become an independent learner. It means that you'll have the ability to improve your English without help from other people. And that's really cool. Let's talk about the second benefit of this habit.The second benefit is an increase in brain power. Just like how a muscle needs physical exercise to become stronger, your brain needs mental exercise to grow as well. Regular listening and reading is a great mental exercise. It improves so many functions of the brain. When you listen to someone speaking, you have to stay focused. This improves your attention. And if they're speaking really fast, you're also training your brain to process information faster, which leads to better comprehension. Reading is great too. It improves your memory. When you read a novel, you need to remember lots of details like the names of the characters, their backgrounds, the plot, and so on. Some books even increase your intelligence. Reading certain types of books improves the way you think. And these are just a few benefits. There are so many other benefits that I didn't even mention here. Now you might be thinking, "Why should I care about my brain power?" Well, because it will play a huge role in your English language development. Especially if you're trying to improve your spoken English. For non-native English speakers like you and I, speaking English requires a lot of effort. It places great demands on so many cognitive functions like memory, attention, auditory processing, reasoning, and so on. So if you want to speak English well, you're going to need to have a strong, healthy brain with lots of power. And by the way, if you're not living in an English-speaking country, this habit is a must. And I'm speaking from my personal experience here because I've never been to an English-speaking country. If you're in the same situation, the only way for you to immerse yourself in the English language is by applying this simple but powerful habit. I guarantee that you'll love the results.

The best way to improve your English vocabulary

Are you looking for the tutorial on the Imitation technique?Below are my 6 updated suggestions for practicing Imitation.<h2>1. If your English listening is poor, improve your listening skills first.</h2><div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright is-resized"><img class="wp-image-3288" src="https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/listen-to-English-through-cone.png" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" srcset="https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/listen-to-English-through-cone.png 400w, https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/listen-to-English-through-cone-278x300.png 278w" alt="" width="200" /></figure></div>Some students try to practice Imitation when their listening skills are still poor, so they have trouble doing it because they don’t understand the person they’re imitating (or they often encounter words or phrases they don’t know.)This is not good. In order to practice Imitation, your English listening skills must already be quite advanced. (You should be able to understand most native speakers.)The goal of doing Imitation is to turn your passive vocabulary (words you know but can’t use in speech) into active vocabulary (words you can use in speech). It’s a speaking practice, not a listening practice.So, if your English listening is poor, you must improve your listening skills first.<h2>2. Don’t imitate in the third person.</h2>This is imitating in the third person (what I taught in the video):<ul> 	<li>Speaker: “I go to the beach every day.”</li> 	<li>You: “He goes to the beach every day.”</li> 	<li>Speaker: “But my brother hates going to the beach.”</li> 	<li>You: “But his brother hates going to the beach.”</li></ul>In the video, I told you to imitate in the third person. I thought it was more challenging than repeating after the speaker word for word. However, I don’t recommend doing that anymore because of the following problems:Problem #1: Imitating in the third person can cause you to make mistakes, especially if you’re a beginner. For example, you might say “He go to . . .” instead of “He goes to . . .”. So, it’s much better to just imitate the speaker word for word. This ensures that you will speak English like native speakers.Problem #2: Turning a statement in the first person into a statement in the third person makes you think about grammar. For example, you might think, “OK. The subject of this sentence is ‘he,’ so I must use ‘goes’ not ‘go’.” This is not good. You should never think about grammar when practicing. If you do, you might develop the habit of thinking about grammar when having real conversation.Because of these two problems, it’s better to imitate the speaker word for word. Don’t worry if the practice seems too easy. As long as you understand what you’re repeating (the content), the practice is working and effective.So, when you practice, just repeat after the speaker word for word:<ul> 	<li>Speak: “I go to the beach every day.”</li> 	<li>You: “I go to the beach every day.”</li> 	<li>Speaker: “But my brother hates going to the beach.”</li> 	<li>You: “But my brother hates going to the beach.”</li></ul><h2>3. If you think in your native language when practicing Imitation. Stop!!!</h2><div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright is-resized"><img class="wp-image-3934" src="https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/think-serious.png" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" srcset="https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/think-serious.png 500w, https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/think-serious-244x300.png 244w" alt="" width="200" /></figure></div>When some students try to speak English, they think in their native language first.This happens when they practice Imitation as well. When they hear a sentence in English, they translate it to their native language (it happens automatically in their mind). And when they try to recall the sentence, they translate the sentence from their native language back to English.This is not good. If something like this happens to you when you practice Imitation, you must stop practicing immediately.If you find yourself thinking in your native language (or translating), you must fix this bad habit first. It’s impossible to improve your spoken English unless you get rid of this habit.You can get rid of this habit by using the English speaking lessons in my <a href="https://engfluent.com/course/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">English course</a>. These lessons will train you to speak English without thinking in your native language.Practicing with my lessons is easier than practicing Imitation. If you’re a beginner, you should use these lessons first. It’s a great way to learn to speak and think in English.If you want to learn more, visit <a href="https://engfluent.com/course/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this page</a>. On that page, you can download the first two lessons of my course. If you’re not sure if the course is right for you, feel free to download the lessons and give them a try.<h2>4. If you’re a beginner, don’t try to imitate long sentences without pausing. (It’s too difficult.)</h2>This is what I said in the video:<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">Start by imitating small portions of speech first like phrases and short sentences, then move on to imitating larger portions of speech like long sentences or even groups of sentences.</blockquote>This advice is probably OK for advanced students. But for most English students, this advice is impossible to follow.Many students have told me that they usually can’t remember and recall an entire sentence, especially if it’s a long one. They tend to forget the first words of the sentence.This is my fault. When I was making the video, I was already an advanced speaker. And I forgot what it was like to be a beginner. I forgot that it was really hard for beginners to practice the same way I did.So, my new suggestion is to always pause several times when you imitate each sentence. After a few words have been spoken, pause and repeat after the speaker immediately. Don’t wait until the speaker completes the sentence before you repeat after the speaker (unless it’s a very short sentence).Then, after you’ve imitated the last part of the sentence, try to recall the whole sentence by saying it out loud. If you cannot do it, that’s OK. Go back to the beginning of the sentence, and imitate that sentence again (don’t forget to pause several times). Keep repeating the sentence until you can recall the whole sentence.<h2>5. If you’re a beginner, ignore my suggestion about delivering the entire speech. (It’s impossible.)</h2>Here’s another thing I said in the video:<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">…And finally, try to deliver the entire speech on your own.</blockquote>If you’re a beginner, please ignore this suggestion. As a beginner, if you can recall 2 – 3 sentences at a time, that’s good enough. Or if you can recall a single sentence that’s really long, that’s good enough.This suggestion is impossible for beginners because when beginners practice Imitation, they tend to memorize individual words. (This is what I did in the beginning as well.)We can only remember a small number of words at a time. So it’s impossible for beginners to recall an entire speech (because they would have to recall every single word that they heard. Impossible!)The reason I can recall an entire speech is not because I have amazing memory, but because when I practice Imitation, I don’t memorize individual words. Instead, I memorize the key idea. Since a single idea is easier to remember than a lot of individual words, I can easily recall the idea and then express it in my own words.So, if you’re just getting started, wait until you become advanced before you try this suggestion.<h2>6. Expect the practice to be difficult. (It’s actually a good thing.)</h2><div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright is-resized"><img class="wp-image-3528" src="https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/climb-challenge-difficult.png" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" srcset="https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/climb-challenge-difficult.png 500w, https://engfluent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/climb-challenge-difficult-207x300.png 207w" alt="" width="225" /></figure></div>When most students start practicing Imitation, they find it very difficult; they can’t pronounce words like native speakers, they have trouble remembering sentences, and it takes them a long time to form a simple sentence.This makes them lose confidence and motivation. They feel like the practice isn’t working. They don’t feel like the practice will improve their spoken English.If you have these problems, let me tell you something that might surprise you…If you find the practice difficult and challenging, that’s actually a good thing.When I was beginning to use the technique, it was difficult and challenging. I often felt frustrated because the person I was imitating spoke fast, or because I encountered a lot of difficult speaking patterns or words that I wasn’t familiar with.Oftentimes, the conversation that I tried to imitate was very complex. All I could do was repeating after the speaker mindlessly (like a robot). And I couldn’t recall most of the sentences.At the end of many practice sessions, I felt like I hadn’t really improved anything.  I felt like what I was doing was pointless.However, I never lost faith in the technique. This is because I had the right mindset before I began using it.Let me explain.Before I started practicing Imitation, I had read a book called “The Talent Code“. (The book teaches how to improve a skill effectively.) The book taught me one important lesson: in order to quickly improve a skill, I must practice something difficult…something that would make me feel uncomfortable and frustrated. That’s the fastest way to push myself to the next level.So, during my practice, if I felt like I was practicing something difficult, that’s when I knew I was doing the right thing. That’s when I knew I was stretching my English speaking abilities.This mindset made me embrace difficulty. I didn’t see difficulty as something to avoid. I saw difficulty as a signal that I was on the right track.There’s another thing that kept me going; it was the thought that, each day, I was doing something that would make me more valuable in the future. It was the idea that, if I kept going, a year from now, I would speak English much better.I knew that if I quit just because the practice was difficult, a year from now, I would be one year older, but my spoken English would still be at the same level. This thought kept me going.Don’t avoid difficulty. Embrace it. It’s an indication that you’re pushing your spoken English to the next level.&nbsp;

The Imitation Technique Tutorial

Africa speaks over two thousand languages, making the continent home to a quarter of all languages on Earth. South Africa alone has dozens of languages, Chad more than 100, and in Nigeria people speak over 500 languages! How can we hope to understand such a multilingual continent? Spend the next minutes with me, and let's try. This iconic silhouette represents a continent four times the size of Australia, three times as large as China or Canada, and over twice the area of Siberia, which is the most ground I've yet covered in a single animation. Now, face to face with such vast lands of varied people and languages, where and how do we start? With... families. Language families that since ancient times have lived, grown and branched in Africa. Follow the Atlantic south of the Sahara, along the Gulf of Guinea, through to the basin of the Congo River, East to Kenya and all the way down to South Africa. Here is a large and diverse group of Niger-Congo languages. Perhaps a fifth of all the world's languages belong to just this one family, including Wolof, and Twi, and two of Nigeria's most spoken languages, Yoruba and Igbo. (But Hausa, you're from another family. We'll get to you.) Off on their own in Sudan, these pockets get lumped together as Kordofanian, but watch out how you classify them. We'll come back to them, too. Benue-Congo is a vast subgroup that spread far south and east of the Benue River into the expansive Bantu languages. This family shares the trait of sorting nouns into a dozen or more classes, using suffixes or more often prefixes to categorize nouns into humans, plants, animals, abstractions, positions... Even the name "Bantu" itself is a composed word: ntu is the root, and ba- is the prefix for the human plural class. Well inland, in the Sahara and down the Nile, linguists propose a family called Nilo-Saharan. Have you ever heard of these languages, each spoken by millions of people: Luo? Kanuri? Songhai? More familiar names might be the language of the Maasai or the Nubian languages, including Old Nubian. The Kadu languages circled into Kordofanian sound Nilo-Saharan to some. This family is usually tonal, actually the same goes for Niger-Congo, so you need to distinguish higher and lower pitches to make meaningful words. Along the north and east of the continent, there's a family we've run into before: Afroasiatic. Think of ancient and modern Ethiopian Semitic languages like Ge'ez and Amharic, the Cushitic languages, Egyptian, Amazigh throughout North Africa, and the languages around the Omo River which, as you recall, are unique and hard to classify. The Semitic branch is well known for reaching outside of Africa and boasting very old written languages. Some of Afroasiatic is even tonal, like Hausa from the Chadic branch, which can change tone to mark grammar. If Afroasiatic expanded out, on the flipside of the continent, one large family long ago expanded in. Or more off of. Madagascar is this large island that native speakers of the Malagasy language call home. They now speak dialects that trace their origins back to a single subbranch of a single branch of the Austronesian language family. So expect the kind of words and grammar you'd hear in Borneo, plus some Bantu borrowings. Languages from the Kalahari Basin, and southward and westward, got grouped with Hadza and Sandawe from East Africa into a single, ahem, "Khoisan" family. These languages are famous for their click consonant sounds like /ǀ/, /ǂ/. Turns out people must like saying clicks, because their Bantu-speaking neighbors even picked them up over time, as in isiZulu and Sesotho. So in sum, five big language families. And that's it. Africa explained, right? All this talk of families and branches... makes me feel like we need a reality check courtesy of areal linguistics. If African genealogical linguistics talks about language families, areal linguistics moves our focus to areas that share features, features languages have not because of who their parents are but who their neighbors are. This approach makes sense in a continent where people's experiences are often multilingual, practical and regional. At this point I originally wanted to detour and share a whole bunch about West Africa, a big language area with very interesting features. And also home to many newly inspired writing systems, some of which gained traction. But today our main story picks up in southern Africa. Because traits spreading due to contact instead of family relationships will be the undoing of the five family stories I told you. Starting with those "click languages". Clicks have been borrowed throughout an area, and with comparison what once was named a single "Khoisan" family unravels into many: Khoe, Kx'a and Tuu, famous for having the most clicks of all. Far away, Sandawe and Hadza then look like isolates, unrelated to each other and to any of what's going on down south. Wait... if the five families are unraveling, exactly how many distinct families are there in Africa? Here goes one of those "it depends" answers. Are you a lumper or a splitter? Keep shaking these family trees and even more uncertainties fall out. Remember Nilo-Saharan? It undergoes a lot of scrutiny, sometimes tagged "hypothetical". Pick it apart, and you'll find clear isolates like Chabu, and tough-to-call ones, like do you think Songhai is its own group or part of the larger family? And say you don't like the hypothesis at all, well then, you're left with a bunch of smaller families. That's not the only old idea that has its share of detractors. They're coming after Niger-Congo too. From breaking up Kordofanian, to doubting all languages that fall outside of the broad Atlantic-Congo core. So do Mande peoples speak Niger-Congo languages or not? Africa has many isolates and disputed families. Sometimes because they're obviously unrelated. Sometimes because of all those debated classifications. Sometimes because they're underattested, lack good documentation. It's true of Africa's sign languages, too: many ultimately trace back to LSF or French Sign Language, but many arose from their own local origins. So at first glance Africa's languages seemed complicated, but we simplified them down to five manageable, namable families, and now we realize they're getting complicated all over again. And that's still not the full story. We're missing more recent colonizer and settler languages. The effects of especially Indo-European and Arabic linguistic contact over time expand our concept of African languages. Expand it inward as the languages become local: Zairian French, Nigerian English, a Dutch variety becoming Afrikaans. There are also pidgins and creoles. Some people feel like the two examples you're looking at here are bad Arabic or broken Portuguese, but no, linguistically they are creoles lexified by those languages. Colonization also expands our understanding outward from Africa. Colonizers forced African people, tongues, hands and the voices and signs they carried into the waters across the globe, making a massive impact on language history. Their descendants in the diaspora today speak former colonial languages, like English. Indigenous languages, like Garifuna. And creole languages like Kreyòl Ayisyen or Papiamentu. And in all cases, Africa's languages from those not-so-five families leave imprints on words, meaning and grammar. In the end, yeah, there may be no one African language, single quintessential family, place or people. Maybe with this time we've spent together we can appreciate the many languages of Africa, and the peoples who speak them, better. And if you want more, last year I put together this list full of creators and channels who share more about this continent with the longest linguistic history on earth. Please learn from them. And stick around and subscribe for language.

