These last few days have given you, I am sure, some extra time to watch a few shows online or on TV. Now the question is, are you watching them in English?

If you are reading this, it is most likely that you are keen on improving your English skills and are looking for ways to help you do it quickly. I am sorry to say that there is no “immediate” way to learn English but there is so much you can do to improve. One of the most recommended steps is to speak, speak, speak, but I know that is easier said than done.

The next step you can take is to watch all those fabulous series and movies in original version. I know you think it is exhausting and for some even impossible, but I guarantee you that if you get into the habit of watching everything in English, it will get a lot easier. Think of it kinda like the gym. The more consistent you are and the more frequently you go, the easier and perhaps even more fun it becomes. Same here…

So, here are a few steps to help you get started and things you can do to help you learn while watching. But above all, remember to relax! Have fun and sit back:

First of all, be aware of active and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary are words or expressions that you are familiar with and easily understand or even better, are already in your dialogue when speaking English. These are phrases you do not need to worry about when listening to English.

Passive vocabulary are words you might be familiar with (or not) but rarely use or are not sure how to. This can happen simply because you do not have the opportunity to use English as frequently.

Second, be an active listener when watching something in English. Have a pen and paper near you and take note of words and phrases you are attracted to or not familiar with. But Don’t sweat it! Take a few notes and try learning them but do not take down more than 5 to 7 words/phrases. This should be out of curiosity and not pressure.Then make sure you say these words out loud for at least a week. Memorize them, practice them, play with them!

Third, if absolutely necessary, use subtitles, but in English only! Start making that change now. Even if it is difficult, I guarantee you that if you keep trying, you will eventually catch on and be able to understand more and more each time.

Fourth, choose the right material to watch. News and soap operas are the easiest to watch. Comedies and sitcoms are the most challenging due to the slang and collocations used so pick something adequate for your level and interests.

Join a speaking club! That can either be a book club, movie club, whatever your interest is and start putting those skills to work. You will start seeing a considerable difference and at least more confidence in what you watch and read.

If you are interested in setting up a club, feel free to contact me and we can get you started!

Finally, if you want an added challenge, try a podcast. There are some great resources out there today to learn both English and lots of other fun facts.

Shows to watch:

Best Netflix TV shows to watch in 2020

10 Best movies to learn English with

The best shows on Netflix to learn English (both British and American)

My favorite Podcasts:

Hidden Brain (American)

Modern Love (American) Did you know Amazon Prime has a series out on this podcast and it is incredible!

Desert Island Discs (British)

Meditative Story (American)

PHOTO SOURCE: Image Magazine

Tomorrow is the last day to RSVP for Cleaning up your act | Living a more sustainable, healthier life led by Anna Bezubka on Thursday, March 28 from 19.00-20.30h.

Join us for some fascinating conversation, new vocabulary and the know-how on being kinder to our Earth. The round table is open to all levels and we will provide you with snacks and drinks. Newsletter information linked

We hope to see you there!

NEXT UP: Cleaning up your act | Living a more sustainable life) with Anna Bezubka Thursday, March 28, 2019 from 19.00-20.30h

Eating Your Way Through Words | Food Vocabulary with Caroline Bagnara

*DATE CHANGE: Thursday, April 25, 2019 from 19.15-20.45h

“Learning never exhausts the mind” – Leonardo da Vinci

*Due to some unforeseen events, we have rescheduled the next round table with Caroline Bagnara to April 25 and May 16. Please take note and keep in mind you have time to sign up to some of our fun round tables but don’t wait too long…time is ticking and we would love to see you and you friends there!

Next up is Anna who will be teaching us how to live a healthier more sustainable life, just in time for Earth Day! Here’s Anna:

“Zero-waste. Eco-friendly. Sustainable.

Do these key words keep coming up in your Google searches and during your conversations with friends? Don’t want your grandchildren to move to Mars? Save our planet while you still can! A brain-storming and ideas-sharing session on how to live a greener, more eco-friendly and more sustainable life. Exchange your ideas and get inspired by actions of others.”

