English With Michael



Please note that there are probably a few mistakes in the transcripts. There is a lot of text to look through and its very time consuming. You can use it as a guide to practise your English but I can’t promise that everything is perfect. If you have any questions you’re welcome to ask me.00:01Oh, I've really got my work cut out for me today. This is a very common English expression and the meaning is not so easy to guess. If you have your work cut out for you, what do you think that means? I'll tell you the meaning and a little bit about the history of this phrase at the end of the podcast, so don't forget to stick around and I'll tell you the answer.00:31hello and welcome to the English with Michael podcast. The best place to come to study English as a second language as well as to practice the British accent with me. Michael Lavers as your teacher. Hello English learners. Welcome to the English with Michael podcast. Welcome back. If you've listened before or if it's your first time, welcome. It's really good to have you here. I hope you stick around for a while and have some fun.01:05So today we're going to be looking at a very important topic. I think I always say that it's not always important, I guess. I think this is important. This is related to motivation and it's a misconception. It's a complaint that I often hear about English and today we're going to be looking at the idea that English is really, really hard to learn, but I'm going to tell you why that's wrong, why it's not actually hard to learn. Now I do want to mention before I start talking about that, that I'm not saying it's easy. Learning any language is a difficult longterm process. If you are struggling, that's completely normal. I think everyone's struggle is when they learn the language. So don't feel bad about it. Don't feel discouraged, keep trying. What I want to talk about today is maybe making you feel better because thinking negatively about something can actually affect your outputs.02:18So if you constantly think, Oh, English is so hard, it's so difficult, I'm never going to succeed, then that will affect how much progress you can make. And I'll give you an example of this later on with one of my friends actually. So I think I got this question a while ago on Instagram. Someone asked me, why is English so hard to learn? And that question makes me a little bit uncomfortable. And I was trying to think about why, and I think it's maybe not something specific to English. I think learning any language is quite a difficult task. One reason why English might be challenging for you is because you don't have sufficient, that means good enough motivations. If you want to really improve your motivation and your reason to learn English, then I recommend sticking around and to episode 32 so it's going to be next month I'm going to do an episode about motivation.03:23So that'll be a very useful one to look at. But I'm not gonna talk about that too much now. But for today, I've got seven reasons why English isn't so hard. There are many, many lists on the internet telling you why English is so difficult, but I'm going to be positive today. I'm going to talk about why it's not that hard. So let's get right into number one on this list. So unlike many European languages, the nouns don't have genders. If you're learning from a European country or a country with a European language, this is a really, really big thing. As an English speaker learning French for example, or maybe Spanish. It's so difficult because I have to remember is it LA or LA or EL? There's so many different possibilities. And from my point of view, I don't understand why, you know a bicycle needs to be masculine or feminine. But in English you don't need to worry about that. So you can just say the bike, the computer, the person, everything is the same. So that's very nice and simple. So when you think English is so difficult, it could be much worse. It could be much worse.04:48the second reason why is that isn't so much conjugation. Conjugation is when we change the form of the verb, four different tenses or something like that. So for example, we have go, went and gone. So this would be present, simple past simple and pass participial go, went, gone. So there are three words to remember. You know, this is an irregular one cause we don't say "goed", we say "went" for past tense. So that is an irregular past tense. So it's a little bit to remember. But regardless of the tents, the subjects is always the same. I went, I go, I have gone. So there's always I, and generally it's the same with different pronouns as well. I went, she went, he went, they went. So the pronoun changes, but went is always the same. The only time it changes is when it's a present simple, a base form verb like go. And obviously we would say she goes, not she go, but that's much easier than languages say like Spanish or Portuguese. Although I don't speak these languages, I'm pretty sure with different pronouns, the word itself will change. So again, there is much less conjugation to remember. One more quick example, one that I actually know a little bit more about is Japanese for example. So I think Japanese conjugation is incredibly hard in my opinion. Let's look at the English version. So if we say go in Japan, that would be 行く. So it's very similar. They're both very short and simple.06:47If we say in English, I had to go, I had to go. It's still fairly short. It's four syllables. I had to go. And actually even without the pronoun, without I, without the subject had to go just three syllables. It's so simple. Right? So it's past tense and have to, you have no choice. In Japanese, this is how it would sound. Something like this anyway, excuse my bad accent. It would be 行かなければならなかった. so that really long sentence means had to go. So you can see how easy English is compared to Japanese in this case. So that's just one more example. Another reason why I think it is fairly easy. Reason number free is that the tense is don't really matter. So hear me out on this one. It depends on the situation. So in some cases you don't even need to know the tense to be honest.07:56For example, we have future perfect tense. This is one of the hardest ones. So this would be, for example, I will have been there 20 times, you know I will have done, will have been, for example, we don't really need to use future perfect tense. Future simple is just fine. There is a small difference between, I will have been there and I will go. For example, we could say, I will wait for two hours or I will have waited for two hours. There's a small difference, but the meaning that you're giving across is basically the same. So even if you never ever learn future, perfect tense, people will always understand, you know, of course it's still good to learn it if you can. It's really good tense to learn. But I would probably say you don't need it to misunderstandings. And even the more basic tendencies. Even if you say, tomorrow I go to work, that's very simple, right? You could also say, yesterday I go to work. Now this is not correct because of course we should say went, went for past tense, but it's still very understandable09:19if