The Languages of Africa

The largest region in Asia is also its least populous and speaks the fewest languages per square kilometer of anywhere outside of Antarctica. Maybe you think its very name just sounds cold, remote, bleak, but did you fail to consider that here is home to fuzzy bears? And a rich linguistic history? Today we meet, many of us for the very first time, the languages of Siberia. This world is full of languages with histories, and I'm here for that. I asked patrons to vote on unanimated geographies, areas that we haven't covered yet in an animation. The responses surprised me. See, I'd been reading in French about Bantu noun classes and now during quarantine in Spanish and English about Mayan linguistics. So the language part of my brain was unprepared when the votes swung north. Far north to the Arctic... and to Siberia. "Siberian languages". These two words aren't about a language family but a language area. So let me pocket my family trees and start by pulling out a map and thinking about the land first, then by the end we can navigate the languages of this taiga a bit more confidently. Oh, but let me turn it the way you're used to. North is up, right? So what on here counts as Siberia? Well, it's fuzzy, not just its bears, its borders. Today's lines on maps tell me this vast area is in Russia, north of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China. Along the edges are also Korea, Japan and Alaska. The Ural Mountains draw a line at the western edge of Siberia. All the rest is bounded by ocean. Which ocean? The one to the East. And the other one to the North. But not all Siberia's water is salty. For many peoples of Siberia, life is lived along a river, including the Ob', the Yenisei, the Lena, the Amur, and the Kolyma. Let's fill in the map even more: Lake Baikal north of Mongolia, the mountainous East Siberian system, all the way to Chukotka and down to the tall active volcanoes of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The biome is largely taiga, with low precipitation. Of course it has a reputation for cold, and on that front winters do not disappoint, but summer might. Sibera is about extremes. There are towns here that sink well below freezing for five months, but then in the summer days are up in the 20s (or 70s Farenheit), winning it the award for biggest cold-to-warm swings on the planet! Here's another extreme: it's extremely sparsely populated, especially if you wander away from its southern edge. So I was unsurprised to see one linguist use a database of Earth's 7000 languages to count Siberia as "the least linguistically diverse place in the world." Nonetheless, despite first impressions, there is actually a lot of talk to talk about here. Siberia is home to some forty languages from about ten language families. Hardly a linguistic wasteland. Now, there's an old and messy distinction based on which families originate or have homelands "inside" versus "outside" of Siberia. We'll start with the larger "external" families and travel roughly west to east. First, Indo-European, from the Slavic branch: you hear Russian throughout. Now, я плохо говорю по-русски, but I can tell if you want to start reading about this area, consider brushing up on your Russian. Siberia is outside the three historical dialect areas of Russian, which all evolved out west before expanding. Siberia's Russian mainly has northern features but it might be a compromise or mix. And it's making a big impact on the other languages in Siberia. Another large language family has a long presence here: Turkic, spoken all across Siberia and in two branches. South and West, there is Kipchak, the same branch that includes Kazakh. North and East you'll find one of Siberia's most spoken languages, Sakha, part of Siberian Turkic. Historically, Old Uighur is in the same branch, and it's responsible for the script later adopted by the Mongols. So the earliest writings in the whole family are from Siberian Turkic. Another language spoken by a community of hundreds of thousands is one you'll remember from my article about Mongolic: Buryat centered around Lake Baikal. There's actually even more Mongolic spoken along both sides of the southern edge of Siberia, including Mongolian and Dagur. In my article about how Hungarian builds its long words, we panned over to meet its closest linguistic relatives living near the Ob River. These are members of the widespread Uralic family. Internal Uralic classification is a tricky topic I'm very happy to dodge this time, but to the north Nenets, Selkup and related languages belong to that same family. You'll know the outsider's name for another big family if you watched the one about the Altaic controversy. (Lots of NativLang tie-ins today, I love it!) Tungusic includes, in the south, the Jurchen tongue and its descendant Manchu, and Xibe, and Nanai along the Amur River. Up north, the Evenki and Even have been a major cultural and linguistic bridge throughout eastern Siberia. The people are famous as reindeer herders and even reindeer riders. Oh, while we're here, the creation of this autonomous area in Russia brought in a more recent Indo-European language, too, in the form of Yiddish. One more large family gets represented here. Skip to the edge of this region, and let me circle Chukotka. Right along the coast and now split between two countries the native language is Siberian Yupik, a part of Yupik-Inuit-Unangan across Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Another relative, Sirenik, lived here until the passing of its last voice in the late 1990s, dimming a source of knowledge for a language that's been hard to classify within this family. Ok. So you've met five extensive language families with some members native to Siberia. And then there are Paleo-Siberian languages, an imperfect term that groups together indigenous families entirely inside of Siberia. Typically, they have fewer speakers than in the past. Typically, just a fraction of the people speak their own language. Even so, these languages remain important to their people and continue to fascinate linguists in and outside of Siberia. The westernmost is Yeniseian, traditionally spoken along an extensive north-south stretch. Today, Ket might be its sole living descendant. Judging from comments and suggestions, the thing that interests most language enthusiasts is the proposed link between Yeniseian and Diné in the Americas. But this tongue itself is worth appreciating. It's so full of interesting features, I heard and read legends of its quirks before I knew the full story. Yukaghir is the outsider's name for a family native to lands west of Chukotka, including around the Lena River. Today there remain two languages with perhaps a few hundred speakers between them. Grammatically, it is most often called out for its unusual and far-reaching focus system, which can be a challenge for linguistic theories to explain. Nivkh is a range of dialects from the Amur River to Sakhalin. They undergo initial mutations somewhat similar to Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish. Now the Wikipedia article tells you their vowels are oddly lopsided and gappy. However, this expert disagrees: no, Nivkh vowels form a typical triangle. Consolation, though, it's one of the rare tongues where you have to tell a voiced trill r apart from a voiceless trill r̥ But their most striking feature might be their numbers, which are actually counting words that sort nouns into many, many classes. That brings us right back to the edge. Native to the whole northeastern reaches of this land, east across the peninsula to the Bering Sea, south to the Kuril Islands, is a family linguists label Chukotko-Kamchatkan. (And I want to hear you repeat that five times!) Hmm, here's something unique from Lygh'orawetl'en jilyjil, called Chukchi by outsiders: a basic noun has a reduplicated stem, while plurals and other cases use a simple stem. Yes, so, a grammatical switcheroo: more basic is more complex. And just south, at the edges there's another NativLang tie-in, the story of Ainu told last time, a language today associated with Japan, and also traditionally native to Siberia. We can keep going; there's so much more to share, from the interactions at the edges to language-nerdier questions like do we have evidence for Siberia as a unique language area? (Is there a "Siberian type" language?) But time is getting away, and animating extra minutes takes nearly as long as a Siberian winter. For now we part with a better understanding of this remote but hardly linguistically desolate part of the world, its people and its languages. I hope you are well and stay well. Stick around and subscribe for language.

The Languages of Siberia

How do you learn to speak English? In this article, we'll discuss three methods for learning to speak English that really work. But before we do, we first need to talk about how humans learn. This is important because if you have some basic understanding of how we learn, you'll be able to distinguish good learning methods from bad ones. So let's begin. The first thing you need to know is that there are two types of learning. The first type of learning is called explicit learning or conscious learning. This is the type of learning where the learner knows that he's learning something and also what is being learned. One example of explicit learning is studying grammar. When you listen to an English teacher explaining the past tense, you're learning English explicitly by consciously memorizing how to use the past tense. The second type of learning is called implicit learning or unconscious learning. In implicit learning, the learner doesn't know what is being learned. Oftentimes, he's not even aware that he's learning something. The learning happens unconsciously. One example of implicit learning is listening to a conversation in English When you listen to a conversation, your main goal is not to learn English but to understand the conversation. But by doing the activity, you're simultaneously learning English. You may not realize it, but you're learning many aspects of the English language — the sentence structure, the grammar, the vocabulary, and so on. So we can learn English in two different ways — either explicitly or implicitly. The question is, which way of learning is better? To answer this question, consider this: Just like there are two types of learning, there are also two types of knowledge — explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge. Explicit learning results in explicit knowledge whereas implicit learning results in implicit knowledge. And there's a very big difference between these two knowledges. Accessing explicit knowledge requires conscious thought. You have to think about the knowledge in order to use it. This means that if you want to speak English properly, you have to think about English. You have think about whether to use the past tense or something else. You have to think about how to form a sentence properly. But that's impossible because when you speak, there's no time to think about any of that. In contrast, accessing implicit knowledge does not require conscious thought. You don't have to think about the knowledge in order to use it. Think about how you speak your first language. It's pretty effortless, isn't it. You can speak properly without having to think about any grammar rule. That is possible only because your knowledge of your native language is implicit. For this reason, implicit learning is a much better learning strategy. When you don't have to think about English, it frees up your mind so you can fully concentrate on expressing your thoughts and ideas. Unfortunately, many English students like to learn English in an explicit manner. Some of them spend time on Youtube reading articles about English grammar. What they don't realize is that the knowledge they gain from the activity is explicit knowledge, which is almost useless when it comes to speaking. So let me share with you three methods for learning to speak English that really work. I'll give you an overview of them as well as their advantages and disadvantages.The first method is listening. Just listen to English as much as possible. An advantage of this method is that it's very easy to do. You can do it while stuck in traffic, while exercising, while waiting in line, and so on. But he main drawback of this method is that it's too passive. Listening alone is not enough. You have to combine listening with some sort of speaking practice. And that brings us to the next method, which is to use English speaking courses that teach English implicitly. Let's see how these courses work: Is there a cat? No, there is not cat. No, there isn't a cat. What is there? There is a dog. A dog, there's a dog. Does Lisa own the dog? No, Lisa doesn't own the dog. No, she doesn't. Lisa doesn't own the dog. Who owns the dog then? OK, so that's one example. Here's another one: There was a guy named John. He wanted to own a restaurant. Did John want to own a car? No, he didn't want to own an...a car. No, he didn't want to own a car. What did he want? He want to own a restaurant. Well, he wanted to own a restaurant. He wanted to own a restaurant. Who wanted to own a restaurant? OK, so that's how it works. A key advantage of using a course like this is that you get feedback every time your speak. This allows you to learn and improve quickly. This is great for beginners. By using a course like this, the learner can expect to see significant improvements in a matter of months. But this method has some disadvantages too. One of which is limited learning. When you use a course like this, you get to learn only the words, phrases, and other things that are used in that course, and this is a problem because in order to speak English well, you need to keep expanding your vocabulary. Another problem is that at some point it's going to become easy for you to practice with these courses and you will stop improving. When that happens, you're going to need to use a different method in order to keep getting better. And that brings us to the last method, which is called imitation. This is the practice where you listen to a conversation or a story in English and then try to tell that story in your own words. And by doing so, you get to learn grammar, vocabulary, and other aspects of English. This is a great method for intermediate and advanced speakers. A key advantage of this method is that there are virtually no limits to how much you can learn. The more you practice, you more you learn and the larger your vocabulary. But the main problem with this method is that it can be difficult for beginners. If right now you can speak English just a little bit, you may not be able to practice imitation effectively. If that's the case, you might want to start with one or two speaking courses before you start using this method. OK, so that's an overview of three learning methods that work because they're all a form of implicit learning.

The Right Way to Learn to Speak English

Like in the upper 99.9th percentile of likability. These are the types of people who, when you talk to them, you feel understood. You feel like they're really listening, they value you as a human being, and they see the best in you. No matter where these types of people go, it seems like they have friends. It seems like people tend to celebrate them and elevate them to this deity status. And it sounds kind of crazy, but that's why it's so rare. I feel like I can only name like three or four people I have ever met who fit that description. And it seems like the more likable of a person you are, the more the world opens up to you. You know, people just enjoy being around you, they always want to invite you to things, they want you to be part of their company, they give you promotions. And you can look at that and say, "Well, that's not fair, they don't deserve it. They're not more qualified than I am." But it doesn't make it any less true. The more likable a person you are, the more people like you. You know, some people are very likable and other people are very difficult to like. And the people who are likable tend to do better in almost every area of life compared to people that no one wants to be around. I've thought a lot about what makes somebody likable. What makes someone somebody that people love being around? Like, what's the common theme? And can we implement those behaviors into our own lives so that we're just generally more likable as a person? Now, right off the bat you might have some resistance towards this proposition because you might be thinking like, "Oh, why would you want to be more likable? Why would you worry so much about what other people think of you? You're focusing on the wrong thing. You should focus on yourself, your own happiness, and then people who don't like it can screw it off." But I think that's overly simplistic and foolish, and if you think that way you're not gonna get very far in life, especially if you already struggle with people and you think that, oh, just being more of yourself is gonna help for some reason. It's like, how has that worked out for you? How has that worked out for you? Because ultimately, we're creatures of habit. What we think is just part of our personality might just be a conversational tic or bad habit that we've picked up over conditioning, over the role that we played in our friends circle or our family, and it could actually be making us more abrasive of a person than necessary. For instance, if you struggle to make good eye contact with somebody while you're talking to them, and it's just a habit that you have, you tend to look down all the time, if I told you that if you made better eye contact with people and you got more comfortable with making eye contact with people, you're not gonna say that that is somehow a betrayal of your personality. You wouldn't say that I'm telling you to be someone that you're not. I'm not telling you to deny your god. I'm just saying that there are things that you do that make a difference in how you are perceived by others. And I believe that the most likable people just do those things better than the average person. So in this article, it's a little bit of a different article, I'm just gonna talk off the cuff about things that I've noticed about the most likable people I've ever met, and then hopefully we can try to figure out how to implement some of those behaviors and those mindsets to make us more likable and more enjoyable to be around so that we can enrich our lives and have a better time with being social and interacting with people, leaving people better off than when we found them. So the first thing that you need to do if you want to increase your likability is that you have to realize that nobody really cares about what you say more than they care about how you make them feel. How you make people feel when you're around them is the most important thing. That's the thing that leaves an impression on people. In fact, 99 times out of 100, people aren't gonna really remember the things that you said when they go home after you interacted with them. They're gonna remember how you made them feel. Good manners make good first impressions. They have a lot to do with how well people like you. - A good example of this is when somebody that you're talking to is going on a rant about all of their problems and they're really heated and pissed off and they're going on a monologue about all the terrible things that have happened to them throughout the day. And you're listening and you're kind of giving them the time of day, and then you try to offer a piece of advice or an observation or ask them a question, but they just sort of steamroll over you and disregard anything that you say to continue in their monologue. When that happens, you kind of feel dejected. You kind of stop listening to all the particulars of what they're saying, and the only thing that you're left with is this feeling that they don't really care about what you have to say. You know, they don't really care about your opinion, they don't care about you, so F this person. Every interaction that you have with somebody is like that. What people remember about you is how you made them feel. It's the vibe that you give off. Is it one that is encouraging and empowering and collaborative, reciprocal? Or do you feel kind of expendable? Like they don't really care about your unique situation, your unique perspective. They don't really care about any advice that you have to give. They might as well be ranting at a brick wall. Here's another example. Say you're a guy and you're on a date with some girl and you are talking about all these things that you think are very impressive. You're saying a lot of words. You're talking about what you do for a living. You might be saying stuff impressive, like, "Oh, I have a six-figure income, blabbity-blabbity-blah. I have three sisters, something-something-something." And then once you realize that you've been monologuing for a little bit too long, you ask routine questions to them like, "Oh, how many sisters do you have? What's your favorite color, blabbity-blabbity-blah?" You know, this goes back and forth for an hour or two, and she goes home. And while she's at home, she was thinking back on the date and she was thinking to herself, "You know, he seems like a nice guy, but I just didn't feel that spark." Like, "I didn't really feel like we had chemistry." That spark is everything. That spark is what people think of you. They don't think about all the little things you said. They don't really think about all the things that you did or what your job position is. Like. No one really cares. What they care about is that spark, and that spark is the energy you give off. How do you make that person feel when they're around you? If you're sitting there in an interaction with somebody and you are tense and you are performative, then they're going to be tense and performative as well. The most likable people on planet Earth realize this. You know, they put people at ease because they're at ease. That's what good manners do. They make everyone feel at ease. - They feel so comfortable with conversation, with eye contact, with being playful. They realize that people like you when you make them feel important and valued. That's what a boy likes. He wants to know he's appreciated. - You might hear that and say, "Okay, what am I supposed to do then? Am I supposed to just be a pushover and just never voice my opinion on things and make people feel so special and comfortable and listen to all of their problems and never talk about my problems or my life, and just be like an interviewer?" That's not what I'm saying, and that's never the way it works out, because 9 times out of 10, when you are genuinely interested in someone else and you act genuinely interested in someone else, they feel special and they end up liking you more. And when someone likes you, they're more likely to ask you questions about yourself. So it's almost like you have to give first and then receive. So another thing you might say is, "What, I'm just supposed to pretend to be interested in what they're saying? Like, that's not very genuine. I thought that good connections came from authenticity and honesty, so if I'm not honestly interested in what they have to say, then the entire friendship is built on a facade." But here's a weird thing that I've noticed, is it's almost paradoxical because the people who are most comfortable with who they are and the life that they live are usually the people who are least desperate to talk about themselves. Because think about it. If you're insecure and you don't like your life, then everything that you say about your life or your job position or what you tend to do on Saturdays, you're subconsciously hoping that the other person says, "Oh, that's really cool. Oh, wow." Like you want so desperately for someone to say, "Wow, you make six figures. Oh, that's such an interesting job. That's amazing." But think about it. Everyone thinks like you. Most people are insecure, so if you are that for people, if you're the person who says, "Oh, wow, that's super interesting, tell me about that," people say, "Oh my goodness! Let me tell you about it. This is awesome. Someone's listening." People are dying to be listened to. People are dying to be called by their name, to be looked at in the eye, to feel like, "Man, I don't know if that guy really cares about me, but I sure felt like he did and that makes me feel good about myself." That's the key to likability. So I think it all boils down to a few things. If you want to be the most likable person that you can be, the most likable version of yourself, then firstly, you have to live a life that you like. The more you're interested in the world around you, the more interesting you become. - You have to find yourself likable. You have to admire the things that you do on a day-to-day basis, or at least not actively participate in something that ruins your opinion of yourself. Because if you dislike yourself, then curiosity in other people is hard to come by. You can't afford to be curious about other people because you need their validation. You need them to validate you. But people who are secure in themselves and their lifestyle will find that, oh, they don't necessarily need people to comment on their life because they like their life, so then they can actually have fun with conversation and ask questions that they find interesting and be interested in the other person. And as a result of that, the people that you're listening to will say, "Wow I like this person. I want to ask them questions about their life," and then that's when that reciprocity can get going. Those are just some thoughts that I've had. The people that I think are the most likable in life not only like themselves, or at least carry themselves like somebody that they admire, they treat themselves with respect. But because of this, they're able to go into a room and not be desperate for other people's approval. They can sit there very comfortably and easily ask people follow up questions about their life and be genuinely curious because there's a lot to learn from people. There's a lot of things that people have gone through that you can't imagine and that are genuinely interesting, and they can't wait to tell you, but no one ever asks. - You know, to keep your friends, you gotta be... Gotta be pretty considerate. Look for the good in people. Give them credit for being as straight as you are. - Yeah It might work. - So yeah, let me know what you think of all that. It's a little bit more of a loose concept article. I'd be super interested in hearing what you've observed about the most likable people in your life. You know, when I say the most likable person you know, someone probably pops into your head. What makes them likable? Comment below. And if you're looking for less theoretical tips and you want step-by-step things that you can do to make you more likable. Expand your mind, learn something new, and as usual, have a great time. And if you liked this article, watch my previous article. It's not doing too well in the algorithm and I really liked that article. It meant a lot to me, and it changed a lot of people's perspective. Some people just straight up didn't get it. They're like, "You just said eight minutes of absolutely nothing." But other people are like, "Dude, this is some of the most poetic shit I've ever seen." So make up your own mind on that. Thank you so much for reading, and we'll catch you in the next article.

The secret to being more likeable

How do you improve your English listening skills? If you ask this question to English teachers, they will tell you the same thing. They will tell you to go watch movies They will say that reading movies is a great way to improve your listening. But there's a problem. A lot of English learners watch movies with subtitles. Some people use English subtitles. Other people use subtitles in their native languages. It doesn't matter what kind of subtitles you use. Watching movies with subtitles is a really bad way to improve your listening. And in this article, I'm going to explain to you why it's such a bad idea. But first, let me share with you my personal experience. So back when I was in college, I wanted to improve my English listening skills. So what did I do? Well, I started to watch movies with English subtitles. I thought that that was the best way to improve my listening. I was really optimistic. I thought that in two or three years, I would be able to understand native speakers. Unfortunately, it didn't work. After six years of doing that, I still could not understand native speakers. I still needed subtitles when reading a movie. I was really disappointed. I watched a lot of movies, but I still could not understand native speakers. At the time, I didn't know why it didn't work. But now I do. So let's talk about that right now. First, there's one thing about listening that you need to know. Listening and hearing are not the same. If you want to improve your listening, make sure that when you practice listening, you're really listening and not just hearing. So what's the difference between listening and hearing? Well, the difference is whether or not you're paying attention. If you're paying attention, then you're listening. If you're not paying attention, then that's just hearing. So let me give you an example. If you turn on the radio and pay attention to the sound from the radio, then that is listening. But if you turn on the radio and then you do something else like reading a book, then that's just hearing. You can hear the radio, but you're not paying attention to it. You are not listening. And again, if you want to improve your listening, make sure that you're really listening and not just hearing. You need to make sure that you're paying attention. Now let's talk about reading movies with subtitles. What's wrong with it? Why doesn't it work? As you might have guessed, it doesn't work because you're not listening. You're just hearing. So let me explain. When you watch a movie, you brain is trying to understand the movie. But there isn't just one way to do that. There are two ways or two options. The first option is to focus on reading the subtitles. The second option is to focus on listening to the sound. Now I have a question for you: Which option do you think your brain will choose? Reading or listening? Well the answer is obvious. You brain is going to focus on reading the subtitles. Why? Because it's much easier. The text on the screen is clear. So it's very easy for you brain to process. The sounds of people talking, on the other hand, are not that clear. So it's much more difficult for your brain to figure out what people are saying. As a result, you brain will pay attention to the subtitles and not the sounds. So when you watch a movie with subtitles, you're not really improving your listening. You're actually improving your reading. That's why it doesn't work. So the best way to improve your listening is to just listen. Don't read and listen at the same time. If you watch a movie in English, remove the subtitles, so that your brain will have to focus on listening. If you do that, your listening will improve much faster. That said, there is still a problem. If you remove the subtitles, then you won't understand the movie. And if you don't understand the movie, then it's going to be boring. So what should you do? Well, here's my suggestion: Don't try to improve your listening by reading movies. Just watch movies for fun. There is a better and faster way to improve your listening. And that's the subject of the next article. In the next article, I'll share with you the method I personally used to improve my English listening skills. So I'll see you again in the next article.