Please RSVP by Wednesday, March 20th

And don’t forget our future events:

Saturday, April 6, 2019, 10am-12.00h: “Meandering through art” led by Rosemary Grieve (Visiting a museum and practicing your English skills in description)

Thursday, April 25, 2019, 19.15h-20.45h: PART I: “Eating your way through words” led by Caroline Bagnara (Learning Essential Food Vocabulary)

Thursday, May 9, 2019, 19.00-20.30h: “Setting yourself up for success” led by Heidi Schmidt (the importance of setting goals and challenges)

Thursday, May 16, 2019, 19.00h-20.30h: PART II: “Eating your way through words” led by Caroline Bagnara (visiting Santa Catarina Market and practicing your vocabulary skills)

Start reserving your favorite activities, invite a friend and we will keep you informed! Each course has a cost of 30€ per person and will include snacks and beverages

As the summer comes to a swift close and the temperatures begin to drop, I want to offer you one last scoop of rose ice cream to welcome you back to work, new challenges and perhaps even new resolutions to finish off the year. I have always thought of September as being an excellent month to take on new hobbies, learn something new or get to work on those New Year resolutions you set up for yourselves at the beginning of the year.

And so in ode to loving and hating certain routines or new intentions, I thought we could look at some idioms on how to express your likes or dislikes. Here we go!

To express likes you can say: “I’m crazy about it!” which is equivalent to “I love it!”

EXAMPLE: I’m crazy about this new series. Have you seen it?

“It’s right up my alley (or street).” is equivalent to “The kinda thing I like.”

 EXAMPLE: Sushi for dinner is right up my alley.

“I dig it!” is equivalent to “I like it!”

 EXAMPLE: I really dig this new music group.

To express dislikes you can say: “It doesn’t float my boat.” which is equal to “I don’t like it”  EXAMPLE: Meeting at 8am doesn’t float my boat.

“It’s not my cup of tea.” is also equal to “I don’t like it.”

EXAMPLE: Having to present in front of a large crowd is definitely not my cup of tea.

“I can’t stand it” is equivalent to “I really hate it” or the Spanish version of “No lo soporto!”

EXAMPLE: I can’t stand people who interrupt others when they are speaking.

“I can’t bear it” is similar to disliking something so much you almost can’t accept it.

EXAMPLE: I can’t bear having to start all over again.

And there you have it. A colorful way of sharing your likes or dislikes on something. We hope this makes starting a new term just a little easier. And if you still have not signed up to our classes, what are you waiting for? We can’t stand knowing you could quickly start improving your level but haven’t done anything about it yet!

PHOTO SOURCE

Artist: Brigitte Cazenave

On this rainy cold day, when warmer weather seems distant and bouts of the flu are sprouting everywhere, I thought we could talk about something comforting as we patiently wait for longer sunnier days.

With Spring on the horizon, I wanted to talk about an interesting blog post I read recently in regards to slowing things down and taking in our surroundings. Basically, to live in the present and enjoy the now…Not an easy task when we are running around from place to place, is it? But maybe, 2018 is a great year to try and re-focus and take pleasure in the small things in life. You might have heard of mindfulness and meditation. If you haven’t here are a few links to get you informed:

https://www.mindful.org/mindfulness-how-to-do-it/

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/mindfulness/?

In essence, mindfulness is being aware of yourself and your surroundings. Of soaking up or absorbing our sensations and learning how to view experiences through an easier or at least calmer perspective. This is not anything new or revolutionary. Artists and philosophers have been doing it for centuries, but in this fast paced world in which loneliness is now officially an epidemic and with a Minister of Loneliness in the UK, maybe we need to step back and take pleasure in the smaller things in life.

So, what are thin slices of joy? According to Chade-Meng Tan, they are small little pleasures throughout the day that make us feel, better, happier and it doesn’t take much to do it.

Usually these events are unremarkable: a bite of food, the sensation of stepping from a hot room to an air-conditioned room, the moment of connection in receiving a text from an old friend. Although they last two or three seconds, the moments add up, and the more you notice joy, the more you will experience joy, Tan argues. “Thin slices of joy occur in life everywhere… and once you start noticing it, something happens, you find it’s always there. Joy becomes something you can count on.” 

Remember the French movie Amelie? When she sticks her hand in a bag of dried beans and gets pleasure out of it? Those are thin slices of joy…

So, which are your thin slices of joy? Do you celebrate them daily?

