How to Study a Language: Maximize the Benefits of Your Course in a Creative Way | Kristina | Skillshare
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How to Study a Language: Maximize the Benefits of Your Course in a Creative Way

teacher avatar Kristina, Join me on iTalki for online lessons! :)

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Hello and Welcome - Introduction

      2:08

    • 2.

      Here's How - Class Project

      3:38

    • 3.

      Doing Homework

      5:57

    • 4.

      Using Audio Recordings Creatively

      4:25

    • 5.

      Using Texts Creatively

      4:40

    • 6.

      Using One-sentence Exercises Creatively

      3:08

    • 7.

      Learning Vocabulary Creatively

      4:54

    • 8.

      Making the Most Out of Your Sessions

      5:00

    • 9.

      Practicing Speaking

      8:00

    • 10.

      Common Mistakes

      7:55

    • 11.

      Knowing Whether You Really Know Something

      3:25

    • 12.

      BONUS - Drills

      2:51

    • 13.

      Recap and Project

      2:08

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About This Class

This class helps you make better use of the resources you already have – course or online course, coursebook (or other learning materials) to make progress more effectively. These are all pieces of advice from a teacher!

 

WHO IS THIS CLASS FOR?

It is for anyone who is planning to or is learning a language now – on that note, please bear in mind that I am an English and Serbian teacher, and I´m familiar with several European languages so I´ll teach this class with those languages in mind. My class may also be useful for people learning Asian or African languages, but I really can’t guarantee this class will be 100% applicable in those cases.

 

WHAT DOES THIS CLASS OFFER?

I have designed this class specifically to help people learn on their own and maximize everything that their courses and coursebooks offer. After completing this class, you will be equipped with a set of simple, yet extremely effective techniques on how to learn vocabulary, reading, speaking, and avoid common mistakes.

 

WHAT YOU NEED:

What everyone needs to start this course is a pen or pencil and several sheets of paper to catch notes! Additionally, you may also need access to a printer so that you can print the project template at the end of the course. Alternatively, you can draw the template on your own.

Meet Your Teacher

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Kristina

Join me on iTalki for online lessons! :)