The wrong way to improve your English listening skills

Hello, welcome to my blog. Today I'm going to be sharing with you ten homeschool hacks to help you home educate your children without losing your mind. Hack number one is be intentional. Now I was gonna say plan, prepare. I feel like everybody's hacks has, someone has that in there, you know plan your day. Planning your day can really really really help. The most important thing, however, is not to sit down and make a plan, it is to think about your homeschool day, your homeschool week, your homeschool year, your child, and what you want to see come out of this. That's gonna help you identify what is going to fit and what isn't going to fit. You can be intentional with the kind of activities you do. You can be intentional with the kind of atmosphere that is in your home. The more intentional that you are with homeschooling, the more successful and enjoyable and peaceful this homeschool journey can be. So get out a pen and paper, make a list of ideas and just think about the bigger picture of your homeschool and what you want to get out of this. Hack number two is blend your kids. You guys there is no reason that you need to teach an individual math to all of your kids, an individual spelling, an individual reading program, an individual grammar program, an individual vocabulary program, an individual Latin program, an individual science program, an individual socials program, an individual history program. You see how we do this to ourselves? Homeschoolers are the worst at this. Blend your kids. You can't do it in everything but you can do it in some things. You can blend your kids no matter what their ages and grades in things like science, socials, history. You can teach that together in a way that's fluid and relaxed and enjoyable. There is no need for you to do everything at once. So take a deep breath...and say "blend you kids." Hack number three, don't try to recreate school. School is at school because it's school. You are homeschooling. That means you do school at home. It is actually different. And sometimes we look at it and we try to make the exact same thing happen in our homes. We want our kids to raise our hands. It just doesn't work like that. There are things and systems in place that need to be there because they're dealing with a classroom of 20 or 30 kids. We have a different situation. We have a different environment and we have a different atmosphere. So when you are looking at your homeschool day, don't feel like you have to recreate school. There's no need for desks. There's no need for-for individual little stations. There's no need for recess. There's no need for schedules. You can do those things. But you don't have to. I encourage you to embrace the uniqueness of homeschooling. Make it yours. It's okay to do school in your pajamas, snuggled up on the couch because you're home. There's a different environment and atmosphere in your home than they're gonna have in school. If you want to get dressed and get going on your day and get motivated and organized you can do that. Because you're at home. You are the dictator of your school day. So stop putting the pressure on you to make it what everybody says it needs to be, or what you feel like it needs to be, and make it what it needs to be for your family. Hack number four, utilize your kids. Kids are not only incredibly smart, but they are incredibly useful and responsible - some of them. And they're very very very able to do things that we probably think that they aren't. These are simple things like having your older kids teach your younger kids. There can be a remarkably small difference in age and or no difference in age, but difference in ability. And still you can have an older student or a more advanced student helping a child that is younger or struggling. They can do the reading together. Don't even tell them "you're gonna teach" if that's gonna cause a problem with-with sibling rivalry. Instead just saying to your kids, "Hey I want you to do this together," naturally that's going to happen. Your older ones are gonna do the reading portion of it and help the younger ones be able to do what they need to. Like even in your home utilize your kids. Utilize your kids in the-the cleaning up of their homeschool environment. They can probably clean up their homeschool desk or area. They can probably put their books away when they're done with it. So you can expect probably a little more out of your kids and encourage them to take part and ownership in this whole homeschool endeavor. Because this isn't just you teaching your children. This is your family learning together. So how can they take ownership in that? They can probably even take ownership in some of their planning. The older your kids get, the more they can do that and the more they start to enjoy it. Give them a piece of paper, give them their planner, and let them start to dictate what their rhythm and flow will be like. Any time your child can take ownership over their environment, over their day, feel like they are needed and- and important and have a really special place in their family, it completely changes that attitude of "you're telling me what to do" and that kind of-you know-that happens sometimes with homeschooling. Parents over our children, they just don't want to receive it especially once they get a little older and rebel a little bit from that authority from us. So anytime we can give them ownership it is going to shift that atmosphere and make a huge difference in the whining, don't want to do this, not interested attitude that we often deal with as homeschool parents. Hack number five, use the internet. There is so much out there on the internet. There are so many learning apps that are available. There are so many websites that you can use for spelling lists, for all sorts of different things. There are YouTube channels that are full of-of history and science and different things that you can use for free. There's a ton of apps that you can use for your kids. We love Reading Eggs in our home and Math Seeds and we can do that with all our kids and all their various ages and stages and it's just take some of that weight off of you as a parent. They can be working on that consistently, they can be improving in their reading or their writing or their grammar or their spelling or their math skills without it always having to be the dynamic of mom teaching or dad teaching. So sometimes utilizing online tools like that make a really big difference and I'll throw the plug in there that I have a four week free trial for Reading Eggs. So if you want something free that you get to try out and see if it'll work for you, that's a homeschool hack you don't have to pay for, you can take it to the bank. Check out the link below. Hack number six is creative purchasing. So what this means is that rather than feeling like you have to buy a different book for each child and every different subject that they do - which not only gets expensive but also gets bulky - the things to think about, like let's only focus on this year at a time. We as homeschoolers have a tendancy to go to something like a homeschool convention, see all of the amazing books, we want to buy them all, and we start stocking up. We see a good sale, we stock up. Though we mught be saving a little bit of money, starts to invade your entire home. So think on one year at a time - what you need now. Because that even might change in a year when you're looking at it again and planning for the year after. Also looking at units and how you can combine things rather than feeling like you have to do everything. So when you have a little bit of time to plan out your year and what you want it to look like, that's gonna help you with your purchasing. Other things that you can do is rather than going and shopping at, you know, some of the bigger retailer stores you can get a lot of supplies for your homeschool, organizational stuff at a dollar store. So you can get creative with your purchasing to save you money and also save you space and help you be more organized and intentional as a homeschool parent. Hack number seven is change the environment. When you are dealing with lack of motivation, when you are dealing with bad attitudes, when you are dealing with whining or fussing or crying or just feelings of overwhelmed even in yourself, the easiest and fastest way to change that is to change your environment. And this is one of the number one pros, in my opinion, of homeschooling, is that you can do that. In school they are stuck at their desk for most of their learning situation. But you as a homeschooler have the incredible privilege and ability to pack up your stuff, go outside. Pack up your stuff, go to the coffee shop. Go to the library. Go to the park. There are so many ways that you can shift your environment that make a big difference in your own motivation, your own desire to want to homeschool, as well as for your kids. So whether it is you or your child that is struggling and just not actually wanting to do school, that is a small thing that can make a huge difference. Even in your own home. Something like changing up your table. Putting a nice vase of flowers there. Um, making some tea and organizing it differently. These are the things - turning on some nice music, lighting a candle - that can just shift it enough that it's a little bit more fun. And my goodness, free tip I'll throw in there, use food. Use food. Pull out a snack, put it in the middle of the table. Food has the ability to shift right away the overwhelm to just, "Okay I'm gonna eat a snack while I do this" and it's not quite so daunting. Somehow school's not so daunting when you have food in front of you. Hack number eight is surprise your kids. Anytime we get to a point in our lives, humanity, our culture as a whole, of the same thing day in and day out with no shift and no change it gets mundane, it gets boring. We lack motivation, we lack drive, we lack interest. And as homeschoolers we don't have to do that. So you can surprise your kids - lay out a-a big spread on the table, pull out some new unit books, fill up a basket with different activities, say, "Today we're not doing any of that - we're playing this board game." Or "We're going to go on a field trip." You can surprise your kids in very small ways and they have a lasting impact. Anytime there's an element of surprise, it draws you in a little bit more. So surprise your kids. Get creative with your homeschool and you will begin to see a shift not just in that day and in that lesson but in your child's attitude towards learning. And their expectation towards education. And maybe they will start to own their education a little bit more. Hack number nine, motivate your kids with incentives. Now my incentive for homeschooling is that I get to drink coffee. So I am naturally more inclined to want to homeschool my kids when I have a steaming cup of coffee in front of me. Your kids can have incentives too. That's a very natural part of life. If you do a good job at work, you're gonna get rewarded for that with a paycheck, with an, uh, you know, accolade of some kind, with a pat on the back. People appreciate a job well done. So how can you as a homeschool parent capitalize on that? What kind of incentives and rewards and motivators can you use for your kids? Simple things like sticker stores, you can give your kids money or you can give them stickers and they can earn them and you can have a little bin or basket. I've seen people use little shoe, um, organizers that go on the back of your door with those plastic pouches from the dollar store and put prizes in it for various different amounts that they would need to cash in. This is just added incentive. It makes it a little more fun. Friday is sticker store day or whatever. You can use timers as motivators. Kids can try to compete against each other or themselves - works great for some kids. Not so well for others. But having motivators. There's healthy motivators like when I get my stuff done I get to go over to this person's house. Or do this extracurricular thing. Or we're gonna go for a walk if we get this done. We can spend time together. We're going to do a family fun day if we can get all our stuff done. So there's healthy motivators. There's motivators of time spent with you, quality time that can help your kids be a little bit more invested and a little bit more excited about homeschooling. Alright homeschool hack number ten, don't overthink it. There's so much out there. There's so much curriculum. There are so many styles and approaches and people telling you what to do and how to do it. The main and biggest thing is just to get started. If you spent all your time thinking about what it's gonna look like and what you need to do you're gonna just stand there at the starting gate never actually getting off on your own two feet. So just start somewhere. Baby step it in. Just do something. And as you go you are naturally going to learn who your kids are better. How they learn. How you teach. What works with your family dynamics. And you're gonna be able to shift and tweak it to suit you just a little bit more. You are not a slave to your curriculum. You are not a slave to anything that you are using. It works for you. So let it work for you. If something's not working, cross it off. If something is working, dive into it more and let go of some of your other stuff. Don't overthink it. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed by the amount that's out there and don't focus on everybody else. Focus on yourself, what is working for you, what is working for your homeschool. Alright so that's it. Ten homeschool hacks to help you along the journey because it can be a little bit daunting sometimes. I hope that that helps you to find something new to maybe try in your homeschool, to think of it maybe a little bit differently and to maybe help you get out of the rut if you're feeling like you've been a little stuck for a while. If you have any questions please post them below. I would love to have you subscribe to my channel and any of the links that I mentioned today as well as that free trial are down in the description below so go and check that out. It's a limited time offer and I hope you guys have an amazing day and keep calm and homeschool on.

Top 10 Homeschool Hacks

Here are ten homeschool hacks to help you home educate your children without losing your mind.Hack number one is be intentional. Now I was gonna say plan, prepare. I feel like everybody's hacks has, someone has that in there, you know plan your day. Planning your day can really really really help. The most important thing, however, is not to sit down and make a plan, it is to think about your homeschool day, your homeschool week, your homeschool year, your child, and what you want to see come out of this. That's gonna help you identify what is going to fit and what isn't going to fit. You can be intentional with the kind of activities you do. You can be intentional with the kind of atmosphere that is in your home. The more intentional that you are with homeschooling, the more successful and enjoyable and peaceful this homeschool journey can be. So get out a pen and paper, make a list of ideas and just think about the bigger picture of your homeschool and what you want to get out of this.Hack number two is blend your kids. You guys there is no reason that you need to teach an individual math to all of your kids, an individual spelling, an individual reading program, an individual grammar program, an individual vocabulary program, an individual Latin program, an individual science program, an individual socials program, an individual history program. You see how we do this to ourselves? Homeschoolers are the worst at this. Blend your kids. You can't do it in everything but you can do it in some things. You can blend your kids no matter what their ages and grades in things like science, socials, history. You can teach that together in a way that's fluid and relaxed and enjoyable. There is no need for you to do everything at once. So take a deep breath...and say "blend you kids."Hack number three, don't try to recreate school. School is at school because it's school. You are homeschooling. That means you do school at home. It is actually different. And sometimes we look at it and we try to make the exact same thing happen in our homes. We want our kids to raise our hands. It just doesn't work like that. There are things and systems in place that need to be there because they're dealing with a classroom of 20 or 30 kids. We have a different situation. We have a different environment and we have a different atmosphere. So when you are looking at your homeschool day, don't feel like you have to recreate school. There's no need for desks. There's no need for-for individual little stations. There's no need for recess. There's no need for schedules. You can do those things. But you don't have to. I encourage you to embrace the uniqueness of homeschooling. Make it yours. It's okay to do school in your pajamas, snuggled up on the couch because you're home. There's a different environment and atmosphere in your home than they're gonna have in school. If you want to get dressed and get going on your day and get motivated and organized you can do that. Because you're at home. You are the dictator of your school day. So stop putting the pressure on you to make it what everybody says it needs to be, or what you feel like it needs to be, and make it what it needs to be for your family.Hack number four, utilize your kids. Kids are not only incredibly smart, but they are incredibly useful and responsible - some of them. And they're very very very able to do things that we probably think that they aren't. These are simple things like having your older kids teach your younger kids. There can be a remarkably small difference in age and or no difference in age, but difference in ability. And still you can have an older student or a more advanced student helping a child that is younger or struggling. They can do the reading together. Don't even tell them "you're gonna teach" if that's gonna cause a problem with-with sibling rivalry. Instead just saying to your kids, "Hey I want you to do this together," naturally that's going to happen. Your older ones are gonna do the reading portion of it and help the younger ones be able to do what they need to. Like even in your home utilize your kids. Utilize your kids in the-the cleaning up of their homeschool environment. They can probably clean up their homeschool desk or area. They can probably put their books away when they're done with it. So you can expect probably a little more out of your kids and encourage them to take part and ownership in this whole homeschool endeavor. Because this isn't just you teaching your children. This is your family learning together. So how can they take ownership in that? They can probably even take ownership in some of their planning. The older your kids get, the more they can do that and the more they start to enjoy it. Give them a piece of paper, give them their planner, and let them start to dictate what their rhythm and flow will be like. Any time your child can take ownership over their environment, over their day, feel like they are needed and- and important and have a really special place in their family, it completely changes that attitude of "you're telling me what to do" and that kind of-you know-that happens sometimes with homeschooling. Parents over our children, they just don't want to receive it especially once they get a little older and rebel a little bit from that authority from us. So anytime we can give them ownership it is going to shift that atmosphere and make a huge difference in the whining, don't want to do this, not interested attitude that we often deal with as homeschool parents.Hack number five, use the internet. There is so much out there on the internet. There are so many learning apps that are available. There are so many websites that you can use for spelling lists, for all sorts of different things. There are YouTube channels that are full of-of history and science and different things that you can use for free. There's a ton of apps that you can use for your kids. We love Reading Eggs in our home and Math Seeds and we can do that with all our kids and all their various ages and stages and it's just take some of that weight off of you as a parent. They can be working on that consistently, they can be improving in their reading or their writing or their grammar or their spelling or their math skills without it always having to be the dynamic of mom teaching or dad teaching. So sometimes utilizing online tools like that make a really big difference and I'll throw the plug in there that I have a four week free trial for Reading Eggs. So if you want something free that you get to try out and see if it'll work for you, that's a homeschool hack you don't have to pay for, you can take it to the bank.Hack number six is creative purchasing. So what this means is that rather than feeling like you have to buy a different book for each child and every different subject that they do - which not only gets expensive but also gets bulky - the things to think about, like let's only focus on this year at a time. We as homeschoolers have a tendency to go to something like a homeschool convention, see all of the amazing books, we want to buy them all, and we start stocking up. We see a good sale, we stock up. Though we might be saving a little bit of money, start to invade your entire home. So think on one year at a time - what you need now. Because that even might change in a year when you're looking at it again and planning for the year after. Also looking at units and how you can combine things rather than feeling like you have to do everything. So when you have a little bit of time to plan out your year and what you want it to look like, that's gonna help you with your purchasing. Other things that you can do is rather than going and shopping at, you know, some of the bigger retailer stores you can get a lot of supplies for your homeschool, organizational stuff at a dollar store. So you can get creative with your purchasing to save you money and also save you space and help you be more organized and intentional as a homeschool parent.Hack number seven is change the environment. When you are dealing with lack of motivation, when you are dealing with bad attitudes, when you are dealing with whining or fussing or crying or just feelings of being overwhelmed even in yourself, the easiest and fastest way to change that is to change your environment. And this is one of the number one pros, in my opinion, of homeschooling, is that you can do that. In school they are stuck at their desk for most of their learning situation. But you as a homeschooler have the incredible privilege and ability to pack up your stuff, go outside. Pack up your stuff, go to the coffee shop. Go to the library. Go to the park. There are so many ways that you can shift your environment that make a big difference in your own motivation, your own desire to want to homeschool, as well as for your kids. So whether it is you or your child that is struggling and just not actually wanting to do school, that is a small thing that can make a huge difference. Even in your own home. Something like changing up your table. Putting a nice vase of flowers there. Um, making some tea and organizing it differently. These are the things - turning on some nice music, lighting a candle - that can just shift it enough that it's a little bit more fun. And my goodness, free tip I'll throw in there, use food. Use food. Pull out a snack, put it in the middle of the table. Food has the ability to shift right away the overwhelm to just, "Okay I'm gonna eat a snack while I do this" and it's not quite so daunting. Somehow school's not so daunting when you have food in front of you.Hack number eight is surprise your kids. Anytime we get to a point in our lives, humanity, our culture as a whole, of the same thing day in and day out with no shift and no change it gets mundane, it gets boring. We lack motivation, we lack drive, we lack interest. And as homeschoolers we don't have to do that. So you can surprise your kids - lay out a-a big spread on the table, pull out some new unit books, fill up a basket with different activities, say, "Today we're not doing any of that - we're playing this board game." Or "We're going to go on a field trip." You can surprise your kids in very small ways and they have a lasting impact. Anytime there's an element of surprise, it draws you in a little bit more. So surprise your kids. Get creative with your homeschool and you will begin to see a shift not just in that day and in that lesson but in your child's attitude towards learning. And their expectation towards education. And maybe they will start to own their education a little bit more.Hack number nine, motivate your kids with incentives. Now my incentive for homeschooling is that I get to drink coffee. So I am naturally more inclined to want to homeschool my kids when I have a steaming cup of coffee in front of me. Your kids can have incentives too. That's a very natural part of life. If you do a good job at work, you're gonna get rewarded for that with a paycheck, with an, uh, you know, accolade of some kind, with a pat on the back. People appreciate a job well done. So how can you as a homeschool parent capitalize on that? What kind of incentives and rewards and motivators can you use for your kids? Simple things like sticker stores, you can give your kids money or you can give them stickers and they can earn them and you can have a little bin or basket. I've seen people use little shoes, um, organizers that go on the back of your door with those plastic pouches from the dollar store and put prizes in it for various different amounts that they would need to cash in. This is just added incentive. It makes it a little more fun. Friday is sticker store day or whatever. You can use timers as motivators. Kids can try to compete against each other or themselves - works great for some kids. Not so well for others. But having motivators. There's healthy motivators like when I get my stuff done I get to go over to this person's house. Or do this extracurricular thing. Or we're gonna go for a walk if we get this done. We can spend time together. We're going to do a family fun day if we can get all our stuff done. So there's healthy motivators. There's motivators of time spent with you, quality time that can help your kids be a little bit more invested and a little bit more excited about homeschooling.Alright homeschool hack number ten, don't overthink it. There's so much out there. There's so much curriculum. There are so many styles and approaches and people telling you what to do and how to do it. The main and biggest thing is just to get started. If you spent all your time thinking about what it's gonna look like and what you need to do you're gonna just stand there at the starting gate never actually getting off on your own two feet. So just start somewhere. Baby step it in. Just do something. And as you go you are naturally going to learn who your kids are better. How they learn. How you teach. What works with your family dynamics. And you're gonna be able to shift and tweak it to suit you just a little bit more. You are not a slave to your curriculum. You are not a slave to anything that you are using. It works for you. So let it work for you. If something's not working, cross it off. If something is working, dive into it more and let go of some of your other stuff. Don't overthink it. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed by the amount that's out there and don't focus on everybody else. Focus on yourself, what is working for you, what is working for your homeschool. Alright so that's it. Ten homeschool hacks to help you along the journey because it can be a little bit daunting sometimes. I hope that that helps you to find something new to maybe try in your homeschool, to think of it maybe a little bit differently and to maybe help you get out of the rut if you're feeling like you've been a little stuck for a while. If you have any questions please post them below. I hope you guys have an amazing day and keep calm and homeschool on.