And since we are talking about the present, I thought we would do some practice exercises on the use of the present simple & present continuous. Good Luck!

Present Simple and Continuous: https://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/simpre-prepro

It has been well over 6 months since I have been able to share interesting posts with you and I am happy to announce we are back and extremely happy to be here once again. Since last Winter, much has changed and as I welcomed our baby boy to the world, I also welcomed new thoughts on how we work, learn and grow. I am conscious or aware that the seeds I plant now will be so essential for the future of our little one and the example I set as a working adult will be for him to follow as he grows. Therefore, as Spring came and went and we begin to quickly invite Summer I have given thought to who we are when we work, when we learn, age and evolve. I know,  a bit deep for coming back suddenly, but hey, why not?

This post is dedicated to making us think about the pleasures of being necessary and ourselves at the same time, making those weekends stretch longer and longer and being productive…

One of my all time favorite writers, Toni Morrison, recently wrote on defining the person you are and the work you do. Two separate entities which we sometimes forget. Especially in today’s age when our work weighs so much on us as well as on our identity and we can inevitably lose the definition of who we really are and as a result, that fine line of leaving work behind when we are done with work becomes blurry (not focused). After speaking with her father as a child about work and being unhappy, her father responded the following:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

Morrison ends the article with the following: “I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.”

If you want to read the full article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are

What do you think? Do you feel defined, confined or reassured by your work?

On a sweeter note, did you know you can make your weekend feel longer?? Yep, 48 hours can stretch just a little further…here is how (think new): http://nymag.com/scienceofus/article/how-to-make-the-weekend-last-longer.html

And finally, how to keep your sanity if you work alone…this is for all you freelancers or anyone who feels trapped in front of their computer on a daily basis! http://jkglei.com/freelance-sanity/

What are your thoughts? What do you do to make your working life happier?

Photo Source

Last week we had a wonderful round table session on motivators at work and on projects. Marina gave us some interesting information on how to analyze what motivates us most at work and what makes us lose interest. Did you know money is not everything? Do you agree?

Here is more information on moving motivators

She had us rate or scale our motivators above from 1 to 10. 1 being the most important and 10 the least important. It was fascinating to see what we each chose as important and non-important. She then explained what each of these motivators could mean in our professional world.

Afterwards, we related these motivators to Maslow’s human hierarchy of needs. Remember those?

We decided where each motivator fell within the triangle and how they were relevant…It really was a fabulous session.

So, how do your motivators rate? Are you currently motivated at work or do you need to restructure your own motivation?

Thank you Marina for an insightful session!

Maslow’s Photo Source

Let’s talk about eloquence on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in October. Sentence structure and sharing our ideas clearly is so important in any language, but we know how tricky it can be to get those words into the right order when studying a new language. There really is no exception to the rule when speaking about word order in English, so the good news is that once you learn the rule, you will not make mistakes!

In Jason Kottke’s article, inspired by Mark Forsyth’s book The Elements of Eloquence Jason states, “…adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”

While the Cambridge dictionary gives us a slightly different order: Opinion, Size, Quality, Shape, Age, Colour, Origin, Material, Type and Purpose, Noun. 

In other words, for a native speaker, this order is intuitive and learned. We know exactly how to construct the sentence, but we wouldn’t know how to tell you what order those words should be in. It’s the typical comment, “that’s just the way it is…” but in all truth, there is an actual order to it.

So, why don’t we try? Put the following words into the correct order:

1. table, a, square, wooden, big:

2. the,cup, tiny, plastic, blue, expensive

3. black, small, box, Turkish, old, a

Want more practice? Check out these links: 

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/adjectives/order-adjectives

http://perso.wanadoo.es/autoenglish/gr.adwo.p.htm

http://www.learnenglishfeelgood.com/esl_adjectiveorder4.html

And an exercise on word order in general: https://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/word-order/exercises?02

Finally, a lovely poem on word order by Alexandra Teague:

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed 
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South 
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when 

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order 
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering 

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard, 
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread 
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade 

is essential to bread . He copied this down, but 
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost  before 
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English 
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part 

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color. 
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding 

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal. 
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years 
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.

Photo Source

Post Insipired by: http://cupofjo.com/2016/09/grammar-rule/