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Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Hello and Welcome - Introduction: Hello, I'm Christina. And today I'll be teaching you how you can utilize the language learning materials that you already have in new ways. This will allow you to expand your abilities and get the most out of your course. Students often like learning opportunity. That is the chance to practice all the things that they're course offers. I am here to offer practical solutions to your real problems and not to teach theory behind it. I've been a professional language teacher and tutor of English and Serbian. For over six years. I've been teaching online and in person to individuals and groups of people aged anywhere between three and 93. I want to use my experience and observations to your benefit so that you can make quick progress in language learning. I've designed this class for all people who are not sure how to study. They may have all the materials and use them in class, but have no idea what to do with them at home. It's also for those who have no problems studying but simply want more challenges in extra opportunities. Finally, old current and prospective language learners are welcome because I really believe that anyone can get inspired by techniques and ideas that are presented here. The majority of my tips are useful for levels from beginner to upper intermediate. Advanced learners may also find some ideas interesting, but I think they will benefit the least because advanced learners are typically aware of the things that I'm presenting here. And they usually don't need this type of content. In this course, you learn how to use your homework course, eBook and audio materials to improve all language skills, from reading to speaking from vocabulary to grammar. I'll also teach you how you can avoid common learner mistakes, and at the end you'll be equipped with all the practical skills that you need in order to make quick progress in your language journey. In the next lesson, we'll talk about the project and what to expect from this class in more detail. 2. Here's How - Class Project: in this lesson, we'll talk about what supplies you need for this class, how to make a project at the end of the class. And finally, I'll tell you about your take away. You don't need anything more than a pencil and a sheet of paper to catch notes. After class, you can decide if you want to print my poster template or make your own from scratch. The poster you'll make should serve as a reminder of what you've learned. Here. You can decide on the size if you want to have it lay on top of your desk. Letter size or a four is enough. But if he wants to put it on your wall, you may want to print it in a larger format, which would take two letter size or to a four pieces of paper that you can attach together again. Your alternative is to find a single large sheet of paper and draw the whole thing yourself . I'll explain the project in more detail at the end of the class. Let me remind you again, the main part of the project is to listen to instructions and advice carefully and catch notes. I recommend writing as much as you can, just make sure that those notes are meaningful, right? Everything that's new to you, intriguing or inspiring, you'll use those notes to fill in the poster. This is what the template poster looks like. My idea is that you fill it out with their own notes and thoughts. In the resources section. You'll find some examples of how I feel this out just to give you an idea. Here's what you'll learn. You will learn how to process what you see on a course book page and understand that there are numerous learning opportunities in each page that most students failed to see. You will learn how to use the materials you already own and extract heaps of value. For example, you'll learn that articles from your book aren't just simple reading exercises that your grammar exercises can be used for more than one grammar point and that listening materials air Absolutely not. For just one listening exercise, you will learn how to do your homework appropriately. It's not just something you rushed through before the next listen, but an important step in learning. I'll show you what exact steps to take so that you can actually learn from your homework. You will get some tips on how to get more out of your listens and how to improve the communication in your classroom. I will also give you plenty of tips on how to practice your speaking and vocabulary. You will learn about common mistakes a lot of students make and how to turn them to your advantage. I will also show you how to be sure when you have learned something, and at the very end you'll get a bonus chapter on how to create drill exercises, which are very easy and quick to make. To recap, you'll learn how to use your materials, including the course book and exercises in it and audio materials to expend your language learning. You'll get some tips on how to do homework to maximize the benefits. I'll advise you how to avoid making common learner mistakes and how to practice speaking and expand vocabulary. You'll learn a bit about human knowledge and how to be sure you know something, and finally, I'll make some drill exercises to illustrate how you can practice extra for your project. It is important to catch notes and at the end, you'll get to make your own poster based on my template. In the next lesson, we'll talk about how to do homework in a way that allows maximum benefit. 