The number of homeschooling families has grown substantially over the years. There are many reasons for this growth, including more and more parents are finding jobs that allow them to be remote so they travel and bring their family along. Many parents are simply taking their child's education into their own hands. Why is that? The reasons actually vary substantially however there are some common factors. School population continues growing and, because of this, resources have become more strained. Teachers are facing burnout at an alarming rate which leaves less one-on-one help and ever expanding classroom sizes. There's also some serious dissatisfaction with the rate of the school system's advance in technology and simply keeping up with the times. If you have ever thought of making the transition to homeschooling or at least are interested in knowing some of the secrets, you will not want to miss what I'm about to show you.Here's what we're going to discuss in today's article. 	- Homeschool pros. 	- Homeschool cons. 	- Traditional school pros. 	- Traditional school cons. 	- And the last, meeting in the middle.Let's start with the pros of homeschooling. Homeschooling allows parents to provide children with an exceptional education enriched by real-world experiences including things such as 4H, scouting, church groups, community volunteering, and even traveling to destinations such as historic places. It allows flexibility to spend extra time on your child's gifted areas. As a parent, you're able to run an online business which in turn helps teach entrepreneurial skills to your child. Finally, homeschooling allows the ability to educate through everyday life. Next, let's discuss some of the cons of homeschooling. First and foremost, your children are always home. Now this may be far from a con for some, but time to yourself is also important. Homeschooling is time-consuming for parents. Often you need to force social interaction since your child doesn't physically go to a place where their peers are. For homeschooling parents are always asked and may get very old. How do you socialize your child? You must be very religious, right? And how in the world do you have the patience?Next, let's shift our focus to traditional schools starting with the pros. Traditional school prepares children for the real world in a lot of aspects, allows them to work in groups. Children spend time interacting to accomplish projects. There's less supervision as children age. Also less intervention from parents. Services are available for children with special needs. The traditional school includes enrichment activities such as art and music. And finally, both parents are able to work if needed or wanted. Let's go over some cons related to traditional school. Family schedules need to mirror the district's because things such as extended absences are frowned upon. The traditional school primarily teaches to the middle. As an example, gifted students are typically not put in a position to maximize that gift. Also children with special needs are often not provided with everything they need. The traditional school system may teach different values than you would like, such as politics or history or religious beliefs. Also, traditional, private schools can be expensive. Even some public schools require things such as uniforms and fundraisers and school parties.Lastly, there are things that are just not taught in public schools such as money management and other life skills that need to be learned. No matter where you are in your thought process regarding homeschooling, many families have made the jump. In fact, with the advancement of technology and the ability for people to work anywhere, even full-time RV-ing has seen a massive spike. This requires homeschooling and thousand of folks have begun their journey. We enjoyed that lifestyle for a year and a half. Here's the secret to all of this. There are zero signs that the education system will improve during your child's school years. Now that's a hard pill to swallow for sure, but it's true. While there are pockets of great districts and rooms filled with extraordinary teachers, they are the exception. If your child is falling behind, you can't wait for the school system to come to their rescue. The lack of resources will not allow it anytime soon. If your child is excelling in school it's most likely due to the fact that they have an incredible teacher who spends a lot of their personal time building, creating, and implementing the resources necessary for children to reach maximum success. So while you may not want to make the jump from traditional school to full-time homeschool, there's a happy medium that millions of parents have latched onto. We have. Our daughter is seven years old. She's gifted in many areas and we found that traditional school is too easy for her. Instead of pulling her out of school and bringing her into a full-time homeschool environment, we have her work with one of our special education experts three times a week. She focuses on her gifted areas which, for her, includes math and reading. She absolutely loves this process and tells her teacher at school all the time about her sessions the day after they take place. At a minimal cost and zero family interruption, this is the direction hundreds of families have gone. For more information about our programs, take a look at the description for this article. I truly hope this article helps you understand more about homeschooling and options that may exist or, at the very least, opens up your mind to ask more questions for your child. If you like what you saw, please consider subscribing to our channel. If you have suggestions on what you'd like to see in an article topic or if you have additional questions related to homeschooling, please either leave a comment . We love interacting with our incredible community and strive to help simplify the crazy world of special education. From all of us, thank you for reading this episode. We'll see you in the next article

Traditional School VS Homeschool | Pros And Cons

Egyptian scribes wrote hieroglyphs for three thousand five hundred years, from the dawn of history until they fell silent. Decades before the fall of Rome, they took one final gasp in this temple, home of the last known inscription. And yet today, I get to animate not a story of loss but of success, a tale of what Ancient Egyptian sounded like, and more importantly, how we know. There's a popular narrative about the rediscovery of Ancient Egyptian. It involves a Frenchman, an Englishman and a stone. The first time I heard it, I remember cozying up on the couch to some documentary, you know, one where the camera pans slowly through pillars across temple walls then cuts to a bright sunflare and clashing synth cymbals. It went like this. In ancient times, the hieroglyphs were forgotten. Dusty relics until the 1800s, when Napoleon invaded Egypt. A stone was found, the Rosetta Stone. Scholars marveled over the puzzling strings of birds and snakes and hooks and limbs. The stone bore two Egyptian scripts and, auspiciously, a rough translation in perfectly readable Greek. Champollion and Young both raced to unlock its secrets, tediously matching names in the Greek text back to the mysterious Egyptian symbols. By most accounts, the Frenchman won the game, and the language of Egypt was at long last restored! Oh, past self, I know you were cozy and awestruck. Sorry to disenchant you; that story is... hmm, you think I'm about to say wrong? No, not that, more...missing something hiding in plain sight in history and even those famed decipherers' own words. Something we can uncover by asking a different question: not "who deciphered it?", but "what did it sound like, and how do we know?" 1810. Years before his celebrated decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, here is Champollion hurrying through the streets of Paris. He's begun to make regular visits to learn from Abuna Yuẖanna, Father John from Egypt, whose liturgical and cultural language is Coptic. The abuna receives meager payments for his work here, yet, in a move familiar to Egyptians after him who have experienced their share of the long history of human migration, abuna has been sending much of what he earns back to support the families of his two deceased brothers. Champollion, as we see in his writings, is absolutely convinced that Coptic is the Egyptian language, the very same one that stretches back continuously for thousands of years, and that until he can dream in Coptic he will never understand Ancient Egypt. Coptic, to outside eyes, looks like Greek with a bit of a Nile flourish. Indeed, it's written in an adapted form of the old Greek "uppercase" alphabet, with both consonants and vowels, and that's about to become very significant. In addition to the starter kit of 25 Greek letters, Copts use seven letters derived not from Greek but from late forms of Egyptian signs. The first hint at decipherment. Champollion eagerly absorbs all of the grammar and sounds as abuna teaches. And within years of work, it'll be by plugging in Coptic sounds and working from Coptic grammar that the decipherer will finally be able to peer back into the hieroglyphs. Major hitches impeded truly revealing their sounds. First, the consonants. Sure, many have parallels in Coptic, but what did they really sound like back then? Consonants were merely pesky nuisances compared to the dust cloud that looms over Egyptologists to this day. Hieroglyphs are a desert of consonants. Where were the missing vowels? Egyptologists scratched their heads and scribbled in some placeholders as a convenient way to pronounce words. Not because they thought Egyptians sounded like this, they just found it easier to read Hatšepsut than ḥꜣt-špswt. Arbitrary proxies aside, which sounds really echoed in these ancient gaps between the consonants? Well, since Coptic is Egyptian, and Egyptian documents are plentiful and span such a long time, Egyptologists could compare Egyptian to itself. This is "internal reconstruction", and it resulted in an explosion of hieroglyphic knowledge. It reopened a full human language, one that built words using a template where roots are these abstract things made up of consonants. Egyptians would then fill in that template with vowels to make a word. Since they didn't write those vowels, how do we refill their vowels when we're stumped by a beautiful example like "nfrt". Well, compare Coptic dialects and guess it might've sounded like /nafɾət/ or /nofɾət/. What about an animal's horn, its "db"? That's a /tep/. And name, "rn"? Why, it's /ɾin/. And "kmt", meaning "Egypt"? Fill it in: /keːmət/. How about "p-rmṯ", meaning "the person"? /pəroːmət/. Though, you three, stay put because as we'll learn your stories have a twist. Evidence also comes from the languages Egyptian interacted with, both in words they borrowed and words they lent. In the New Kingdom, during the reign of Ramses II, a decades-long conflict dragged on between Egypt and the Hittites. Wearily, the two sides settled on a peace treaty. They wrote this treaty in two versions: in hieroglyphs on a temple wall at Karnak, and on tablets in cuneiform. The elaborate hieroglpyhic title of Ramses starts with two words: nswt, king of Upper Egypt and bjtj, king of Lower Egypt. Well, in cuneiform these get written out entirely in syllables. After comparison, you might reconstruct an old pronunciation like /nsiːʔ bijat/. Do you notice something? Ramses' Egyptian seems to be dropping consonants, and presumably some vowels. It's evidence that the language changed over time. Indeed, it evolved in stages from Old to Middle to Late to Demotic and Coptic. So Egyptian changed... changed from what? Answers came from linguistic clues far beyond Egypt. Over two thousand kilometers southeast of Cairo, in this pocket of Ethiopia, there's a cluster of languages grouped together under the label Omotic. The people here are of course perfectly comfortable with their languages, while linguists are left less comfortable. To many, Omotic shares traits with a broad family throughout North Africa and West Asia called Afroasiatic. But Omotic is hard to classify, to such an extent that others don't see family traits reflected at all. So why this detour? Simply because the traits used to make the call on Omotic are found in other languages. These traits echo in the streets of Cairo today, where you won't hear the latest form of Coptic, but Masri or Egyptian Arabic. Arabic is in the Semitic branch of Afroasiatic. And, by the way, it was in Arabic that medieval scholars made the first attempts at relating hieroglyphs to Coptic sounds. Who else should have these family resemblances but Egyptian? Afroasiatic linguists placed Egypt in its own branch. They compared these various branches and traced them back to a common ancestor, Proto-Afroasiatic, leaving us with a picture of the position of Egyptian within a family. Now you could look for sounds by rewinding up from Coptic to Ancient Egyptian. You could also start to fast-forward down from prehistory and triangulate sounds from a more remote past, ancient even to them. Sure, Coptic easily fills in the /i/ in /rin/ and the /e/ in /tep/. On the other hand, there are words where Coptic doesn't match the vowels in its Afroasiatic relatives. In fact, it looks like many o's must've been earlier a's: ⲁⲛⲟⲕ, the pronoun "I", came from an older /ja'nak/. And do you remember the way I said the word for "person", with an o, /roːmə/? That shifted from earlier /raːmac/. And when I guessed that "beautiful" might be /nafrət/ or /nofrət/? Now we know why – it changed in stages from /nafɾat/ to /nofɾə/. Scrutinizing sound changes gets tricky. Take the word wnwt. The hypothesis is it sounded something like /w_naːwat/. And now you know the word for those unequal Egyptian hours from my clocks article! Incompletely... because its first vowel remains unclear to us today. The uncertainties don't stop there. Why is there no early hierogylph for the consonant "l", and which signs were pronounced /l/ in which periods? And is d a voiced, emphatic or unaspirated t? And what in the Duat is the value of this sign? Alas, this is not a phonology class. We're starting to miss the delta for the reeds. The key point is this. What I didn't realize, all cozy in front of that documentary, is that it took all this, understanding Egyptian's ancestors, its relatives and its descendants, to figure out that Aten's name was /jaːtin/, that ankh, meaning "live", was pronounced /ˁaːnaχ/ and then later /ˁoːnəχ/, and that Egypt's name /keːmə/ was earlier /kuːmat/ and its language /ɾaˀnikuːmat/. Thank you for taking this journey with me to rediscover the sound of the longest written language on earth. Thanks to patrons for following my updates, supporting me and appreciating the artwork along the way. To everyone reading – stick around and subscribe for language.

