You’ve heard of Tinder, right?
It’s a dating app and it’s very popular.
(At least until some teenager invents a better way to stare at your phone.)
Is your shirt on or off?
The Mr Vig Method
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When I was a kid I wanted to be black belt in karate.
So I signed up for lessons.
Live English – Don’t Study It!
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Book or shoes?
When I first moved to Prague I saw there were two types of people on the metro.
The Two Big Language School Lies
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My new student walked in to my apartment and sat down on the couch.
She looked confused.
10x Your English In 8 Steps
On Thursday, Pavla’s boss told her she will have to go to Munich and give a presentation…
In English!
Fix Your Speaking Mistakes With The Echo Technique
Prague 2005.
February.
A Monday morning.
How A Bookstore Can Make Your English Better…Or Worse
Greetings from the US!
I went home to Virginia for the holidays this year.
And while visiting my sister, I decided to check out a local book store.
Of course, I went right to the language section.
What did I find?
The same boring grammar books and lists of idioms I see students in Europe reading!
If you know my blog, then you know that one of the basic ideas I teach is that you should run away from anything boring.
And run away fast.
Because boredom is the enemy of learning and remembering.
We pay attention to what’s interesting and forget and avoid whatever is boring.
And if you choose a boring book – like A Dictionary of American Idioms (zzzzzz) – that’s a bad idea because you’ll quickly become bored, you’ll stop reading, and your English will get worse.
So what’s the solution?
Every bookstore sells books which can improve your English vocabulary.
Just reading one of these books will help you learn and remember useful, native speaker vocabulary.
But these books are not in the language section…
Where are they?
They’re everywhere else!
They’re fiction books… biography… humour… personal growth… fantasy… yoga for mothers…
In fact, any book that’s not in the language section!
Why?
Because although reading is one of the best ways to improve your English vocabulary…
(According to one research study, adults learned 45 words from reading just one short novel. *)
It MUST be something you’re interested in.
If it’s not, then you’ll become bored, stop reading, and your English will get worse.
Make sense?
Good!
Two Book Recommendations From My Sister
Because I stayed with my sister and her family last week, and because she’s a school teacher, and because your reading should also be easy, I asked her to recommend some books.
These are her top two choices for easy reading:
Little House On The Prairie
One of my sister’s favorite books. All her kids read it, and I read it too when I was little. (I liked it, but I think it’s more of a girl’s book.)
It’s the true story about a girl who moves with her family to the American frontier (out west) before there were railroads or electricity.
The TV show based on the book was something my family watched every week.
Old Yeller
This one, I remember, I liked more. It’s definitely a boy’s story.
In the 1860s, when Europe still had kings and queens, a boy and his dog hunt in the wilderness of Texas.
Happy reading!
*Saragi, U., P. Nation, and G. Meister. 1978. Vocabulary learning and reading. System 6: 70-78
The 1,700 English Words Every Business Owner Needs
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(NOTE: The link for the words is at the bottom of the article. Or click here to get them now.)
How many words are in the English language?
The answer: a lot!
171,476, to be exact.
(At least that’s the number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
And that’s a little depressing for any non-native speaker who wants to improve his or her vocabulary.
But here’s the good news.
You don’t need to know all those words.
You don’t even need to know half…
or 25%…
or 10%…
If you want to read about business, talk about business, and do business in English, you only need to know less than 3% of the English vocabulary to understand 97% of business communication.
How is that possible?
A Strange Fact About Native Speakers
Native speakers like to repeat themselves.
We say the same words over and over again.
When it comes to choosing our words, we’re all vocab environmentalists recycling our words.
So while this is how most people think of the English language:
In fact, it’s more like this:
And it’s the same in the business world.
A Recent Discovery
Earlier this year, a team of English language researchers in Japan discovered that if you know only 2,144 English words you can understand 92% of conversation.
And an additional 1,700 business words will buy you 97% understanding.*
But…they have to be the right words.
Here’s the story:
The researchers took a lot of business magazines…
They took a lot of business books…
They took a lot of business newspapers and websites…
(And by “a lot” I mean 64 million words in total.)
And they dumped all these business words into a blender.
(Or maybe it was a computer…)
And they asked the question:
“What are the words that rise to the top?”
They wanted to know the most common…the most frequent…the most valuable words for business in the English language today.
The Answer
A list of the only English words a businessman or woman could ever need.
Researches call them “frequency lists.”
But I call them “super words.”
Ready to find out how many you know?
Click here to get you Super Business Word Checklist.
*https://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/
Image of The Economist by Lynette taken from Flickr, under Creative Commons licence.
Image of The Effective Executive from Harper Collins.
Why You Don’t Use All Your Words: The Empty Refrigerator Effect
“I know more words… I just don’t use them.”
Jan was a student who had been learning English for years.
For more than two decades, in fact. Since he was a kid in school.
When he met me he already knew a few thousand words.
But he wasn’t satisfied.
Because he still had problems when he spoke.
