Miscellaneous

This week in
Vitamin V…

We’re talking about what you should do in a conversation.

And… what you should not do. Read More >

Yesterday I told you I made a discovery in 2006 – two years after I started teaching.

I told you how some of my students made a little progress…

While others made A LOT of progress. Read More >

February 2006.

U Sudu pub, Prague 1.

Have you been there? Read More >

 

When I was a kid I wanted to be black belt in karate.

So I signed up for lessons.

Got my yellow belt.

And then quit.

Oh well.

Like a lot of 11 year-olds, when I discovered it was hard work I chose to ride my bike with my friends instead.

Anyway, my point here is that everyone in karate or kung fu or tae kwon do knows you first get your white belt. And much later you get your black belt.

You learn to punch before you learn to kick

And you learn to stand before you learn to jump.

There’s an order.

There are steps

Logical. Makes sense. Sequential.

And… it’s the same with a foreign language.

But most students are skipping steps.

They’re jumping to the last steps or they’re starting in the middle.

And they have problems with speaking and understanding and they don’t know why.

THIS IS STEP NUMBER ONE

If you already have basic grammar and basic vocab, this is the step I give my private students first

It gives them the fastests results in the shortest amount of time.

It’s easy. They do it in their free time. And it only takes a few minutes a day.

And it makes everything else you do in English much, much easier.

So what is it?

Vocabulary.

But not just any words.

Specific words.

 

A New Discovery

Do you know how many words are in the English language?

English has the largest vocabulary of any language.

171,476 words are in the Oxford English dictionary.

And that's a depressing number for an English student.

But here’s the good news: you don’t need to know them all.

In fact, you don’t need to know half.

You don’t even need to know 10%.

If you want to understand native speaker conversation you only need to know 0.8%.

That’s just 2,144 words.

How Is That Possible?

Native speakers like to repeat themselves.

It’s true.

Even native speakers who went to college and have big vocabularies and interesting things to talk about.

We say the same few words again...

And again.

And again.

In fact, we love these words so much, 90% of our conversation is just these words.

These 2,144 words are 90% of the words I use, the words the Queen uses, and the words your customer from Manchester uses.

And if you understand 90% that’s good enough.

It’s not perfect but it’s enough to understand and to communicate. (I have British friends and sometimes I think I understand less than 90% of what they say!)

These are what I call “super words.”

So would you like to learn a short list of English vocabulary words and understand 90% of English?

…90% of TV

……. 90% of film

……… And 90% of native speaker conversation?

Good!

There’s just one problem…

The Super Word Story

People have been counting words for a long time.

And when the computer was invented, suddenly word lists became big.

In fact, some were huge!

20,000 words…

100,000 words…

But an English student doesn’t need all those words.

He or she just needs the most important.

What we call the “high frequency words.”

That’s why an English teacher named Michael West decided to make a simple list just for English students.

It’s called the General Service List and it contains only the 2,000 most useful words in English.

But there’s just one other problem…

West published his vocabulary list in 1953 (he started making it in the ‘30s).

And as you know, a lot of things – and conversations – have changed since then.

For example, in his list you can find a lot of words about farming and religion.

Which, of course, could be very useful if you’re looking for a job on an Amish farm.

But for the average English student living in the 21st century, the list wasn’t ideal.

Until…

And Then... The Discovery

Finally, in 2014 a new group of English teachers made a new vocabulary list.

And this time they made some improvements:

• More Accurate: 200+ million words analyzed with computers
• Modern Words: Sources are recent conversation transcripts and modern TV shows, films, and magazines.
• For Conversation: Other word lists are 90% written English. This list focuses mainly on spoken English.

And then… they made it even better!

How can you improve a list of words?

Good question.

Somehow they found a way to make it shorter.

In June 2016 they released a new version that has 24% fewer words; and with this list you can still understand the same 90% of TV, film and conversation.

Not bad.

Here's How To Get Your Super Words Checklist

Ready to find out how many super words you know?

1) download my Super Word Checklist here.

2) print it out.

3) check/tick any word which

1. You’ve never seen before
2. You don’t know how to explain or use in a sentence

Ready to start?

Click here to download your copy.

 

 

 

 

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

 

(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.

 

 

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

1. You’ve never seen before
2. You don’t know how to explain or use in a sentence

Ready to start?

Click here to download your copy.

 

Reading is one of the best methods for improving your vocabulary.

The same is true for watching TV.

But…like with anything, there’s a right way and a wrong way.

Here’s one lesson I learned from a student.

The Wrong Way

“I bought the DVD box set of ‘Friends'”

My student and I were talking about what TV shows he could watch to increase his English input.

“Great,” I said. “How many have you watched?”

“Just one episode,” he said.

“Why just one?”

“Because I don’t like ‘Friends’.”

“Well, what do you like?”

“‘Sex and the City’.”

“So why did you buy the “Friends” box set?”

“Because my last teacher told me “Friends” was a good show for improving your English.”

Oof! Can you see his mistake?

 

The Difference Between Interesting And Compelling

For my student, “Friends” was interesting.

But “Sex and the City” was compelling.

Interesting is a clever advertisement on the side of the highway you glance at for a second.

Compelling is car accident that you slow down to stare at because you have to look at it, even though you know you shouldn’t.

Interesting you’ll look at once.

Maybe.

Compelling you have to watch every day.

The articles in text books are interesting.

The news story about the actress whose dress fell off while she was walking onto the stage at the Oscars is compelling.

For me, it was the TV show “Lost.”

I would put on an episode an hour before my bed time, then at the end of the episode I would convince myself that it wasn’t that late and I could watch just one more.

And then at the end of the second episode, I convinced myself that I could sleep later in the morning.

And pretty soon it way past my bedtime and the next day I was exhausted, but I did it again the next night, and the next (until I got so lost in the story I stopped caring).

It was like I was addicted.

Addicted To English?

When I meet someone who’s fluent in English, I often ask them how they learned. Very rarely do they tell me about the CAE exam or a business English text book or how many vocab words they memorized.

Usually they tell me about something compelling they found, which also happened to be in English.

My Puerto Rican friend Leslie told me she started reading the “Sweet Valley High” books when she was a teenager.

My Dutch friend Niki told me she found some comic books that were only in English.

My Turkish friend Cenk told me he started watching “The Simpsons.”

What if you found something compelling in English?

What if it was so compelling it was like a drug and you had to watch it or read it or listen to it?

What if you became addicted to it?

How fast do you think your English would improve?

 

Image of farmer by Annelogue taken from Flickr, under Creative Commons licence.

 

“Where’s Trutnov?” I asked.

One of my Czech friends was trying to tell me but she was having problems. She confessed – a little embarrassed – that she always confuses the English words for “east” and “west.”

And she didn’t know why.

A couple weeks later, while I was building my own vocabulary by reviewing my Czech flashcards, I noticed I was mixing up the words for “push” and “pull.”

And I didn’t know why.

But then…I found out!

The answer… interference theory!

And yes, it’s as boring as it sounds. If you have trouble sleeping at night, you can read some academic papers written about it.

But let me save you the pain and suffering.

INTERFERENCE THEORY: when you learn two or more words at the same time, and the words are related (ex. types of metals, names of trees, a list of phrasal verbs for movement, etc.), your brain doesn’t like it and will make you feel stupid when you try to remember them.

Advertisers have known this for a long time. They know that if you see a commercial for a Skoda and then immediately after it a commercial for a Fiat, you’re less likely to remember which had the new brake system and which had the new heated seats. So instead, Fiat chooses to play their commercial after the latest “Fast and Furious” movie trailer.