What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like - and how we know

I recently made an article called 41% of English words come from French. How did that happen? Check it out here if you haven't seen it yet. And while the title was admittedly somewhat provocative, I was nevertheless rather taken aback by the sheer number of comments questioning these figures. So I thought I'd go into them today a little bit more deeply. Now there are several different sets of stats on the internet, and this is the one I chose French, including Anglo Norman 41% Anglo Saxon, 33% Latin, 15% Old Norse, 5% Dutch, 1% Other 5% Greeks not even in the list will come to that in a moment. Now I got these stats from Joseph M Williams Origins of the English language, and I made a passing reference to it in my last article, but I didn't explain it in more detail, and I will explain why I came to the conclusion that these were the most accurate figures in a moment. But first of all, let me tell you a lot of commenters that weren't happy, such as this one from seven Wonders. As I understand it, English vocabulary is as follows: 29% Latin. 29% French. So 58% romance. 26% Germanic. 6% Greek. 6% other languages. And 4% derive from proper names. So when you say, as I understand it, what you mean is you lifted the figure straight off of Wikipedia? Now how about this one from Vint Guitarz,  to put it simply bullshit. English vocabulary is 26% Germanic, 29% French, 29% Latin 16 from Greek, and the remaining 10% from other languages and proper names. OK. Seems like the same figures quoted from Wikipedia, but then he says, "you're basically full of crap." PHD Evolutionary Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley University of Chicago. So your knowledge of anthropology validates your data, does it? Michael Gaston said this. This is B.S. Everyday English is 67% plus Anglo-Saxon is a little bit more polite. We get this comment. I'm afraid I disagree. 29% French. And then it goes on to quote the same figures in Wikipedia. He goes on to say the majority of English vocabulary comes from French or from Latin, but in the most commonly used words, in casual speech, it tends to be more Germanic. I'll come to that in a moment. OK, fair enough. But why do you think that the stats you quoted are more correct than the ones I've chosen? I also got this from rbhp. This is bullshit. Danish is like half the English language, or Colibri49 says three or four decades ago, the BBC, or perhaps Channel four , ran a TV series called The Story of English. It was made very clear that about 40% of English comes from Germanic sources, and I completely concur with that book and TV series. Actually, I have read the book and I've seen the TV series, so I am familiar with it. However, it's kind of ironic that she says she completely concurs, which are two words that come from French. The greatest ire, perhaps with some justification, came from Greek speakers. As the graph doesn't even mention Greek, it puts it into the other category of 5%. So the comments were something like this: Where is the Greek in your graph? Your graph must be very inaccurate, as there is lots of Greek influence in English, which is true, not deny it. Drew K says Hi Gideon, I find your article is brilliant. Thank you. Drew K But as for this one, where's the Greek mate? Thousands of English words are from Greek. You have misrepresented the huge amount of English words coming from Greek. What about Greek? Most highly literary words in English are from Greek. Much of English comes from Greek. These people don't even mention Greek. I don't believe them. You're missing the huge percentage of Greek words.The problem with the statsSo lots of figures quoted this graph from Wikipedia. Why is it so difficult to agree on a figure? Isn't it just a case of adding up the origin of each word and providing a total? I mean, if we want to know the ratio of men to women in a country, we could easily get the data if we wanted to know how many lemons and oranges there were in a box of lemons and oranges. That's easy, and we know how many fire engines there are in Toytown just by counting them. So in this article, we're going to look at the origins of English words, the roots of English words, and why it's so difficult to get a precise figure. Now let's start with the basics. English is a Germanic language. The grammatical structures are Germanic on the tree of languages. English is west Germanic and it branches off into the Anglo Frisian group. As you see in this graph, Friesian being the closest language to English, its only sibling. I should say there is also a belief held by some linguists that English is in fact a Scandinavian language, and this is a very interesting idea. It's a minority opinion, but perhaps we'll look into it in another article because it's beyond the scope of this one.How Germanic is English?So the hundred or so most common words in English are Germanic in origin. They contain their conjunctions, the pronouns, the prepositions, the and some common words, including modal verbs. For example, the verb to be and are go with why would should in out you. He or she, they are And there are a couple of French words sneak into the top 100 or so words, such as people and the word number in order to make sentences. In addition to verbs, you need articles and conjunctions and pronouns and prepositions. They're all pretty important. And these are all Germanic. This means that you can make lots of sentences just using Germanic words. For example, my brother and I went to the Ale House, where we drank ale and mead and ate apples while my mother cooked chicken in the kitchen. However, a common misinterpretation of these figures is that because the most common words are of Germanic origin, it means that everyday English is Germanic. And as you move up into more complex and formal language,How French is English?you hear more words of French and Latin origin. This is simply not true or not quite true, because beyond the hundred words 100 or so most common words list I just gave you everyday English is a mix of Germanic and French. If you try to speak without words of French origin, you'll end up talking about you and your brother. Go into the ale house feeding apples to the swine, and you'll never be invited back to the party and you'll have a sad life. That's because so many everyday words are of French origin. Try getting by without moving. Push, chair, table, use. Stay, very, fine. Travel, change, way. beer, city. just, money, language, taste, touch. These are just a few everyday words we get from French. We stayed at the table and used the money for beer and very fine beef, a basic sentence with mostly, if not all, words of French origin. So, yeah, hardly the language of the elite. The common words are French, too. However, this is true if you tried to make an entire sentence using French words. It's more challenging. I did try it. I did try. And this is the best that I came up with. Male spectators awaiting beer experience, considerable excitement viewing attractive female dancers performing, and it took me 45 minutes to come up with that. If you think that you can make a better English sentence using only words of French origin, then please write it in the comments. That's my first challenge for you today. Because now my next challenge. Let's have a look at some English words, and you can tell me in which columnEtymology challengeWould you put them in? I've got columns here. We'll find the main source languages of Old English also called Anglo-Saxon. I'll use them interchangeably in this article. Latin, French, also Anglo-French, Old Norse, Greek, Dutch and others. Let's start with this one. Glamour, glamor. Now this is a Scots word from the Scots language, not Scottish English. Don't confuse it with Scottish English. No Scots. And if you don't know about the three languages they speak in Scotland, then do check out the article we made about it up here. Now you're looking at the columns, you say, Hey, where are Scots in our list? It's not there. So it should be in another. Hmm. Hold on a second. Glamour is actually a corruption of Grammar, which comes from the French grammaire. So this is a point for Team French, isn't it? But wait. Grammaire actually comes from Latin grammatica. So is that point for team Latin? Well, we're not finished because grammatica comes from the Greek gramatike. Does that mean that the Greek gets the point? Yes. Who gets the point here? I'm asking you. You decide. Let's have a look at a few more examples. In British English we say schedule. Americans say schedule. But whatever it comes from the old French cedule, meaning a slip of paper. But this in turn comes from Latin scheda. But its roots are from Greek skide, meaning a splinter. And once again, who gets the points. Street. This is an interesting one. It comes from old English stret, meaning streets and you have similar words in modern German strassa. And Dutch strat. Point for old English. But no Stret is taken from the Latin strata, meaning paved road. And it's one of the few words in English that has been around in Britain since Roman times. Almost all the Latin we have came into English. Much later. So is this a point for Team Latin? But hold on. Strata has proto Indo-European roots. It comes from the word stare meaning to spread a point for proto Indo-European. Is it which isn't even on the list, sister? Now this one is up for debate. Is it from old English sweostor or from Old Norse systir? Now there are many more Anglo-Saxon words in English than Old Norse ones, and yet it sounds more similar to the Old Norse word. Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon were similar languages. So where do we put our point? Difficult to say, isn't it? Coffee we get from Dutch koffie, which got it from Turkish, which got it from Arabic. Who gets the point? Clock. Now this is complicated. It, too, has Dutch roots. It comes from clocke but the Dutch got it from old French clocque in modern French. That's Cloche, which means a bell. The French got it from a medieval Latin clocca, but it doesn't stop there because Latin probably and I stress probably got it from a Celtic clocc and it cognates with words in Welsh and Irish, which I can't possibly pronounce. Here's where it gets really interesting. Take the word anti-clockwise wise it's from old English meaning direction, but you can trace the word back to proto Indo-European. Anti is from Latin, which took it from Greek, which took it from proto Indo-European meaning against. And we've already talked about clock. So which team gets the point for anticlockwise? A word with three different etymologies answers in the comments. Compound words always pose a problem. Smartphone is a mix of old English and Latin etymology. Television is a mix of Latin and Greek. Awkward is a mix of Old Norse and old English. Which column do we put them in, or do we split the points and the words poor and pauper, poor, poor comes from French, pauvre pauper from Latin. But ultimately, both come from the same Latin word pauper. Is this two points for Latin or one each for Latin and French? Generally, I'd say, give the points to the first language. We got it from OK, because if we go to the top of the tree, we'd have a lot of proto Indo-European because Germanic, Romance Greek and Celtic languages share the same ancestor, and our graph will end up looking something like this by giving the points to the first language up in the hierarchy. You can see why Greek loses out and Latin too. There are not. Many non Indo-European words in English.Non Indo-European wordsA few of Arabic origin, such as sugar, cotton algebra from Japanese, you have tycoon and tsunami from Indonesian. We have bamboo and gong and the Aztecs gave us avocado from Spanish chili and tomato. What about the names of things?Real names and words unknownWhat about foods, for example, chop suey? That's in the dictionary. But is it one word or two? pain au chocolat Is that three words or one? And what about these words, girl, boy, bad bird, dog, big cake, lad,  common English words? And yet we don't really know their origins. They just appeared in the English language some time over the centuries. But their etymology remain a mystery as we have theories, but we don't really know so we can put them in any column. Just take girl, for example, it can be traced back to the 13th century and you should refer to a child of either sex. There are serious about its origin, but they're just fairies. Look at these words.Obscure and technical wordsDo you know them? Because I don't. If you count all the words in the dictionary, you kind of skew the results in favor of Latin and Greek. The reason being that there are lots of technical words and medical and scientific terminology that are never used in general conversation, but there are lots of them. And do we count them or not? And if not, where do we draw the line? Have a look at this sentence! John and Jane went to London and Leeds and ate breadMore about wordsand butter and jam the word and appears five times. That's a third of the text. Do we count the five occurrences of and or is it just once if you're going to count each occurrence, this is going to push up the number of Germanic words if you run a dictionary through a program and just count each word once. Then this will push up the number of Latin and Greek words. And it would be strange the word there alone makes up 6% of a given text on average. Would we give this? Would we give the word the same weight as floccinaucinihilipilification? a word that nobody uses, the word that nobody ever uses, ... ... ... ... ... OK. Almost nobody ever uses it.ConclusionsSo these are the figures most quoted about the origins of the English language. The figures I talked about in the beginning from Wikipedia are based on 80,000 words taken from the shorter Oxford English Dictionary. But in my opinion, I think it's grossly inaccurate because. We don't use 80,000 words. A highly educated speaker might know 30,000 words, and the stats should reflect this. And analyzing a dictionary that gives the same weight to each word. Just seems wrong. So ignore what you see in Wikipedia, so in the article I made about the French influence on the English language, I use the figures in the book by Joseph M Williams, Origins of the English language, where he took a survey of 10,000 words taken from several thousand business letters and gave this set of statistics . And this, to me, seems a reasonable approach. Everyday words that people are actually using without wandering into the fringes of the English language. Now, if you're a doctor or a physicist, you may have a different top 10,000. But this is good enough for a pleb like me. Now, the percentage totals are not perfect for the reasons I explained, and they're never going to be perfect. But perhaps it's a reasonable approximation. So next time somebody quotes you statistics about foreign influences on the English language? Well, anything for that matter, be sure to ask them. So what's your methodology Sunshine? Benjamin Disraeli said There are lies, damned lies and statistics. People use statistics as a drunk, uses a lamppost for support rather than illumination. And Andrew Lang said that at the end of the day, face the facts. 91.3% of statistics are made up. How you enjoyed that article check out our other articles on the origins of the English language have a great day and see you soon. .&nbsp;

What are the Origins of English Words?

English, you're quite unusual. You can say things most languages just can't! And I think some of your most interesting skills can tell us something about you and a little about languages the world over. We met some linguistic skills English is missing out on, but what about the features it does have? I mean, does it already possess any uncommon or rare traits? Why yes, yes it does, compared to most languages. Now, "most" should have a bunch of asterisks next to it, because figuring out what most languages do is hard. There are several thousand and we'll just be taking samples, but you're not here for stats lessons. You're here for the cool features. When exchanging stories about English's quirks, there's one thing I see most everyone rush to first: spelling. And yeah, your spelling is whoa (whough!), and yeah it's fun to keep bringing up "ghoti" as a whimsical way to spell "fish" following your own "rules". But a spelling system is not a language, and even if you never wrote a word, there are English oddities you'd have to contend with. Forget letters for now. Start with numbers. English is already among a smaller group for putting its numbers before its nouns instead of after. But things really get out of order with your firsts, seconds and thirds. See, if languages need ordinal numbers, assuming they're using them at all, one thing they do is keep them consistent, maybe at worst having a "first". Going off-number with your firsts, seconds, or even three-plusses is common in Europe. If you want to play along with the crowd, try extending your fourths and fifths down to oneth, twoth, threeth. Speaking of numbers, English has plurals. When you have bee times many, you call them bees, not bee. That's less normal than you might expect. In fact, plural markers like these are left out in many languages, and they're optional in others. Sometimes they even show a preference for animacy, so humans and animals may get the plural treatment but place and thing get left alone. Articles are THE way to go in English, or at least A way. But having a's and the's is not the only way. (Or the norm?) Plenty of languages just have the: it's dog, it's the dog. Or no articles at all! I saw dog. Is that a nonspecific dog? That exact dog? Well, languages can help you out with more info if needs be, but how often is it really ambiguous? Be like Korean or Russian and save yourself some words. If you're a collector or hoarder and you like your possessions, this verb is surely known to you: have. Except not all languages have it. In fact, it looks like most don't. Forgoing it means doing something else, building some clever constructions. Maybe say "it's of you" like Nepali, "it's to you" like Gàidhlig or, my preference, go Sango style with a conjunction: "you are and it". That's not the only weird "have"-thing. If you have spoken or have read much English, you have run into this before. Ok, I'll stop the hints: it's the perfect. Maybe you've thought nothing of it. But think something! It is a highly unusual characteristic of Western European languages. French, German and Italian have really gone all in on this and... ne hanno fatto il modo principale di parlare del passato, made it the main way to talk about the past. In languages that haven't perfected haves, some forgo it altogether. Others have strategies, like in West Africa and Southeast Asia, where they opt for "already" or "finish". Since we're talking about your verbs and their Europeanness, consider that pesky thing school warned us to avoid: passive voice. But you don't have to avoid what isn't there, and for most languages the passive is not. I guess those writing drills were preparing us for worldwide verbs. Verbs go hand in hand with cases. Language nerds know this well. Except English behaves odd here, too, asymmetrically casing your pronouns, like they eat hay, but not your nouns in horses eat hay. The way you use that verb is less common, too. It only marks the subject. It's more common to mark both the subject and the object, let me make this up, horse eats'm hay, or just nothing at all, horse eat hay. Well, at least the way you align nouns and verbs is nothing special. It's called accusative alignment, and it means that the "I" in "I see you" is the same as in "I sleep", but changes to "me" in "you see me". Plenty of languages go for "me sleep", that's ergative, or they adopt even more fluid strategies. Wow, is your head still on? Or was that stranger than you ever expected languages can get? Stranger than... is a comparative. And the way English compares, with an adjective plus a suffix plus this comparer particle, is rare outside Europe. In fact, this pattern may be like a fingerprint. When it shows up elsewhere - boom! - European influence suspected. The next time you want to say "your language is tougher than mine", may I suggest the Subsaharan strat of saying it's "tough exceed" mine. Or look to Uzbek and declare that it's "tough from my language". Or simply be balanced like Sona in Papua New Guinea: "your language is hard, mine is easy". English, you even sound rare compared to other languages. I mentioned this once before in my article about weird phonemes, but interdental fricatives are uncommon. That's your θ and ð. They're honestly difficult if you didn't grow up with them. And if you want to know what life is like without them, to stop it, you've got to stop it! Turn the fricative into a stop consonant, just like Irish and again many Nigerian English speakers do when they say [ð]is [d̪]is way or [d]is way. Also, your vowels are odd. Few languages have more distinct vowel sounds than English. Kabyle, a Berber language, has just three. Maya has a very normal five. British English has 13 distinct vowel qualities. (See, I told you they're odd!) But the oddest sounding thing about you might be arrr. This r sound isn't too common. What may be even rarer is the way people who pronounce their Rs between a vowel and a consonant actually say those vowels: far, fir, for. Those vowels are unique. You can hear them in English, in Mandarin Chinese where it's become a whole érhuà process, and rarely anywhere else. Before we get to my last feature, I have a quick honorable mention that isn't about the whole world so much as it is about specific regions where English would be out of place because it has fingers, hands, and arms. Around Eurasia and closer to the equator in Africa and the Pacific, the words for your "hand" and "arm" are the same. Even rarer, the word for "finger" and "hand" match up often in the Australian languages and sometimes the Americas and the Pacific. One place all three of these collide is Tahiti, where tō'u rima can mean my arm, my hand or my finger! We've seen a bunch of things that are surprisingly weird given how routine they feel in English, but this mundane "one" may currently be my favorite "one". Take a noun-less adjective, a sad one, happy one, or this red one, and notice that English expects one word after it. This is uncommon. Why not just use the adjective like most languages, or mark it with a suffix or prefix? Or take the rarest strategy. At least one lone language in Australia does not let adjectives float free without nouns. No red ones, no red. It's a red and a house, or it is not red! Well, that was fun to spend a couple articles thinking about the unusual things English lacks and has. I'm curious to know if you have any favorites, or if there's one particular feature you'd really want me to spend more time getting animated about. Credit goes to this tool, WALS, for the basic data and maps I relied on here. And to my patrons and audience, you were all kind to let me play with these while I'm in the midst of working on a more serious tale from language history. To patrons, thank you in all of the unusual English I can muster, and to everyone reading, stick around and subscribe for language.