3. Doing Homework: in this lesson, we're going to talk about doing your homework. What I'll tell you here can also apply to any exercise sheets you're using for practice. If this chapter raised your eyebrows, let me tell you this. In my opinion, most students don't approach homework correctly. There's a lot more to homework than people think. What is the most common situation? The teacher assigns homework. Students take it home or download it. They feel out the exercises, and some will do them just before the next lesson. And that's it. In class. They may discuss it briefly, or the teacher may check and return it. And students glance at how much red there is in the page, not even thinking about what they got wrong and why. This makes homework a sheer formality, something you don't want but have to do. Here's what I recommend for the best results. Make a blank copy of your tasks, print out or copy all your homework assignments and make sure that you have one blank copy of each assignment. Over time, you'll accumulate a lot of exercises every third or fourth month, you can take the pile and start doing all your homework again. You will already have the answer key from your previous homework correction, and you will see how easy some exercise are, which is a proof that you made progress. And that's a boosting confidence right there. And you will also see which areas you need to work on more if you got them wrong. And finally, you will do some exercises correctly. But you may have to think about your answer for some time. This also means you should go back and review those points. Don't ignore such vocabulary and grammar just because you did complete the exercises correctly. Your knowledge is on the verge of being forgotten, and you probably wouldn't be able to use them in your speaking. So make sure that you check them out. And remember this. All of your mistakes are important, and all of them are a chance to learn something. The next step is do your homework on a day when you don't have a class. Let's say that you have language lessons twice a week and that they are on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You should do your homework on Wednesdays and Saturdays. This way you'll have 16 occasions a month when you will be dealing with your course. That's an average every other day visiting grammar and vocabulary, which is a lot more chances for your brain to consolidate knowledge and learn rather than forget, review the last unit. First, make sure you know all the words and all grammar points from your previous unit, and you can even go back to older units if you feel the need for that. Reviewing means that after that you'll be able to understand and use grammar and vocabulary readily. Then start doing your homework. Make a rule. Don't check any rules or words while you're doing your homework. This rule will help you take reviewing seriously so you'll be more prepared for homework. When you finish your homework, take some time to check it out and read it out loud. This way, you'll find any silly mistakes and practice reading and pronunciation after you've checked it and being pointed examples about which you are unsure, you can open the book and look for any grammar rules that you may need in order to correct your homework. Look for any new and unusual constructions or expressions. Unusual here means something that's unfamiliar to you or something that you personally would never remember to use. Sometimes you'll find a sentence with a very specific expression or construction. It may be something really simple, but it's worthy of your attention because you never know when you may need to use such an expression. Don't just focus on what your task was about. For example, just circle A B or C and consider your done. Pay attention to those interesting bits of language because they can and reach your knowledge. You can write them somewhere and keep them right by hand as much as possible. This helps with their spelling, but also with learning. I know many people avoided at all costs, but writing by hand can help you absorb knowledge better, especially if you're a visual learner. That is, You remember by seeing things typing and correction software are just hurting your progress . Here's an anecdote. At my university, there were several really good English language students who kept failing a simple spelling test over and over. I couldn't understand this at first, but then I learned that they were all tech savvy, which meant that they almost never wrote anything by hand, and the old type, their assignments, which finally led them to not being able to write even basic chords properly. Some people will do all of these tips naturally, whereas some do only a few or even none. Although I would love to see you do all of them, I'll only encourage you to see what works best for you and try to do those points only for the beginning. So in this lesson we talked about how to do your homework for the best results, and those points are. Keep an additional blank copy of your homework on the side to revisit later. Do your homework and exercises on days when you don't have a class review first before starting homework. Then check it carefully and read out loud. Pay attention to new expressions and save them and finally write by hand. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to use audio materials to extract the most out of them. 4. Using Audio Recordings Creatively: in this lesson, we're going to list out some exercises that you can have with your audio materials. Most course books come with a CD or downloadable audio's. Here's how you can use your course book Audio's Listen to the audio outside of your listen , don't listen in events. Just play those recordings that you've already covered in class, catch notes and then summarize what you've just listened to in as many details as possible . Yes, talk to yourself as if you were preparing a presentation. Alternatively, you can write a few paragraphs practice in direct speech if you're level and the type of audio allows that say things like Jamie said that he had gone to Japan. Whatever the dialogue is about, you can turn everything into indirect speech. Describe the situation instead of saying what you hear people say describe the situation they're in. Here's an example. There's a TV crew in the street and they're interviewing pedestrians. We can hear cars worrying and beeping in the background. It's a business city. The first woman they stopped was in a hurry, and she sounded rather stressed. She wasn't polite. Use the recording as a dictation stop and replay the recording as often as necessary, sentence by sentence and right exactly what you hear Paying attention to spelling inter function and capitalization. Play sentence by sentence and repeat after them. Pay attention to how they pronounce sounds, word, stress and intonation. Some words, Air stressed that is louder than others. Somewhere it sounds differently when they're not stressed. He can sound like eat in English questions in many languages and in a rising tone. So be mindful of those things. I'm giving you examples in English, but I'm sure you can find such things in the language you are learning now. We're not done with audios because they're also transcript. Almost all textbooks have encountered have transcripts of all the recordings at the end of the book. If you have them, make use of them, play the recording and follow the text. This can help you. If listening is your weak point, read the text out loud. Some transcripts are surprisingly long, especially for the intermediate or advanced level. Have a drama class pretend that you are the person or the people who speak in the audio, read the text and be as expressive as possible. Get into the role Acting can help you relax and start speaking better. And if you have a learning buddy, you can do this together. In fact, that would be the best. But if not, you can still practice in front of the mirror. Find your expressions and words, and by new I also mean those that you personally wouldn't use. Writing them down and using them in your writing can expand your vocabulary. Record yourself reading and check your reading by comparing it to the audio. This is great if you want to imitate how native speakers talk, and if your goal is to sound just like them. You can do a lot of these exercises with online resources and podcasts in your target language as well as with films. So in this lesson, we talked about additional ways that you can use audio recordings outside of class to improve several language skills. Repetition isn't bad. You can use one single audio over and over with completely different goals and every time achieve new results while using the same grammar and vocabulary in new ways. We talked about listening to catch notes and summarize practice in direct speech, describing the situation Do the dictation and repeat sentence by sentence. As for transcripts, you can use them to simply listen and read along, read out loud, used them for acting and extracting interesting expressions. And finally, you can record yourself reading and then play. The recording for comparison in the next lesson will cover ways in which you can use texts and articles in different ways. 5. Using Texts Creatively: in this lesson will discuss how to use the text in your course book in different ways. Read the text silently and then read it out loud. It may seem obvious, but some people do need these reminder. Read the text several times over the course of several weeks. Repetition will only help you record yourself reading. Sometimes we're unaware of how we sound. Listening to our own voice can help us correct some of our drawbacks. Challenge yourself to read the text perfectly well. No hesitation comes just fluently and correctly play with ratings peed practice reading really slowly, pronouncing every word clearly and practice reading really fast but still try to be understandable. Slow rating will help you slow yourself down if you're impatient and it will help you understand what distress fast rating can seem like a real tongue twister. But it's good because you will be able to say those hard things quickly. And the more you practice it, the better you'll be. Search for interesting expressions. Would you use them? Would you use those words to express that same idea? It can be a simple as per position use. He's interested in music. Maybe you've seen these sentence many times but have never stopped and thought about it. So you keep saying he's interested for music or something else right down the whole sentence, or just the verb with proposition. If you are on a higher level, you may notice more complex constructions and word ordering long sentences, etcetera. I've noticed that many students have the correct expressions right in front of them, but just can't seem to shake off their old habits. This is because they understand the meaning behind it. And don't bother focusing on those expressions because they believe they know them. These things that we overlook tends to be our long term problems. Can you produce a text like that? If you ask? Do so. Write your own text on the same topic? If not, why not? You have all the words and grammar so you can start with simple rephrasing and later right to text similar to one in your book. I've had beginners read a 300 word description or an article, but when I asked them to write something themselves, they say they can't. This means there reading skill is more developed than their writing skills, but the situation changes. If I assign a small writing task to them more frequently, they soon improved a lot. So don't avoid writing within the familiar topics and vocabulary. If your unit was all about traveling, tried to write about your trips and places you've visited or places that you would like