you make a little grammar mistake like that yesterday, I do something. People will always understand you and no one will judge you. So don't be afraid to make mistakes if you want to be understood. Tenses and not so important. Tense is only important when you want to advance and sound more natural. So that's my controversial reason number three reason than before, fairly simple one. And that is that many English nouns and verbs are the same, although sometimes with a little bit of a pronunciation difference. So one example would be produce, which is often used to talk about maybe things that are made or things that are grown. So we talk about fresh produce as in vegetables or fruits. So I'm going to the shop to buy produce. If we use it as a verb, we just say produce. The stress is a little bit different, but it's the same word.10:19So I produce produce. Of course that can have problems on its own. But generally I would say it makes it easier because you only have to remember one word. And even in nouns where you may not think they have a verb. For example, bike, bike, can mean bicycle or motorbike, you might know. We would say I ride my bike, but did you know bike can also be a verb. So I could say I biked to work as past tense two bike, I biked to work. So even if you don't know the correct verb, like right, you can just sometimes even use the noun. Another one is a flag. So if you watch my YouTube videos, you will know I have lots of flags in the background behind me. That flag can also be a verbs. If you flag someone's attention, it's kind of like you're waving a flag. You want to get their attention, you're waving a flag. So I flagged the policeman to come and help me. So you can talk about many different things with only one word. So that's another hopefully quite easy thing for you.11:36If you have ever learned a language like Chinese or maybe you are Chinese and it's your native language, you might realise the English has a very tiny alphabet. Unlike Chinese where you have to learn thousands of characters, English, there's just 26. How easy is that and the actual sounds that you make in English? I think there are only 44 sounds, so it's not so many sounds to make. So compared to many languages. That's quite an easy thing to. My sick reason was also the cognates cognates. So a cognate is a word that languages having common that comes from a similar origin. So, for example, I Googled a list of Spanish and English cognates. So these are words, maybe they come from Latin or some kind of other older language and that basically the same in both languages. And for example, these are like chocolate bar, what else have we got?12:37Alcohol, sentimental, celebration, compensation, generic. There are so many words that are basically the same in his languages. So if you come from a European country, you probably already know at least 20% of the English language, maybe even more. In fact, I have some younger students and even though their English is fairly basic cause they're still learning in school, they know some really, really long and difficult words. They might look, no one's like pollution or simplification or concentration. And these are fairly difficult words in English, but even beginners in some European countries will know these words. So that's quite easy to finally, something that many people might overlook is one of the most popular languages in the world. And because of that, there's so much free content out there. This podcast is just one example of the endless, endless things you can do to practice your English online in books with people.13:48English is everywhere you look, I'm sure no matter where you live in the world, English is not far away. For some, that might be quite annoying. Maybe you don't want to see English everywhere, but probably this is a good thing because it's a really good way to practice. In the past, when I was learning Cantonese, this was a big problem for me because it's not such a popular language to learn, so it's really, really hard to find content online, especially free content is not so easy, but as an English learner, you have so many options available to choose from, so never forget that there's a lot you could do to study and improve. As I said at the beginning, the reason I'm telling you all these things is not to make you feel bad. It's not to make you feel like you're doing something wrong if you're struggling, because as I said, that is completely normal.14:47The reason I'm telling you this is because the way you think about affects your progress. So I'll give you an example with a friend who I went to school with and this was when we were a bit younger. So if you're listening now, friend, I'm not talking about you now, I'm talking about in the past. So before we had an exam at school, a test, he would always say, Oh, I'm gonna fail. I'm definitely gonna fail. And guess what? He usually failed and the same went for sports and anything, anything else in his life, he always said he was going to fail. And that's usually what happened. And I really believe that mindset is everything. If you think English is difficult, it will feel difficult. If you're positive and you think about how it could be much worse than actually is enjoyable and it can be fun and motivating, then you're much more likely to succeed.15:49The single thing that I notice in all of my advanced students is that they love English. They have developed it into a passion. It's not just something they need and they feel bad about studying. They have really developed that passion for English, so if you can do the same and you can think positively, I know that you can succeed. Okay. That's the end of my motivational speech. I hope it was motivational. As always, I love to hear what you think, so feel free to get in touch. You can email me at info at or just go to my website, go to my website. The show notes for this episode will be hard very simple. Leave a comment, have a look at the notes for this episode and everything I've mentioned today will be written up there, so wherever you are, I hope you have a good day. Thank you for listening and I'll see you next week. Goodbye.17:04you have been listening to the English with Michael podcast to view the podcast notes for this episode and to listen to previous episodes. Head over to podcast17:29At the beginning of the show I gave you the phrase you've got your work cut out for you. Now did you guess what this meant?17:41This is an expression used when you have a lot of work to do, when you're going to be doing something really, really difficult, and you've got so much work, you've really got your work cut out for you. The origin of this actually comes from tailors. So a tailor is someone who designs and repairs and makes items of clothing. So when they have their work cut out, literally cut out, that means they had a lot of projects that were going to be happening that day. These days we don't have so many tailors anymore and not in the UK anyway, but we can use it for any situations. So right now I'm going to edit this podcast. I've really got my work cut out for me. Wish me luck. ................
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