What English does - but most languages can't

In 2003, the famous stunt artist David Blaine spent 44 days without food suspended in a transparent box above London. “I also didn’t go to the bathroom for a month and a half.” “What?” Though Blaine’s stunt pales in comparison to the Scottish Man Angus Barbieri who entered the Guinness Book of World Records in 1971 for surviving a year long fast. So, what happened to Blaine and Angus? In this article, we’ll take a look at what happens to the brain, organs and muscles and hormones when you go without food for longer and longer … 12 hours to 2 days to a week or even several months. “And as the weeks draw on, doctors say he’s shown the first signs of starvation.” Fasting is very popular recently because of the huge health and cognitive benefits to be had from even one or two days of fasting.What happens when you fast?After a day of fasting, you start getting very high pulses in growth hormone levels throughout the day. Your hunger hormone ghrelin also go down. Over 48 hours of fasting, the protein called Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor which literally makes the brain grow increases 3.5 fold. Over a 72 hour fast, the fat storage hormone insulin drops quite a bit. But, fasting hype isn’t new at all. More than 100 years ago in 1911, Upton Sinclair published a popular book called the Fasting Cure where he reports on multiple miraculous health improvements from various people’s multiple day fasts, with some fasting longer than a month. By 1972, the Soviets had developed what the LA times called a cure for just about anything: eating nothing for 30 days. Some research has found fasting to significantly boost mood and be effective for anxiety and depression. So while David Blaine was sitting in that glass box with nothing to do, his body was doing a lot. After about 8 hours without food, his body would shift to mostly rely on the stored sugar or glucose stored in his liver for energy… and David would start to be getting pretty hungry.(BMC) But he only has so much glucose stored in the liver to maintain his blood sugar, so what happens when he runs out?  Well I can actually find out that out for myself by stabbing this thing into my arm and then I’ll eat nothing for 2 and a half days. This thing on my tricep is called a continuous glucose monitor because it continuously monitors my glucose - my blood sugar. I've been fasting for about 63 hours now so let's take a look at my blood sugar. So as you can see… my blood sugar while I was sleeping was relatively flat. But then when I woke up, it went up a little bit, even though I haven’t eaten anything.Where is the sugar coming from?If we look at my blood sugar for the whole  64 hours I fasted, you can see it fluctuated   a lot … here it spiked up when I went  to the gym. But… it only takes about 28   hours to use up all the glucose stored in my  liver … so, where’s the glucose coming from?   One reason my blood sugar didn’t go down and  down to zero is because the body can make   the small amount of glucose it needs. But wait a minute, this couldn’t be good for  the brain because it needs tons of energy…   At the same I was depleting my glucose stores,  my body started to generate an alternative fuel   source - ketones. Ketones are such a great source  of energy for the body that when you’re fasting,   2/3rds of the brain’s energy  needs are met by entirely ketones,   the other 1/3rd comes from  the glucose your body makes.Ketones grow the brain.Ketones in fact are considered to be the most  energy efficient fuel for our bodies , providing   more energy per unit oxygen used. Considering  the brain is the most energy intensive organ,   demanding 20% of the body’s energy budget,  more energy bang for your buck is great news.   The interesting thing about these ketones  is that they’re not just a replacement fuel   but they're really beneficial to the brain.    As mentioned before, after 48 hours of fasting,   levels of the protein BDNF increase 3.5 fold. BDNF  is a potent stimulator of growth in the brain.   Dr John Ratey explains in his book Spark that  when researchers sprinkled BDNF onto brain cells   in a petri dish, the cells automatically  started to grow and sprout new branches.   This kind of structural growth is necessary for  learning and essentially improves brain function.   “BDNF, which I call Miracle  Gro for the brain.” In fact,   BDNF is associated with cognitive improvement  and improvements in depression and anxiety.   And, this paper explains that a stimulator  ofBDNF release is ketone bodies.So how do you feel on a week of fasting?Here’s a paper that looked at 1422 people who  fasted for 4 to 21 days. What’s interesting   is I think most people would be concerned  about their mental or emotional state while   fasting - suspecting a long fast would make  them progressively more hungry and irritated,   unfocused or drained of energy.  However, for over a 1000 people,   emotional well being significantly increased  over 5, 10, 15 and even 20 days of fasting.    So by day 5 in David Blaine’s fast,  he may have been feeling actually   pretty good. Several people, myself  included, have reported that sometime   after day 4 and as early as day 3 of a fast,  they feel especially focused and present with   a lot of energy. This paper from before reports  that sometime between days 2 and 7 of a fast,   there is an improvement in depressive symptoms  - people experience an improvement in mood,   alertness and even a sense of tranquility. This  may be due to very high ketone levels. Normally in   people not eating a ketogenic diet, ketones are  quite low, most likely around 0.1 mmols but no   higher than 0.5mmol. Mine after a weekend of very  un-ketogenic eating are 0.1mmol. But as you fast,   ketones will steadily rise - by day 5 of a  fast, ketones peak, reaching as high as 7-10mmolHunger disappears?Also by day 5, we should expect that David  Blaine wouldn’t have been hungry anymore,  maybe starting even earlier than that. Going back to Upton Sinclair’s book “The Fasting  Cure,” he explains that it is part of the natural   course of longer fasts for hunger to disappear by  day 3 or so. I’ve found this to be the case for   me as well. He also says depending on the person  it can take days or weeks for hunger to return. In fact, the study looking at  1422 people fasting 4 to 21 days,   found that hunger disappeared  for 93% of the people. This thing is a ketone ester, one of the worst  things I’ve tasted - basically drinkable ketones.   Two things I’ve noticed from it: if I take enough,  it increases my focus and mood, a little bit like   I had a cup of coffee. The other thing is  it takes my hunger away for a little while. Ketones are an appetite suppressant. This  paper found you can lower people’s feelings   of hunger by having them drink ketones in  the form of a ketone ester, just like I did. Let’s take a quick look at longer fasts… GoingBenefits from longer fasts?back again to the study on over 1000  people fasting from 4 to 21 days,  for 84% of the people who had health issues,  those issues improved from the fasting. One study found that a patient  essentially cured her diabetes   with only two weeks of fasting. Another  severely obese woman cured her diabetes with  four weeks of fasting. Now, that  woman regained all the weight shelost, but interestingly her diabetes stayed  in remission for over year after that,  suggesting fasting could have had some beneficial  effects unrelated to the massive weight loss. Going back to the 1972 LA times article - a man in   it named Vladimir reported to have cured  his arthritis with 45 days of fasting. But what happened to the Healthy David Blaine? For David Blaine, it wasn’t all miracles  and ketogenic euphoria. He experienced heart   palpitations, blurred vision and backaches.  Blaine lost a ton of weight during his fast:   24.5 kilos or 54 lbs, but according to the report  published about Blaine in the journal Nutrition,How to lose tons of muscle42.4% of that was muscle and only  26.1% of that weight loss was fat.   If you’re gonna fast as long as 44 days, you’re  going to lose some muscle, however if you wanted   to lose as much muscle as possible, you’d probably  want to fast in the same way David Blaine did. Not being able to move around has  serious consequences for muscle.   A 2016 study found that when healthy people  were eating a proper diet with ample protein,   simply subjecting them to strict bed-rest for  a week had them lose a ton of muscle mass. On the other hand, a 2017 study had  men stop working out for 2 weeks…   and simply allowing them to walk around  prevented them from losing any muscle. Tim Ferris wrote in his book “Tools of Titans”  that during his first clinically supervised   7 day fast they didn’t let him exercise  and he lost 12 pounds of muscle. However,   when following a fasting protocol designed to get  him into ketosis as soon as possible - involving   brisk walking for four hours, he claims to  have lost zero muscle mass on a ten day fast. As mentioned before, fasting raises growth  hormone… growth hormone decreases body fat,  it increases bone density and  it helps you build up muscle  and ketones also protect your  muscle from being broken down.  A 1989 study found that simply injecting ketone  bodies into people not only prevented proteins   from being broken down but the ketones increased  protein synthesis - both great things for muscle Not every aspect of fasting is good for muscle,  though. IGF-1 a key factor in muscle growth goes   down and remains quite low over a 10 day fast. But if you’re doing a fast, eating low carb before the fast and getting plenty of low  intensity exercise throughout the fast   should help you get into ketosis quickly  and prevent you from losing much muscle. All this said, you can’t just fast  excessively long without consequences.DON’T overdo fasting.According to a 1969 case report, a 20 year  old woman weighing 118kg or 260 pounds   did a 210 day fast, in the process she  lost 60kg or 132 pounds. And she did   survive a week of refeeding … but she  went on to die of a heart attack after that. The autopsy found that this extreme  fast had significantly atrophied her heart. This paper says that based on  observations made on fasting animals,  once you get into ketosis, prolonged fasting  isn’t all that eventful - you basically along  burning your body fat for energy. However, at  least in animals, when fat stores reach 10% of body weight the body enters  a dangerous stage where protein breakdown increases massively - and  the muscles and heart can waste away. …a couple sources say that you’re  really increasing your risk for  negative consequences once you get  above 40 consecutive days of fasting. Before 1973 there had been recorded at least 4 other fasts longer than 210 days that did   not end in heart attack like that 20 year old woman. Perhaps these people had so much  body fat that even after 210 days, they didn’t  reach that drastic muscle tissue wasting phase.What happened to the guy who fasted for a year?In fact, Angus Barbieri’s 382 day fast was  relatively uneventful with the authors of   his case report simply writing that “prolonged  fasting in this patient had no ill-effects.”   Angus broke his fast with a boiled egg and a  slice of bread, and told reporters "[I] thoroughly   enjoyed my egg and I feel very full".(S) During  the fast, Angus steadily lost weight at an average   rate of about three quarters of a pound or one  third of a kilogram per day, losing a total of   276 pounds or 125 kilograms. And, what was huge  was that he kept the weight off. His fast took   him from 456 lbs down to 180 lbs and 5 years  after the fast he still weighed only 196lbs.How to lose weight and not be hungryThis is really interesting because on the other  hand, many of the participants in the Biggest   Loser TV competition who frequently lose over 100  lbs … end up gaining back most or all that weight. “If you want 5 minutes of fame and drastic  weight loss that you’ll never keep off,   then join the Biggest loser.” “Scientists followed contestants  from the TV show the biggest loser   and they found that when the cameras  went off, the weight often came back on.” “And within about 4 or 5 years  I’d put back on all the weight.” A study done on their physiology  found that the intense exercise   and caloric restriction that  had them lose plenty of weight   left them with an abnormally a ravenous appetite. “Germanakos faced big challenges  after returning home - telling Today   I’m a morbidly obese person in a  fit body. I’m hungry all the time.” Now there’s a phenomenon where when in certain  people who lose weight, their hunger hormone   ghrelin goes up, suggesting they become more  hungry. But when you fast, ghrelin goes down. And,   it seems to be that ketone bodies are what prevent  ghrelin from going up when you lose weight. In fact, this 1968 paper claimed that after  2 weeks of fasting, obese people were able   to be completely satisfied with a diet of  a mere 800 calories for another 2 weeks. It’s probably not reasonable to expect to  consistently have that much of a reduction   in hunger, but this hunger lowering effect may be  thanks to reduced insulin. Dr. Robert Lustig says   that insulin blocks your brain from picking up  on the leptin signal. Leptin is a hormone that   essentially makes you feel full. “And that’s  what’s driving obesity. Insulin blocks leptin   at the brain and makes you hungry. The higher  your insulin goes, the hungrier you get.” Dr. Lustig says that often in obesity,  people have very high leptin levels but   that leptin signal is blocked by very  high insulin levels. When you fast,   insulin drops a lot… so we should expect  people to get full more easily after a fast. The beauty of fasting is it’s so simple. We should be careful with fasting, but not scaredyou’ve never fasted before or are  taking medications, take it slow   and see what a professional has to say  before you fast for many days at a time. I think for a while, not eating  anything has seemed kinda scary.  “She hasn’t eaten anything  in 3 days! Is that true?   You haven’t eaten anything in 3 days?” In this Full House episode DJ is cautioned   that not eating for 3 days will have  serious side effects on her health.  “DJ, if you’re starving yourself, you  could do serious damage to your body.” This might not be the best example because DJ is  quite young, seems like she doesn’t know anything   about fasting, and wasn’t approaching  fasting with the healthiest mentality   but if she has enough extra weight that losing  weight would not harm her health, why is fasting   for 3 days at a time in a healthy person assumed  to be such a dangerous way to lose weight?Electrolytes.One thing I didn’t mention is that you can feel  bad or fatigued while fasting simply due to a   lack of electrolytes. When you fast, insulin  goes down and the kidneys have you pee out   a lot of electrolytes. Replacing them can make  you feel way better. That’s where this article’s   sponsor LMNT comes in. As someone who fasts and  is often on a ketogenic diet, I was already a   fan of LMNT’s electrolyte supplement before they  became a sponsor of the channel. Their electrolyte   packs are a really convenient way not only to  prevent the low energy that can come with fasting   or keto, but they also help me have more energy  for workouts. LMNT tastes great and my favorite   thing is there’s no junk in it - it’s just a  well balanced amount of electrolytes - sodium,   potassium and magnesium, and a bit of flavor and  stevia. Just empty a pack into some water and   you’re good to go. If you don’t want sweetness or  flavor you can just get the raw unflavored variety   and put it in pretty much anything. If you go to  DrinkLMNT.com/whativelearned for a limited time,   you can get a sample pack of LMNT  for just the cost of the shipping

What happens if you Don't Eat for 44 Days? (Fasting Science)

Shakespeare didn't sound like this. And he didn't sound like this either. But if you were back in 1610 and you snagged a couple front row tickets to the Globe, what kind of English would you hear? I have a confession. A tough one for a language nerd. Hhh.. here goes. I never really got into Shakespeare. I remember the theatre geeks, the girl with one hand raised, head turned, chanting lines to... whom exactly? Maybe a poetry-loving squirrel? Neh, wasn't for me. I was into legos and languages. Which is how I ended up unintentionally parsing Homer in Greek before I had to face Shakespeare. Yes, HAD to. A class assignment, I think it was the Tempest. I skimmed just enough to pass a quiz. Then I would've shelved the bard forever, but for that one stray remark. As the theatre geeks donned their best British accents, a random gadfly sneered: "Heh, you know what Shakespeare really sounded like? He sounded like us." No, what? Had I missed something about Shakespeare? Something that took linguistic detective work to solve? Something like... his poor spelling. It's there in the "Bad Quartos" secretly scribbled by some bootlegger in his audience. It's there in the Good Quartos and First Folio, too. Even on his own grave, "digg" and "frend" look almost childish. His stacked "the" and "that" keep a simplified Germanic letter, thorn. Hmm. This isn't HIS spelling. 1400. Chaucer's "Englissh" was a very readable "tonge". So readable that, 75 years later, Mr Caxton imported a printing press to cash in on that readability. But one day a merchant came to town and ordered eggs. A woman said, sorry, I speke no Frenshe. The merchant got mad. He wasn't speaking French. He just wanted some eggs. Someone jumped in to help. Oh, he means eyren! Caxton griped, "Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now write, egges or eyren?" Unleash the spelling debates! How to spell kniht when it was evolving to nite? Should correc/s/ion have a c? And why, oh WHY, did Chaucer's vowels fall apart so fast? By 1600, the ongoing Great Vowel Shift was turning iː into əi, eː became iː and oː was uː! Welcome to Early Modern English, Shakespeare's tongue. "Good Frend for Iesvs sake forbeare to digg the dvst encloased heare". Not "here". "Heare". Just one of many rhymes that, well, they aren't rhymes anymore. Pleadeth rhymed with dreadeth, her with err and one with alone. You find crɛːtərs! Rɛːzənz! "Eye" went fine with compənəi. "Should" kept its "l" and didn't match wood. Extra credit: spell two words that sound like səsəiətəi and rhyme with "variety"! Haha. You get plɛː and prɛː, and prɛː and sɛː. But then thee rhymes with sɛː. So wait, were all of these actually iː? Or maybe thee was thɛː? Hmh. Well, fortunately, we find earwitness accounts of a meet/meat merger: sea was in the process of merging with see. With caution, rhymes may even help us recover puns. Like probably "reasons" and maybe "bile". And rhythm, like those iambs my teacher made us drum out in class, those count how many syllables were in, say, "enclosed". Uh, two. Too syllables. Except here it demands three: encloasèd. Meter can also reveal stress: not house'wifery, but 'ʔɤzɪfɹəi. Ok, you're learnèd now. You see in sɛː and sɛːz a noun and verb. It's no longer strange to hear "uhy noe the raisin, lead-eye". And you can stomach the news that Shakespeare's name may have been shɛːkspiːr or shɛːkspɛːr. In 1889, Alexander Ellis added one more piece of evidence: modern dialects. Dialects contain traces of a time before English had a proper accent. People who still don't merge miːt with meːt, whiches that aren't witches, undropped r's, h-less hearts, and gerund endin's - sounds downright Shakespearean. Like some dialects still do, he used both "thou" and polite "you": thou hast, thou'rt, you have, you're. And that third-person -eth, like in "she hath", was still competing with has. And while data-crunchers deflate legends of his peerless vocabulary, he was endlessly inventive with meaning and syntax. Try out this word order: "though I with Death and with reward did threaten and encourage him not doing it and being done." Playful a tangle for audiences to untie on the spot! So, what about listening to a whole play? Linguist David Crystal tested that in a newly reconstructed Globe. Thrown back into an era of standing, heckling and OP, Original Pronunciation, playgoers detected suspicious traces of one particular dialect: their own. There's something universal about learning to pronounce. We all come as strangers to Shakespeare's sounds, whether you're a theatre geek who quotes Hamlet by heart, or you're me, who'm about to finish animating this and read it for the very first time. I thank ye patrons for unlocking this and keeping me creating. And to everyone reading: I prithee, tarry and subscribe for language.

What Shakespeare's English Sounded Like - and how we know

I've been thinking a lot recently about microcosms because recently in my own life, understanding what a microcosm is has really helped me live a better life day to day, and I really hope that if you are in a rough place, you'll consider what I'm about to say, and hopefully you can gain some new ideas so that you can trend your life in a better direction. Okay, so a microcosm is defined as a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger. Let me ask you a question. What's the difference between life and living? You know, life itself may seem like a simple enough concept because we talk about it all the time. I have a life, you have a life. It's the thing we are all a part of and all seem to have. But if I ask you to describe what your life is, it's a little bit more difficult to do so because there's so much involved in life and your life is kind of just everything that has to do with you. Your family situation growing up, your family situation right now, it might be the job that you have, the job that you want to have, your hopes and dreams for the future, your trauma and regret of the past, every idea that bounces around your skull or has bounced around in your skull. Life is everything, and since it describes everything, it also kind of describes nothing in particular. It's an all encompassing idea that is basically just a theme and a concept, something we're all familiar with but none of us truly understand. Living on the other hand is something that we experience, something that you are doing right now. Living is something you've always done and something you always will do because by definition before you were living was before you were you, and when you stop living, you will stop being you, so you and living are the same thing. You don't know what it's like to not live. In some ways though, your life and your living are not unlike each other. They both deal with similar people, places and things. They both have familiar faces, people you know and love or strongly dislike and want to avoid. Both have dealt and will deal with similar emotions, similar feelings, tendencies, actions, and reactions, but despite their commonalities, one remains a stranger, something we can only look at through abstraction, through memories we recall but can't see, and places we'll go but never be, because no matter how much we think about our life, it will never make sense to us completely. It's impossible to see it all at once. It's impossible to grasp what our life is. We only see fragments and patterns and themes and in a lot of ways, that's exactly what life is. It's a pattern of moments, strung together. It's the overarching theme of decisions that we've made in days like today, so if we take a step back and we think about our entire life and we don't like what we see, we're basically saying we don't like the pattern, we don't like the theme. If life is everything all at once and living is the day to day, then by definition, each day is a microcosm of life. Each day we live is a situation that encapsulates in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of our life, and when we start to realize this, we'll start to realize that life isn't really something we can interact with. We don't have access to our life. The only thing that we have access to is living, playing it out day by day, decision by decision, and our tendencies and our impulses to do certain things are essentially the only thing that we can influence when it comes to our existence. So what does this all mean? Well, it means that if you survey your life, you look at the direction that you're heading, you look at the things that you dislike about your life and about yourself. Maybe you don't like the fact that you never have the motivation to go to the gym or you can't seem to focus at work, and it leads to poor job performance which leads to less money, which means that you can't put food on the table. Maybe you're not proud of who you are. Maybe you don't take care of yourself. Maybe you have serious feelings of regret about things you did or didn't do in the past. Maybe you have wild uncertainty about the future or you're fairly convinced that there is no future for you. Well, these things are all life things, but you don't experience life. You experience living. Living is confined by constant beginnings and ends, sunrise, sunset, again and again and again. You are living right now and it's all you've been doing, so if there are things that you don't like about your life then the only thing you can do to change them is to change the way you live today. Maybe you're thinking I need to quit smoking, and one day I'm gonna quit smoking for the rest of my life, and I'm gonna live the rest of my life free from this nasty habit, and I'm gonna be happy and healthy all the live long day as if that's somehow different than not smoking today, 'cause each time we wake up, we're confronted with an opportunity to echo the familiar motif that's become the central theme, or we can realize that our entire life is crafted in moments like these, so are we gonna continue to water the same tree or are we gonna plant a new seed?Thank you so much for reading and I'll catch you in the next article.

What to do if you hate your life

Good day, everyone. One of the most common questions about language learning is: "What is the easiest language to learn?" Now, there is no exact answer to that question that applies to everyone, because it depends on a few different factors. So, the factors it depends on are: your native language, any other languages you happen to have learned, and also the complexity of the language in question. So, if your native language is English, then the easiest language for you is probably the one that's the most similar to English. And if it's not, then maybe you've learned another language, like if you've learned French, then maybe the language that's easiest for you to learn is the one that's most similar to French. Because you've already learned a lot of the concepts that those languages have in common, so you have already done a lot of the work in the past already. Okay, so it could be your native language, the one that's closest to your native language, closest to other languages you've learned, and also another factor is the complexity of that language. So, it could be a language that's similar to your own, but if that language happens to be quite complex, then maybe that's not the easiest one. So it's kind of a balance of those different factors, there's no precise formula, but we have an idea just from those factors. Now, the American Foreign Service Institute that trains American diplomats to go overseas, which trains them in language skills before their placement overseas. They've done a lot of research into this topic as it relates to English speakers because they're training their American staff to go abroad. So, they're English speakers, but they're learning other languages. So, they have lot of data about how many hours it takes, about how intensively they have to study these different groups of languages. So, they have it categorized into five different groups: Category I, which is the easiest languages to learn for native English speakers, then they've got II, III, IV, and then V is the group of the most difficult languages to learn, and the people studying those languages, study for, I believe, 88 weeks. Full time. So, that's like a year and a half, something like that. People who study the Category I languages, I think are in there for 23-24 weeks, full time. So, it's almost times four if you learn a level V language. So, which ones are in level one, the easiest category. They are the Germanic languages, such as Dutch and Afrikaans. The Northern-Germanic languages, from Scandinavia, like Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Not Finnish, that's a separate language group. And then you've got the Romance languages like French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and I believe also Romanian is in there. So, those ones are the most closely related to English. You've got the Germanic ones like Dutch and Afrikaans, and I think those are probably the most closely related to English, and the easiest to learn. I haven't actually studied those personally, but a lot of people say that Dutch is the easiest for English speakers. I have studied French, and French has been the easiest language that I have personally studied. I used to think it was Indonesian, because Indonesian is really simple and really straightforward, and I made really fast progress in it, and I could communicate in Indonesian after studying for just a couple of months before a trip. But when I started to study French, I realized how much of an advantage that shared vocabulary is, because English vocabulary is something like 35% French, so when I would look at a French text I would recognize a lot of the keywords already, and I could basically understand half of the text without ever having studied French. So, after a few weeks I could basically read, and after a few months I could communicate and speak. Not fluently, but I could make myself [be] understood, and I could understand pretty much whatever was said to me. Face to face at least. Not on the radio or not third person, but face to face I could understand. So, French has been definitely the easiest one for me. Category II, by the way, consists of only German. German is a Germanic language, just like Dutch or Afrikaans. and it's closely related to English. But, it's also quite complex grammatically, it's not that complicated from what I hear, but it does have some complications like grammatical case endings that other Germanic languages don't have. And that's why it's not in Category I, it's a little bit more complex than the Category I languages, that puts it in Category II. And I believe it's the only language in Category II, so it's kind of on its own, because it's related to English, but a little bit complicated. The hardest has been Japanese by far. And that's one of the category five languages according to the Foreign Service Institute. Now, what makes Japanese so hard is, first of all, the grammar is very different from English, it's about as different as you can get. And also, the writing system is extremely complex. And, I think that the FSI categorization of level V doesn't even take into account the writing system, just the spoken language. It matches my experience with French versus Japanese. It feels to me like it took about five times as long to get conversant in Japanese as it did with French. About five times as long. But then, the writing system on top of that, takes a lot longer than that. Maybe ten times, twenty times, thirty times as long as it takes to long to read French, to read and write French. Because you're learning four different writing systems and combining them together. You're learning ideographic pictures, those are the Chinese characters, Kanji. Those are very complicated, there's 2000 of them that you need just to read a book comfortably. And they're read in different ways, there's different pronunciations for each one. So, learning Japanese is a real long term intensive thing. So, it's been the hardest for me. Second to that would be Arabic, because when you're learning Arabic you're learning not only one language, you're learning the formal language, which is kind of outdated and archaic language. But then, you have to learn a dialect at the same time, and then you have to learn how to communicate with speakers of other dialects. So, with Arabic you're learning a whole language family, that's what makes it hard. But, the easiest have definitely been French, followed by Indonesian, because of its simplicity. Indonesian, by the way, is a Category III language according to FSI. Obviously, it's one of the more simple languages, but it doesn't have that shared vocabulary with English, that French or Spanish or Italian or Dutch or Afrikaans would have. That's why it's not in Category I, even though it's very simple. Anyway, I hope that was helpful, I hope that gave you an understanding, and I hope you're not choosing the language to study just based on how easy it is, I hope you're just interested in getting that information. Alright, have a good night. See you later!