to visit. For example, play with tenses if the text is in the present. Simple changes to past symbol or future. Simple. Think about all the things that you need to change other than verbs, such as replacing the word yesterday with tomorrow. Take a few random sentences and make questions or turn them negative. Be sure to have grammar rules with you so that you do this correctly, summarized the text By speaking or writing, you don't have to use the exact same words. Use synonyms and pay attention to your grammar. So in this lesson we went through some ways in which you can use your texts to improve your grammar vocabulary and your thoughts in the target language. They include reading silently and out loud, recording yourself, challenging yourself to read perfectly very rating speed, looking for interesting expressions, producing a similar text, changing the tense making sentences negative or turning them to questions and summarizing by speaking or writing. If you are a total beginner, you may want to focus on correct reading and making sentences negative. And if you're more advanced, you may wants to practice more summarizing. In the next lesson, we'll see how you can use the what I call one sentence exercises in new ways. 6. Using One-sentence Exercises Creatively: in this lesson, we'll talk about how to extract the maximum from exercises that have several one sentence tasks. This is the type of exercise you most often see. They may want you to fill in the blanks, turn sentences negative. So when you see a sentence like I like dogs, you turn it to I don't like dogs or they may require you to make questions, for example. Now I'll quickly give you the tips, and then I'll show you how to do it on actual course book exercises. So this is how you can use them to serve several additional purposes. If there are questions, you can answer them writing or out loud. You can put sentences in singular or plural, make them affirmative or negative. Change tents. See if you can use them as a topic for speaking and writing. Now let's take a look at some examples. First, let's feel this simple exercise where your task is to make sentences in negative. You may do this in class and simply turn them negative, but you can also do other things with these sentences, such as make questions I often call my sister. You can ask who do you often call? Do you often call your sister or you can make it plural? We often call our sisters. If you change tense, you can say I often called my sister. I used to call my sister. Often. I will call my sister often. You can also try and make a short speech on one or all of these sentences. That is topics. Let's look at sentence for here. You could talk about how and why you want a new phone. What brand? How you choose a new device. Are you tech savvy, etcetera? Here's another similar exercise. This one is with questions, and it's a typical filling the gaps. After you complete the task, you can go ahead and answer them. You can do so directly in a few words. Let's take question five. Why are you studying English? You can say I'm studying English because of my in laws, and then you can elaborate it. For example. My husband's family is from Melbourne, and I want to be able to communicate with them. Last year he had to translate everything for me, and I felt embarrassed. So I promised myself that and so on. In one of the next lessons. We'll talk about how to be able to speak for a long time. So don't worry if you think that this speaking part is too hard for you right now. So in this lesson, we talked about how to use exercises with single sentences and expand them. You can answer questions, make sentences singular or plural, make them affirmative negative, or return them to questions, change tents and use them as topics for speaking and writing. In the next lesson, we'll talk about learning vocabulary. 7. Learning Vocabulary Creatively: in this lesson, we're covering different ways in which you can learn vocabulary. All the chapters that we mentioned so far offer help with vocabulary doing homework with special attention. All of the audio recording and reading exercises mean that you will be using the relevant vocabulary over and over. Using words and contacts is probably the best way to go. Still. Here are some other ways in which you can learn vocabulary from your unit. Keep a dictionary. I mainly recommend this to those who are on an intermediate level or higher. Beginners learn so many new words that a dictionary would quickly become too big and basically pointless. I think that for them, a normal notebook conserve a perfect purpose for keeping new words. Her general recommendation is to not right every single word you learn just the important ones when keeping a dictionary right. The word. A note on pronunciation. It may be using the standard pronunciation symbols or just pointing out the stress of the word. Any extra info like part of a speech, irregular plural gender and meaning, right. The word in a meaningful sentence if you're right, the sky was overcast. It isn't as useful as the sky was overcast, so we expected rain. The second sentence bears more meaning and reminds you off what your word represents. Write the words in your native language and translate them quickly out loud. I will give you an example with five Serbian words. Serbian is my native language, and let's say that the language I'm learning right now is English. My task is to quickly say table chair, book bag, phone. This is how you can practice saying new words quickly and readily. I don't recommend writing words in your target language, which is to say, if you're learning English, don't write English words and translate them into your native language. The reason for this is that when you write in the language that you're