It was difficult to find the right words. And he used the same words again and again.
It’s one of the most common complaints I hear from students.
What I told him is the same I’m about to tell you.
And it made Jan feel a lot better…
Vocab Secret #144
Everyone knows more words than they use.
Me.
You.
The Queen.
Everyone.
The average English natives speaker knows 20,000 words* but only uses a few thousand every day.
On average, the difference between the words we use and the words we know is 1/3.**
And that’s also true for your native language and every language you’ll learn.
Feel better?
Well, don’t get too comfortable.
Because the problem still exists: how do you use more words in conversation?
The Empty Refrigerator Effect
This is my refrigerator in Prague.
Not very exciting.
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I eat out a lot.
And when I do cook, my meals are simple.
Sunday morning, for example: scrambled eggs and toast.
It takes about five ingredients to make.
empty refrigerator = simple meals
But now let’s travel over to the US, to my sister’s home, and look inside her refrigerator.
Every day she has to feed four kids and a husband.
So there’s a lot of food in there. And in the freezer. And in the freezer in the basement. And in the food pantry.
And, no surprise, the meals at her house are much bigger: there are main dishes and side dishes and sometimes appetizers and desserts.
full refrigerator = large meals
Fill Your Refrigerator
And it’s the same with your vocabulary.
Just like if you have more food, you’ll cook more food…
If you know more words, you’ll use more words.
You won’t use all the words you know, just like you never cook all the food in your refrigerator…
But when you have more words in your head, you’ll use more in conversation.
A brain full of words = easy conversation, jealous colleagues, international customers, a private jet with a champagne jacuzzi, fame, honour, glory…
The Business Strategy That Will Improve Your English
Ever heard of the 80/20 rule?
If you haven’t get ready.
This simple idea has changed lives, transformed businesses and it can improve your English faster than ever.
The Story Of The 80 /20 Rule
About 100 years ago, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto was studying public records in England when he found something interesting:
80% of the nation’s wealth was owned by just 20% of the population.
“That’s strange,” he thought. “So unbalanced. Something must be wrong.”
So he looked at older recorders. A hundred years ago…two hundred…
But he kept discovering the same 80/20 ratio.
He still thought something must be wrong, so he travelled to other cities in Europe to look at their statistics.
But wherever he travelled he found the same two numbers.
Then he started seeing this ratio wherever he looked.
- 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people.
- And in his garden, 20% of the pea plants produced 80% of the peas.
It seemed to be a universal principal.
One of the hidden laws of the universe…
Interesting.
But when businesses discovered it…
Valuable!
80/20 Enters Business
In the 1950s the Romanian-American engineer Joseph Juran tried to teach 80/20 thinking to American businesses.
But they weren’t interested.
So he went to Japan.
The Japanese listened, applied it, and quickly caught up with the West.
Now American business was interested.
Here’s one example from IBM.
In 1963 they discovered that 80% of their computers’ processing time came from just 20% of the code. So rather than focus on improving all the code as they had before, now they focused on improving just the code which was used the most. The result was their software became faster than their competitors’ and they kept their top spot on the market.
And now it’s a common principle taught in business schools.
What This Means For Your Business
Have we met?
Probably not.
But here are some things I know about your business:
- 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your customers.
- 20% of your salesmen make 80% of your sales.
- 80% of your problems come from 20% of your projects.
- 80% of your complaints come from 20% of your customers.
- 20% of employees cause 80% of the problems.
When you realize this you stop aiming for 100%.
You stop selling to customers who rarely buy.
You stop training employees who don’t produce results.
You stop making products that few customers want.
Instead, you spend your time, money and energy on finding, optimizing and pleasing the 20%.
This is 80/20 in action in a smart business.
And you can do the same with English.
80/20 For English
Here’s how most English students think about vocabulary:
But this is wrong.
Words — like your customers — are not equal.
Some are much more valuable than others.
Here’s a more accurate way of looking at words:
Although the Oxford English Dictionary has 171,476 Words….
80/20 tells us that we don’t need all those words.
In fact, some English words are so valuable that 80/20 isn’t even accurate.
It’s closer to 90/1.
In 2014 researchers in Japan entered 273 million English words into a computer. Words from books, magazines, conversations… and they asked the computer to tell them which words were the most common.
What they discovered was that when native speakers talk they use the same few words over and over again.
And if you know these few words, you can do amazing things; like understand 90% of English conversation, which is less than 1% of all English words (0.03 per cent, to be exact).
The exact number is 2,144.
Linguists call them “high-frequency words.”
I call them “Super Words.”
So what does a smart, strategic English student who doesn’t want to waste time focus on first?
The super words, of course.
Here’s How To Get Your Super Words Checklist And 80/20 Your English
Ready to start using the 80/20 rule to improve your English?
Ready to find out how many super words you know?
1) download my checklist here.
2) print it out.
3) check/tick any word which
- You’ve never seen before
- You don’t know how to explain or use in a sentence
Ready to start?