What's the Easiest Language to Learn?

You already know that the word "language" refers to our ability to communicate with speech. But we saw that what exactly that ability is, turned out to be quite a quagmire. So now let's turn to the other thing we mean by "language" - you know, the specific languages we speak with their own words, their own grammar and their own pronunciation. I mean, English is a language, right? And this is English! But so is this. And back in time, this was English. Even further back, but we call this English, too. Wait, I get it. This is Old English, and this one is Middle English, and this is Modern English. So are these three languages or three different stages of the same language? But I know, history's always messier than we want it to be. So let's just stick to the present. Here are some basic words in English. And these are the same words in a totally different dialect of English. They're two dialects because, if the same language gets spoken in different ways by different groups of people, we call those different dialects. Moving on, let's translate those words into Norwegian (the Norwegian language). And here's how we would write those same words in Swedish (the Swedish language). So, Swedish and Norwegian are different languages, but British and Scottish are different dialects of the same language? Where's the line between a dialect and a language anyway? Is it just arbitrary or conventional? Maybe in the end it really is buttoned up by a phrase Max Weinreich passed along. During a lecture series he gave in the 1940s, a member of his audience made the witty remark, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." If that's so, it's about politics and power just as much as it's about grammar. Language vs. languages, languages vs. dialects... oh, what a mess I've dragged you into! And with that, I welcome you to my YouTube channel. Subscribe if you want to learn more, because from the looks of it we've seriously got some stuff to sort out together.

Where's the line between a dialect and a language? -- Linguistics 101

French. You're a relative of Spanish, Italian and other Romance languages, so why do you sound deceptively different? I mean, why is "acqua" just /o/? How are "cambiar" and "casa" related to "changer" and "chez"? What's the story behind the changes that make your pronunciation so, well, unique? Euh, pardon, let me find where this starts... ah voilà! So say you wanted to create a language that turns out just like French. Well, follow the following recipe. Precisely. Ahem. Start preparing your ingredients two thousand years ago. Take a base of Latin. Combine traces of Gaulish. Because Celtic words will become sources of change. Including, literally, the word change. I must emphasize: do not use fresh Latin for your base. Let it go bad. Ideally wait three centuries until this stickler scribe pens terse corrections, disciplining people to speak "good" Latin, not "bad" Latin. "Good" Latin, not "bad" Latin. Make sure you keep the bad: the oricla, lancia, an aitchless aduc... Imperfections like these set you up for a unique bake. So far what you've mixed works for any Romance language. Spread it out from Portugal to Wallonia. Gradually incorporate sound shifts. Not uniformly. Work them in to form a nice continuum where the edges look distinct but locally it's similar from place to place. It's guesswork at this stage to be honest, but make sure to include these changes throughout the age. Soften ptk to bdg, then βðγ, then (shh). From vi[t]a and a[kw]a and se[k]uru make [viðə] and [aɣwə] and [seɣur], and you're a step away from early French [viə], [ewə], [səur]. Shorten two consonants to one: less Italian lèttera, more letre. Indulge the palate, j-ing kʲ, tʲ, bʲ until a [kʲ]eresia is a [t͡sʲ]erisa, [g]ent- becomes [d͡ʒ]ent, and cambiare is cangiar, one step closer to change. And squeeze /j/s out of fact and lact, [fajtʲ] and [lajtʲ]. These are "changes" any "sage" out there may "sache", may already know. Rework Rome's five neat short and long vowels into seven: i e ɛ a ɔ o u. And open up ɛ and ɔ even more into [i͡ɛ] and [u͡ɔ], taking the word for foot from ancient pĕdĕm to medieval [pi͡ɛ]. If sp, sk, st are especially sticky at this point, add vowels until your state is less Romanian stat, more Old French estat, and what's written is no longer a script but an escript. Ok, go chill your Western Romance dough. I know it's early, but I've invited some guests. Here they are at the door. (Knocking.) Hallo? Ja, it's the Franks. They go on to say you've been neighbors for a while. Now they're here to name your country and speak this language you've been working on. Also, they suggest adding Germanic Frankish words. Just a few. Hundred. They hand you a manuscript with an oath sworn in 842 by two grandsons of Charlemagne. One side swore in Frankish. The other vowed nearly the same lines in what they hastily called Romana. In ink they capture your earlier changes: an aitchless om, softened aiudha, and au is now a lost c[oː]sa. Roll with this. Roll out your language dough until words are stressed with an inténse accént and final vowels drop off: amur, cist. Except -a, which you should weaken down to [ə] like [koːsə]. Oh, did I say to ditch haitch? At this stage, patch in a new aitch, Germanic h- like in "hache". Even add it to some Romance words like "haut". This will create fun quirks when we oust aitches again. Take the voice out of final consonants, shifting u͡ɔ[v] to u̯ɛ[f] and gran[d] to gran[t]. Ooh, and manipulate mid vowels to ei̯ and i̯e, and ou̯ and u̯e. Make L ("el") after a vowel more of an "ew": s[aɯ̯]ce. Before you incorporate any more changes, you want to cut out one section from this dough. Split it up at the word for "yes". In the south of France it's "oc". Up north it's a mesh of "oïl". (In Spain and Italy, "si".) Well, to make what we today call French, just work with those northern "oïl" varieties. A thousand years into this recipe, it's time to dock and bake Old French throughout the High Middle Ages. Peek into the oven to see ka's cha-ing, turning cange into change, a cat into a chat and castles into chastels. Except near the northern coast, so England borrows Norman candles not "chandles" but a double-take of both "canal" and "channel". Then check if multiple [a]s are shifting to [e]: ague to ewe and caval to cheval. It's ok if they go as far as [ie]: from "cap" to "chef" or "chief". Or a can-ine "chien". The vowel u in se[u]r should now sound like se[y]r. And o in o-ïl should turn into [ʊ-iw] and eventually, yes, ou-i! At the end of the Old French period, watch and wait. You might think the sound of French-French would come from a single dialect in Paris. Instead, observe as it arises from social changes and urbanization bringing together people who speak many varieties of Oïl. The oven timer goes off. It's 1300 and your beautifully baked case shines with some of the prestige that Latin once had. Let's prepare to layer on Middle French. Melt the m[ei̯] that was "me" to m[oi̯] then m[u̯ε]. And the [ai̯] in lai̯tʲ to lɛt. The "eu" of old pu̯et or peu̯t is from here on /ø/. Vowels before N and M will flow through the nose now: [bʊn] becomes [bõn]. Heat your slurry until a new set of long vowels seeps out. Where esses break down, [gʊːtə] is merely longer than [gʊtə]. And where two vowels ooze into one, in Old French you were seür, well now you're [syːr]. Dissolve complex consonants. No longer [t͡s]erise but [s]erise. No longer "quand" and "qui" but [kãnt] and [ki]. And sa[t͡ʃ]e and sa[d͡ʒ]e cook down to sa[ʃ]e and sa[ʒ]e. I was going to say pull Middle French off the heat at this point, but you know what? Keep this caramel going. Melt away more sounds at the end of words throughout the French Renaissance: chat, trouver, even ə in [syːɾ]. You're doing it right when many loups sound identical to one lone loup. And turn those nasal vowels into a critical distinction from here on out: [a] is a preposition but [ã], later [ɑ̃], means year. As this cools, it should be teeming with unpredictable letters. (Ah, in other words, French spelling. There you are!) No longer do you read the s, the p or the t in escript. Pour these changes into your shell and watch spelling reformers grapple with their stickiness, concocting accent marks and new letters to deal with them. Now for a thick ganache of kingdom and colonization that will spread your French-so-far even farther. Everywhere, temper au and eau to [o] and [o]. But when Québec gets cold, don't cover up their archaic [frεt]. And keep [mwe] and [twe] while Paris spends a half-century before the Revolution shifting to [twa] and [mwa]. Gwadloup creole will retain an old h in [h]anga and [h]alé. And Amazonian Kheuól will inventively mash three and a third words together into one zabapẽ for "breadfruit". And from Tahiti to Louisiane to the continent with more French speakers than any other, l'Afrique, as this era cools and sets, /r/ will sometimes remain a trill. Remain, because after periods of Révolution and Napoléon, a new [ʁ] is stirred into Paris. For many [ʁ] will replace [r], and while it does, you pour on a layer thick with your most epicurean changes yet. Coat those reemerged long vowels until by the mid 1900s only a slight flavor remains: patte or pâte, Québec bette or bête. In Paris you should even hear bête merge into bette, and, well, pâte is patte. Although you attempted to melt all final consonants, they've been viscous enough to stick to vowels. Indulge this, tacking gr[ɑ̃] to gr[ɑ̃‿t]ami and [lɛ] to [lɛ‿z]amis. And remember those Frankish haitches? Pronounce them no more, but make sure they don't stick. What a fun rule for students to have to remember: H- that isn't and wasn't is sticky. H- that isn't but was isn't. Hence les hôtes but les hautes. Round weak ə to mang[ø], p[ø]tit. Or even smooth it away as you pour: mange, p'tit. Fill to the brim and tap until your French sounds not like words but rhythm groups, syllables freely cutting across words, ə dropp'd or added-ə, to r'fine the rhythm-ə, until you accenntə, the final syllable. Oh look, you've made quite a mess. Don't clean up yet. Garnish with the latest changes. Shift œ̃ to ɛ̃, then even ɛ̃ to æ̃. (Confuse pot and peau.) And push ɔ in d'acc[ɔ]rd toward d'acc[œ]rd. And end rhythm groups with a heavy, breathy vowel: T'as entend[y̥ç] ? Ou[i̥çː] ! Whew. You've now prepared a contemporary French, ready to serve. And you have a recipe to hand down and adjust for the next thousand years of French's shifting sounds. If you're eager to learn more and get into the details, my sources doc is made for you. The names you see now are some of my patrons, for whom I posted thoughts and art during the months it took me to put this together. Thank you for your patient and positive support. Merci tout le monde ! Stick around and subscribe for language.

Why French sounds so unlike other Romance languages

Let's talk about what you think about homeschooled kids.Number one, you think they're freaks. They kind of are freaks, but in an adorable way. Seriously though, they're not freaks. However, they were late to walk and late to talk, and if we had not homeschooled them and we had put them in a standard schooling environment, they would've been probably strongly encouraged, if not forced, to be in therapy for walking, talking, and all sorts of other things. So they were allowed to develop at their own pace in a homeschool environment. Number two, you think they're unsocialized. Au contraire, I would argue that we are over socialized. We have soccer four nights a week, taekwondo two nights a week, my older son is in violin quartet and orchestra, my younger son has taken art classes. Oh, they both like Shakespeare classes. Name it and homeschooled kids do it too. Homeschooled kids are in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They take singing classes, dance classes, nature classes. They play team sports. We do it all. Our kids are socialized. Sure, we don't have a schoolyard where our kids play on their own and tease each other and smoke pot when we're not looking, but can't have everything perfect.Number three, you think homeschooled kids won't be prepared to go to college. Untrue. While many homeschooled kids will stop being homeschooled when they're in high school to attend regular school, what many homeschooled teenagers do is start going to community college and taking classes. Then, they use those credits and transfer to colleges just like other kids do. The truth is homeschooled kids can go to whatever colleges that they want to. Homeschooled kids can study for the SATs just like kids who aren't homeschooled. And the fact is more and more colleges are actually seeking out homeschooled kids to apply to their universities because homeschooled kids tend to be very focused, and they tend to excel in college. Colleges are now more and more accepting of portfolios and work rather than transcripts, and the admissions process is much easier for homeschooled kids than it used to be.Number four, you think they can't learn. Thank you for your concern, but they can and they do. Many homeschooled parents and many non-homeschooling parents have realized that optimal learning doesn't usually happen in very, very crowded classes with little time for recess or little distribution of resources for the arts, especially in urban areas where resources can be very scarce. In addition, a lot of teachers, especially in public schools, are teaching towards testing standards, and that's not necessarily the best way for kids to learn. Another option is paying exorbitant amounts of money to get your kids into private school. But let's be honest, those are essentially schools for wealthy people and a handful of people who can get scholarships. While that may work for a lot of families, it didn't sit well with me practically or philosophically. And you don't need an advanced degree to be your child's best teacher. The library, the internet, museums, and so many other programs can help you teach your child if homeschooling is right for your family.Number five, you think homeschooling is for rich celebrities. Wrong. I'm actually the only celebrity I know in our community who homeschools. Every other family in our homeschool community typically has one parent working and one parent at home. And even though I'm divorced, that's how we work it. Homeschooling is not elitist. It's not something you do 'cause it's trendy, although it is gaining more popularity than ever before. Why? The schedule tends to be a lot more flexible. It allows you to be with your kids more if you wanna be with your kids more, and it allows for a level of involvement with your child's learning which traditional schooling simply doesn't allow. Ultimately, we homeschool because it works for us to have our kids learn in groups of children of varying ages with a lot of emphasis on imagination and play and being outdoors. We get to help them pursue what they're passionate about, and that makes us feel like we're doing it right. Truth be told, my kids can't imagine that there are children who go to school without having their momma or their dada nearby, and I think that's kind of sweet. Their sense of learning and adventure goes hand in hand with our sense of presence and guidance. This is how we show them how much we love, honor, and respect their learning process, and we simply love to be a part of it. What do you think about homeschooling? Are my kids freaks? Tell me in the comments below. Thanks for reading. See you next time.

Why I Homeschool My Kids

Hello, today I want to share with you about the difference between a diploma and an accredited transcript. This is a question that I get all the time: does my kid need a diploma to graduate from high school? This is a question that you start thinking about more as your kids get older but the reality is it's a question that you'll probably have swimming in your head even when your kids are little. Because you're thinking well how do they graduate from high school so that they can get into college which is the goal. Then I today I want to talk about the difference between the two. So here's the basic difference: a diploma is a piece of paper that is given from an institution that says you have done what is required to be considered graduated. It does not have any weight or anything special about it other than the fact that an institution gives it and there's only a couple and now this article it may be different by the time you're reading this article but at the time of the making of this article there's only a couple places that say you're required to have a diploma in order to be able to progress in the military I used to have some rules about diplomas in the state of Utah the Highway Patrol says the kid needs a diploma but almost everyone doesn't talk about the diploma. You only think about that because that was the tangible piece of paper that you received at the end of your high school experience but the reality is that any homeschool family can issue a diploma to their high school kids because they can say yes you went through my home school you graduated print out a piece of paper that says you graduated from homeschool Academy of Excellence or whatever you know. Let’s think about it, most kids when they're applying to college don't have a diploma like none of them do because they're applying halfway through their senior year and they haven't finished high school yet! When you apply for college, it is an accredited transcript. The transcript is a list of all the classes that a student has taken in their high school experience and if you're homeschooling that may start at 14 when they enter 9th grade or it may actually start sooner depending on what you're doing with your kids' education. But it's a list of classes taken each year and they're broken into subjects and they're given a credit amount. Now here's the thing that's really interesting. An accredited transcript is a transcript issued by an institution that's been accredited by one of several regional boards throughout the United States. And if you're reading this article outside the United States I'm going to apologize that I actually don't know how it works in other parts of the world. So if you want an accredited transcript you have to take classes from an institution whether it's a school or an online source that has been accredited. However if you have cobbled together an educational experience from lots of different resources then the accredited transcript will actually have credits that come from lots of different sources. So when you're thinking about applying for college what the colleges want is this accredited transcript possibly not the diploma, so you can take the diploma and put it off to the side except for some very specific situations and if you should just research wherever your kid's gonna go to college because that's gonna tell you what you're shooting for one of the colleges. So the second thing I think a lot of people don't know is when you're looking when a university is looking for applications they have a really broad variety of rules about this accredited transcript. Some colleges say you can have an accredited transcript or a portfolio. You don't actually have to have any of those accredited grades if you can do a portfolio of work that shows the the things you've been doing. And they all have different requirements about what those will look like and they actually allow anybody to submit one or the other. It's not just home school kids there's other places that say well we need an accredited transcript but we only need 16 credits. Now in Utah it requires you must have 24 credits to get a diploma from your high school but the college that my daughter is thinking about going to only requires 16 accredited credits which is roughly 2 years of high school credits so you could do part high school for 4 years. And then go do other things and still have that accredited transcript however there are some schools that say what if you don't have an accredited transcript we'll just take your a CT or your SAT score and we'll just weight that higher in the application process so your kid can actually go to school without an accredited transcript because you've done homeschooling experiences. That aren't accredited but are still really they do well on the a CT they're still gonna be fine. There's so much angst around this diploma and this accredit it's transcripting when I talk to people. And then I explained it and after I knew it like I was so worried about it but then after I learned it was like wait we have options we have a lot of options. So I hope this article has explained the difference between an accredited transcript and a diploma. If you have questions you know put them down below wherever you're reading this article I'll do my best to answer them it's just one small piece that moves you a little bit closer to understanding this whole getting into college thing but it's so so so important.Thank you for reading.&nbsp;