learning, you're able to see the words so your knowledge could remain on the level of recognition so right in your native language and translate into your target language. Make mind maps, mind maps, help us jot down our associations. You can simply begin with one word and expense to whatever it associates you with. You can either let your mind Rome and see how far you can go with ideas Or you can decide to stick to a limited vocabulary, for example, something that you've just studied like nature related words or family words. Flashcards are simple reminders of single words and meanings. You can write the word on one side and the meaning on the other. You can also make sets of flashcards with 3 to 5 words in each and use them as a warm up exercise before you can actually start studying and doing your homework. Finally, you can make separate piles, one with words that are completely new to you or you're not sure about their meaning and the other with all the words that you know perfectly well and can use quickly. Please remember that you should consider a word learned on Lee when you can use it readily with zero hesitation. If you need to think for a bit before seeing the meaning, that's okay, because that's one stage in learning. But make sure to revisit the word many times until you no longer have to stop and think. Let's look at this example. We have a student, a in a student, B, and they both learned five new words. A has gone over his vocabulary until he knew it perfectly well, whereas be stopped making an effort when he got to the point that he could recognize them easily. And he thinks that's good enough. Now they start speaking, and let's say that what they're talking about contains all five of those new words. The person A will be able to make a sentence quite fluently, while the Person B will have to stop five times to try and remember the meaning. So don't sabotage yourself. Learn your words responsibly. So in this lesson we talked about learning vocabulary and the importance of repeating. We mentioned five things you can do. Keep a dictionary right. Meaningful sentences translate quickly and make mind maps and flash cards. And we also said that a word is well learned Onley when you're ready to use it with no hesitation. In the next lesson, we'll talk about how to get more benefit from the language sessions with your teacher 8. Making the Most Out of Your Sessions: in this lesson, we're going to talk about how to get the most out of the sessions with your teacher by session. I'm in class or any way that you meet or communicate with your teacher. Maybe a consultation, Skype meeting or regular lessening the classroom. Write down your questions beforehand and throughout the lesson, we have all seen the any questions silence scenario. But it's almost impossible for you not to have at least one question at least remotely related to class. Jot down any questions that came up while we were doing homework or reviewing the units in class. You can ask your teacher either at the beginning or at the end. Write down the answers as well, especially if you get a new, elaborate answer. It's better to write them down and to rely on your memory. If you're one of those people who just never ask any questions, challenge yourself to ask at least one question in each session. After some rocky time, you'll relax and become more active and interested in class. Beat your shyness. Classroom is the place to practice. Not being shy. Try to speak as much as you can. If it's hard for you. Practice speaking alone outside of class, and you'll likely be less shy and more prepared in class. We'll talk about how to practice speaking alone in the next lesson. The better prepared you are, that is, the more you practice alone, the more you're likely to speak. Finally, when you beat your shyness in the small, safe area, such as a classroom, you will be much more open in real life with other people. Ask the teacher to slow the pace if you need it. I think we all know what it feels like to be behind with what's going on. How can you add new content onto something you haven't learned well yet, asking to slow down or go back and revisit something is easier when you have one on one lessons. However, if you are in a small group, you can talk to the other students first and see how they're doing. Maybe they would also like to review some difficult points. You don't know until you ask. Alternatively, you can ask the teacher to have a lesson dedicated Onley to practicing the weak points where all students can give a suggestion. Allow some time for the teacher to prepare for that lesson, and then you will have a review only session in which everyone's a winner again. This is just a new idea from a teacher. It doesn't mean it's applicable in your case. I personally love when my students tell me what they need, and I enjoy finding your ways to help them insist that you get more speaking opportunity. Some teachers will already offer this, and they're usually seen as demanding and strict, but they're not. That's the whole point of your lessons, however. Sometimes it's really hard to give everyone a chance to speak. Or maybe your teacher plans lessons so that teacher talking time is over 50% of the class. In this case, you can ask your teacher kindly if he or she would dedicate a larger portion of each class to speaking. Just remember not to feel too entitled and boss your teacher around. But if you notice that you've had several lessons without saying more than a few words, you should communicate with them and try to solve this problem. I personally think that communication with your teacher is important. If this is possible, tell your teacher when you have more free time for learning so he or she can plan to give you more assignments or challenging