Why your kid DOESN’T need a diploma if you homeschool

- When we think about our life, we usually think about it in a form of a story. (slow music) First we were born and then we did some things and made some memories and now we're here and we work at our job or whatever. But in the future we plan on doing more things, seeing the world maybe and saving up enough money for a enjoyable retirement. We all tend to view our lives in a sort of narrative structure like this, with the beginning, a middle and an eventual end. Which kinda makes sense because by reflecting on the past, it helps us make sense of where we are now and by having hopes and dreams for the future, it gives us something to look forward to, something to plan towards and if we currently don't like our present situation, we can place our pains and frustrations on the hope of a better tomorrow. But if you think about what it feels like to actually live life, like what it feels like on a day to day basis, it feels completely different. We kinda just wake up, we feel kinda groggy, we stumble downstairs, get the coffee, hop in the shower, you get dressed before getting in the car to get that bread. And after you get that bread, you get more bread at McDonald's because you have an addiction and then you come home, usually pretty tired and you veg out and watch Netflix or whatever you do until you go to bed. This is what living life usually feels like to most people most of the time. Life in general is usually pretty normal. You do the things that you do everyday, you kinda have a routine or a pattern you stick to and life usually isn't super inspiring or mind-blowing, it's just sort of the day to day experience. But is there anything wrong with that? I mean, social media has us thinking that everyone's hanging out on yachts all the time, going on crazy adventures, trying out the 2,000 different bananas in southeast Asia and everyone's getting married to the person of their dreams, popping out the most beautiful babies. But that's not life, that's a highlight reel. And these highlights that we constantly absorb by the people we follow on Instagram or the movies we watch on Netflix, these highlights start to really influence the story we tell ourselves about our own lives. We start viewing our lives, at least our lives lived to it's fullest potential as a life with as many of these highlights in it as possible, so the days when these awesome, crazy things aren't happening, we view that as somehow suboptimal. Our amazing days become the expectation and our normal days become boring, like we're wasting our potential, we're wasting our lives away. But this story we tell ourselves, this adventure life, no one's life is like this, not Dwayne Johnson, not Elon Musk. Sure, these guys are doing some really cool, important things more often than we are but still the majority of their lives, they just sort of wake up, they do a bunch of things they don't wanna do, they're grinding it out, they're working hard, they're often really frustrated or stressed out. They still poop, they still have to eat. Most of their lives exist in this sort of day to day monotony. They're experiencing life in the exact same way that you are, except when Elon Musk is fantasizing about escaping the day to day grind and taking a vacation, instead of the Bahamas, he's thinking Mars. Assuming you get eight hours of sleep every night, which I'm sure you do, you only have about 16 hours to live because you only experience life one day at a time. That little section of time between lifting your head off the pillow and putting it back down again and all that stuff in between that seems kind of normal and kinda inconsequential, that's all life is, it's just that thing over and over and over again. And this can sound super depressing or super inspiring, depending on how you look at it. It can be depressing, obviously if you don't like those 16 hours, usually, a lot of us are slaves to our bad habits. We do things we don't want to do. We work jobs we don't really like and we're put in certain financial or social situations that we really don't like being in. So every single day, day after day is something we generally don't like doing. Which is why we fantasize about the future so much. We're still waiting to live our real lives and if this is all there is, then that's obviously super depressing. But there's a silver lining because changing your entire life isn't as big of a feat as you might think it is. Since life is lived in these little 16 hour little mini episodes, that's a very manageable amount of time to perfect. We can start to build habits that we actually enjoy doing and that are good for us and we can train ourselves to make choices that are actually aligned with our values and will help us be the person we want to be every single day. Because a good life is just a serious of good days, not necessarily days where everything went our way and nothing was difficult or stressful but days where our system was running. We gave life a good shot, we made choices that are aligned with our values and we did the little things that make us happy. Maybe that's having a good conversation with a friend or putting a little extra effort into cooking, so you eat something kinda memorable and that you're proud of, maybe that's developing one positive habit at a time so that the things that keep you grounded and happy and your mood elevated, start to become things that you do automatically. Viewing life on a micro scale like this also adds clarity to the little choices we make throughout the day. If you've always wanted to be a more social person, then that means saying yes to beers with the boys today, when you get the invitation. And if you're constantly fantasizing about being a more fit person, that means going to the gym today. Because your life is today, that's all it is. It's just today repeated. A big thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this article. One problem you might encounter when trying to start a new habit is that when you try to go from something like reading YouTube articles obsessively every single day to trying to replace that habit with reading a book, you're going from something that's super stimulating to something that's a lot slower paced and harder to do. So the transition can be pretty jarring and you might quit right away, unfortunately. A great way to counteract this problem is to take smaller steps, so go from something super stimulating, like reading articles to reading just better articles.Yeah, other than that, thank you for reading and we'll catch you in the next article.

Why your life is so boring

One of the most common problems I hear about nowadays. And I'm sure everyone else does is this feeling of being chronically tired Because sometimes it feels like no matter how much sleep you get you just can't seem to perk up, feel energetic for most of the day, every single day, so that you can tackle your day and your life with energy. You know, this lack of energy throughout the day, this chronic tiredness is something that you would expect to happen to you if you were like 60 years old, 70, 80 years old but it's happening to 20 and 30 year olds, 15 year olds young people who are supposed to have this youthful exuberance to them, but they find themselves operating in life with a sluggishness and dread. Believe me, I've been there. I've been there so many times in my life. So many times in fact, that it really caused me to dive deep and figure out what are the things that are actually going to contribute to me having more energy and how do I make those things happen every single day. And through all my research and self experimentation I've found out that the most important things are kind of the things that you hear all the time. Sleep, exercise, and diet. You might be tempted now to click away from this article because you already know this but that's exactly where I ran into problems. I was treating sleep, exercise and diet like a checklist. It's like, yeah, I get a reasonable amount of sleep. I exercise. I'm an athletic guy. Yeah, I eat food. So those things can't be the reason why I'm feeling sluggish. So I started looking for these like quick tips and maybe I was iron deficient or maybe I had a gluten sensitivity or maybe I needed to decalcify my pineal gland. I skipped over the fundamentals in search for some miracle pill that would make me less tired throughout the day. It wasn't until I revisited the basics and try to absolutely nail them that I realized that was the problem the whole time. Especially sleep. So in this article I wanna go over some things that I've implemented in my life that really has given me a lot more energy throughout the day on a consistent basis. And yeah, hopefully they work for you as well. Thing number one, I stopped misusing caffeine. Now caffeine is one of those weird ones. People think they know a lot about how caffeine works. You know, you've probably heard that caffeine lasts between five and seven hours. So, you know, don't drink too much caffeine in the afternoon, or you might not be able to fall asleep. But the weird thing about caffeine is that it lasts a lot longer than five to seven hours. The half-life of caffeine is five to seven hours. And half-life means that after five to seven hours half the caffeine is still in your system. And then it takes another five to seven hours after that for half of that amount of caffeine to leave your system. So if you have a cup of coffee at like 4:00 PM, which is, you know kind of late, but it's probably not gonna ruin your sleep or something like that. Think again, if you have coffee at 4:00 PM by 11:00 PM, there's a good chance that 50% of that caffeine is still in your system. That means by like 5:00 AM. There's a good chance that a quarter of the original 4:00 PM cup of coffee is still in your system. You know, deep into the night is when you're supposed to be having some of your deepest, most restorative sleep of your life. This is the kind of sleep that helps you form memories process the information you were bombarded with throughout the day, form connections form new ideas, so that you can be more creative. The kind of sleep that's supposed to be healing your muscle tissues, purging your body of adenosine so that you don't feel tired in the morning. There's a lot of important things that are going on while you're sleeping and your body being filled with this caffeine is seriously inhibiting those processes. So the simple tweak that I did that helped me not misuse caffeine is to just not drink caffeine past lunchtime. I have the one that I wake up with in the morning. And since I'm a little bit of a caffeine fiend, I have another one about two hours after that to really get my morning productivity the kind of meth head high that I'm looking for. I'll still get the caffeine crash late after lunch. I expect that, it's the kind of game you play. If you're a caffeine addict like me, but at least when I want to put my head on the pillow after a hard day's work I'm actually able to get the sleep that my body needs. So do not drink caffeine past 12:00 PM. Just don't do it. The other thing that I started implementing was I gave myself a lot more sleep opportunity. Everyone's heard that you need eight hours of sleep a night, but the truth is in order to sleep for that long, you probably need to be in bed for longer. I take about half an hour to 45 minutes to fall asleep every single night. So I need to be in bed half an hour or 45 minutes earlier than I'm planning on falling asleep. And that makes sure that I actually get the sleep that I need every single night. Because the benefits of a good night's sleep is something that's cumulative. You know, if you give yourself that much opportunity every single night, your amount of sleep baseline will go up over a long period of time. And you'll kind of work off your sleep debt. You'll work off your sleep deprivation that you've been chronically plagued with. All you need to do is give yourself more opportunity to sleep. The other thing that I did was I fixed my circadian rhythm. For those of you who don't know your circadian rhythm has sort of like this internal clock that tells your brain whether it's daytime or nighttime. When you should be given energy, and when you should slow down and get ready for bed. And a lot of your circadian rhythm is dictated by sunlight. How bright it is around you, how dark it is around you. Which is why you've heard that you shouldn't go on social media or on smartphones, or look at screens right before bed, which is very, very true. When you're looking at all this blue light, your brain thinks that it's daytime. So it's not giving you the melatonin that you need that your brain needs to know that it's like time to slow down and go to bed now. So one thing that's really helped me is to not look at screens right before I go to bed. And especially not in bed. That way my brain can actually start producing adequate melatonin. You know, I can start slowing down psychologically. And by the time my head hits the pillow during my little sleep opportunity window, I'm out like a light. The other thing I did to fix my circadian rhythms was I pinned a black blanket over my windows because I'm a barbarian with no sense of interior design. But what that did was when it's the earlier hours of the morning when I'm still sleeping, like 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, 7:00 AM. I still want it to be dark so I can still be deep in sleep. Getting as much high quality sleep as I can. Rather than having all this sun blasting in the window interrupting my hard earned slumber. So make your room darker so that for the time you're asleep your brain thinks it's nighttime and that you should be sleeping. And the last thing that I implemented to improve my sleep seems like a little quick fix. I don't know if this applies to you. But I was reading this book called Breath by James Nester. And he talked about the benefits of nasal breathing as opposed to mouth breathing. And I noticed that when I put my head on my pillow every night, my nose gets really congested. And I end up opting in the middle of the night to mouth breathing. And in the book he talks about how nasal breathing is a lot better for you. So anyways, if you can't breathe out of your nose at night fix that, I fixed it by using Breathe Right strips. This article is not sponsored by Breathe Right, but that's just what I did. And they work for me. I'll put a Amazon, actually, I'm not going to put an Amazon, like just type in Breathe Right strips. Okay, so let's talk about exercise. There is a fascinating link between your psychology and your physiology. It seems like what's good for the body is also good for the mind. It's the reason why power posing somehow, you know like you're like standing up and putting your hands on your hips or whatever, that kind of stuff increases testosterone. It's bizarre to think of it, but literally just power posing, feeling powerful lowers your cortisol, which is your stress hormone and increases your testosterone making you feel more confident and powerful. And you hear so many accounts of people who fix their posture which allowed them to go about the day with more confidence. It's like a chicken or the egg thing. They fixed their physiology which translated into benefits for their psychology. The only reason why I'm saying this is because one of the most effective ways that you can have more energy throughout the day is to move your body. - [Narrator] See how the hips act as a pivot. - You would think That if everyone had the same baseline energy to work with, that if you expend that energy by being active you'll have less energy throughout the day. But the exact opposite is true. People who regularly expend their energy having a higher baseline of energy to expend. - [Trainer] He's tight with the buttocks and slowly put the buttocks way back. - It's almost like there's a golden rule baked into the universe that says, "That which costeth energy, giveth energy." I should probably make a t-shirt with that. It wasn't long before Ernie began to feel the benefits of his regular exercise. - So you might be thinking, Joey, you're an active guy. You go to the gym, you play hockey. So that probably wasn't that big of a problem for you. Well, it turns out it was. I play hockey once or twice a in the evenings. And then I go to the gym for like half an hour to 45 minutes to do some heavy lifting three to four times a week. But I spend the rest of that time by and large sitting on my butt, editing articles, writing content, whatever. This sedentary lifestyle was draining my energy. So I made a simple tweak. Not only do I make sure I get out and take a walk every single day, I do something to get out of the house, get moving, but I also bought a standing desk. So I spend a large portion of my time when I'm being productive, standing up on my desk rather than sitting down. And this has that power posing effect. The fact that I'm standing up my body kind of learns that I'm more active and I'm somebody who stands up. So it's like here have more energy. So use this weird phenomenon to your advantage. Make sure that every single day you're getting up, out of your chair you're going for a walk. You know, a minute, every hour, three to five minutes every hour. If you're wanna be ambitious, get up from your chair, go for a walk, go do something. The energy benefits will come in droves. - [Singer] ♪ Take good care of yourself ♪ ♪ It's so easy ♪ - And now just briefly I'm actually not gonna talk about diet because I feel like I don't want to add to the noise. One thing I've learned is that it's really genetically dependent. If your ancestors were from a certain part of the universe Maybe a Paleo diet works better for you. Maybe you have a gluten sensitivity. By and large though, avoid packaged food, avoid sugar, drink enough water. You know, all these things. There's a million diets that you can look up on the internet. If you're putting a reasonable amount of effort into what you're putting into your body, and you're not taking care of your sleep or exercise, you'll probably still be sluggish. It's the combination of these three things, especially sleep, especially exercise with like a reasonable effort put into your diet. You'll have energy to work with. You know, you'll finally be somebody who is perky who has energy, who can, who can tackle their daily tasks and actually get things done without constantly feeling like somebody is just dragging you down, holding onto your shirt and just like covering your eyes all the time. I don't think that was a terrible analogy. I just want to give a big thank you to Audible for sponsoring this article. And I actually only made this article because I started reading the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker on Audible. It was just like a really fascinating book. Talking about the benefits of sleep, the complex mechanics that go on under the surface. You know, it talked about the mechanics of dreams which is some Christopher Nolan's stuff. And I'd highly recommend the Audible version specifically because the guy who's narrating it has just such a golden voice and you can listen to it as you're drifting off into slumber. And for those of you who don't know, Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audio books, ranging from best sellers to celebrity memoirs, to news, business and self-development. Every single month Audible sends you one credit, which you can spend on any audio book of your regardless of price. Audible members also get instant access to a bunch of news digests and guided meditation programs, which is also pretty cool. And by far, one of the most useful things about Audible is that if you cancel your membership for any reason at any time, you still keep your entire library of audio books, including the books that you got for free using their credit system. So to sign up for your free 30 day trial, either click the link in the description below, or text "betterideas" to 500 500. Once again, to sign up for your free 30 day trial click the link in the description below or texts "betterideas" to 500-500. Thanks so much for reading guys. As usual, if you liked this article, make sure you hit like, because the algorithm does it's magic. It works its magic. And it actually recommends my article depending on how many likes it gets and how many comments it gets. If you're lurking here and you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit subscribe because there's just, there's more of this where this came from.

Why you're always tired

Today, I want to talk about the power of learning English through collocations. Now, a collocation is simply two or more words that go together in a natural way. For example, when you compare do and make, we say things like "do a good job", "to do a good job", "he did a great job yesterday". Whereas, we "make a phone call", "make a phone call". And I imagine that, when you have learned this difference before, a teacher or a book might have explained the rules between when to use do and when to use make. But, in many cases, we can't explain when we use make and when we use do, by rules. Instead, it just is what it is. We say "he did a great job", we "make a phone call". It's just the way it is. And, again, these can't be explained by rules. Now, learning collocations and storing them in your memory means that you'll be able to speak more naturally, and you'll be able to speak more fluently, too. Because native speakers grew up internalizing collocations. They heard these word combinations over and over and over again. So, it just seems natural for them to say "did a great job" or "make a phone call". And, instead of thinking about grammar rules, when native speakers talk they just use this stored knowledge, and it just feels right to use collocations in the right way. So, before we look at some more examples of collocations, my first tip is just to get lots of input. And I talked about this in a recent article called "The Power of Input". Now, after this lesson, I want you to watch that, but the idea is that, as you see lots of sentences in English, you're going to store these in your memory and be able to use them naturally when speaking. And the same is true of collocations. The more collocations you see, the more collocations you listen to when listening to podcasts, or read when you're reading books, the more you'll just be able to use them naturally and fluently, and you won't have to think about this too much. So, read lots of English and listen to lots of English. But, you could also be more specific with this by focusing on collocations. And I think this is a really good thing to do, if you want to sound more natural when speaking English. So, look up common collocations. Find examples of these collocations. And also find collocations that are going to be specific to you. What I mean by this is, if you love speaking about football or soccer in everyday English, then learn collocations that are specific to this subject. Learn things like football team, football stadium, score a goal, make a save, own goal, second half, first half, final whistle. In fact, before we go on, let's just have a little test. All I want you to do is to complete the sentence. I haven't something a goal in a long time. I haven't something a goal in a long time. I haven't scored a goal in a long time. You might hear people say, "I haven't made a goal in a long time." And, when somebody says this to me, I more or less understand what they're trying to say, but to sound more natural you say "score a goal", instead of "made a goal". And, again, learning these collocations are going to help you sound more natural when speaking. Over the coming weeks and months, I'm going to make lessons which give you common collocations related to different topics. So, what I want you to do is to let me know which topics you want me to cover. And you can also learn collocations by taking a word and learning the collocations with that word. For example, have. There are many collocations that use the word have. Have a good time, this is a really good one to know. Have a good time, have a great trip, have a fantastic meal. You can also have a word with somebody, which means to talk to them about something specific, usually something that is bothering them. So, I need to have a word with you about this. You can also have a think, to have a think. I need to have a think about it, I need to take my time. I need to take my time and have a think about this situation. Now, you can learn collocations on your own by looking up common collocations in English. Because, instead of trying to think what is right to say, you will feel what is right to say, and it will just come out naturally and instantly without you having to translate word for word. And, in fact, translating word for word doesn't work well when it comes to natural English. Instead, you should look at common collocations in English and translate that collocation into something similar in your own language. Or just know the definition and internalize this just in English. And, if you have enjoyed this lesson, if you have found it useful, share it with your friends or somebody who you think will find it useful. And while you're here, why not read another article of mine. Just click one of these articles here and continue learning with me. Thank you for reading.

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