tasks, but also tell them if you're going through a rough period so that they can advise you what to do. I've seen adults coming into the classroom extremely shy and withdrawn just because they didn't have the time to study. And I've also seen them all going with confidence when they know everything well, I don't want you to get withdrawn or unconfident just because life's being a bit too hard on you. Your teacher is a person who is there to help you and work together with you. So in this lesson, we've covered some ways in which you can increase your take away from your classes. They mainly mean having good communication with the fellow students and the teacher. Ask questions frequently. This habit will help you become more mentally present in class. Do your best to beat the shyness. Feel free to ask the teacher for slight changes if you really need them, like changing the pace or getting to speak more, but also make sure that you are the one who participates actively by asking questions and speaking as much as possible. Finally, tell your teacher if you have extra time for learning, but also if you can't catch up because of other things. In the next lesson, I'll try to help you to improve your speaking. 9. Practicing Speaking: in this lesson, we're going to talk about speaking and how to organize your ideas. You can find speaking topics everywhere in your course book. Every text recording and exercise can be a good start. You just have to know what to look for in sections about recordings and textual materials. I mentioned some ways in which you can improve speaking just a reminder. You can listen to an audio or read an article and then summarize what you've just heard or read. You can also describe the situation or focus on describing actors in those materials. You can also use a text and turn it into a speaking exercise. Let's say you're reading about Tokyo. Pay attention to grammar, sentence construction and vocabulary. Use that information to describe a different city. It can be a big city, your town or a village just to make a contrast. Now speak in present simple and see what your city has or doesn't have Next. Depending on your level, you can write several questions based on your materials. Beginners may right. Where is the church where as intermediate students may right? What do you think about the fact that there aren't as many cinemas now, as there were 20 years ago, right, three or four questions and then answer them. Beginners will have simpler answers, but upper beginners and intermediate students will be able to prepare a short presentation . Talk for 1 to 3 minutes or more. Feel free to challenge yourself and Onley Speak on that topic. Here's a common problem. Many of you don't know what to say. To be able to speak for a longer time, you need to learn how to organize your thoughts. If you practice asking yourself questions, you can improve your speaking a lot. Imagine this scenario. Two people are talking. One person likes golf and the other doesn't. One says. I played golf yesterday. The other may say, Oh, or just nod and kill the conversation instead. There's a lot of things he could ask. How long did you play? Where did you play? I know nothing about golf. Can you please tell me about it? All these can spark a nice conversation. Your thoughts should be like a good conversation. Practicing can help you develop inner questions. Answering them will get you a nice speaking exercise. Let's take the city text, for example, ask yourself several questions, I think. What would you like to know about someone? City. If you knew nothing about it, you may ask, How big is it? Is it a capital? What's the climate like? Is it crowded? Are there many tourists? Then judge down. Just one or two words is starting points and then, based on these, you can start giving your presentation. Now you have a lot of things to say. Here's my example Speech. Based on what we have here, my city is quite big. It's not the capital, but it is the second largest city in the country. I like the weather in spring and fall because even though it can be rainy, I enjoy it, and most of the time it is warm and sunny. Winters and summers are the times when I wish I was away because winters tend to be freezing, whereas summers courting hot. It is crowd E, especially in the public transport and in the city centre. I've noticed a lot of tourists recently. It seems that my city is getting increasingly popular with foreigners. I'm not sure why, but it may be because we have good food and fun festivals. You've noticed. I've added extra information here, and I could go on like this because I've internalized those important questions that allow me to speak for a long time. It is not easy to do this exercise at first, and that's why I recommend writing questions to help you. With time. You'll get used to them and even internalize them, and you'll simply know what to say. Just for now. They're helping you organize your thoughts when you need to organize more complex thoughts such as opinions. Be sure to think of strong arguments to support what you're saying and also include opposing arguments that you can refute. For example, if you want to speak about bad sides of living in the city, you can say many argue that it's better to live in the city than in the countryside because of the easy access to universities, cultural centers and health care institutions. However, I believe that a person who lives in the countryside won't need health care services, often because these people don't have sedentary lifestyles and eat healthy home grown food . That's one way you can use opposing arguments to prove your point. It's also a good idea to talk about the same topic more than once. The first time you speak about something, your voice, maybe shaky. You may have to think looking for the right words, etcetera. But the second time, maybe days later, when you speak on the same topic, it will be much easier the third time. You may expand your thoughts and use more complex sentences as you gain confidence. I've seen people in someone line schools where they had a different teacher almost every lesson. That's just the way some of the online schools work. They had to make introduction about themselves quite often. Almost all of them had an introduction that was fluent and well spoken. If I asked them full up questions about their jobs or personal life, they would also be excellent. Then, as soon as we went to another topic, they weren't able to see much. The difference was huge. This is because they spoke on those same topics many times before, and when they got into an unknown situation there, English just went down. I'm not talking about vocabulary, only I'm talking about sentence structure, fluency and pronunciation. This is why it's a good idea to use your course book, in which every new unit is an entirely new topic to speak as much as possible in all different topics, so that you can activate your knowledge in order to be able to speak about different aspects of reality. Being able to organize your thoughts like this in your target language will help you kill that translation process, which is a problem to so many people. So in this lesson, I reminded you that you can use recordings and text for descriptions in summary. And we learned a bit about how to use texts to produce similar content. How to organize your thoughts through questions as well as that. It's important to speak on different topics over and over. Even native speakers revisit the same topics all the time. So how can you improve if all you had was 15 minute activity? In one lesson talking about how you feel about the current political situation, for example, it's just not enough. The more you speak, the more your target language will cling to your brain, and the more topics you cover, the more you'll be confident with what you're speaking about. The perfect case scenario would be if you had a friend who you could talk to in real life or online. But if that's impossible, you can still practice speaking successfully through talking to yourself and learning how to shape your own thoughts. In the next lesson will be looking at some of the most common mistakes that many students tend to make when they learn a new language. 11. Knowing Whether You Really Know Something: in this lesson, we're covering a few points about active and passive knowledge and how to know if something is well learned without being misled by your own assumptions, your knowledge can be active or passive. Active knowledge is everything you can use readily all the vocabulary and grammar that use naturally in speaking or writing. Passive knowledge includes all the things that you can read or hear and understand, but would probably never use. Sometimes we think that we don't know how to say something at all. But if we encounter that expression in an article, we'll understand it because we've seen it many times. This is also passive knowledge. It's important to distinguish between the two because that gives us opportunity to improve . Think about your past language lesson. A recent one or a really old one. Will you be able to talk about that topic using all the vocabulary and grammar with confidence? If the answer is no, that's your opportunity to improve. Those are areas that you should work on. Improvement isn't about how far you've got in the course, but how well you can handle every single thing you have already gone through. Most of us need to activate the knowledge that we already have. We can do this by doing lots of drills, writing and speaking basically all the things that we've already talked about. What should you consider well learned a word that you can recognize when you see it. No recognition is the first step in the process of learning. At the same time, that's one step away from forgetting it. Some people think that recognizing equals knowing, and they get disappointed when they find themselves forgetting. You can think of a word or a Ruelas well learned on Lee when you can use it correctly quickly and with zero hesitation. Don't take this advice as a scary thing that you're mean Teacher wants you to do. This is just a frame you should be thinking in if you have seen a word many times but have never really looked it up, and they're not 100% sure what it exactly means. Don't say to yourself that you know it. Sure, we all have some words that we don't know and don't really care about learning if it's not in our field of interest and that's completely fine. I'm just trying to teach you not to close the doors in your mind. Keep them open for learning. So as long as you can to use a new word as your own word, don't consider it learned and keep working on it. Reviewing and revisiting it to recap in this lesson, we talked about active knowledge, what we're able to use readily right now and passive knowledge, the entire universe that we're able to understand but not use trade off the bat. We also mentioned that you shouldn't label a word or a rule as learned until you thoroughly understand it and they're able to use it readily. Being realistic will help you not get disappointed later on, but you'll rather be able to act productively. The next lesson is a bonus lesson on how you can do drills to practice various parts of grammar. 12. BONUS - Drills: Welcome to your bonus. Listen on how to make drills so that you can practice extra and get grammar to become a natural thing for you. Let's say you're learning possessive in brackets, right? The basis the thing that you're going to change and next to the brackets, right. The word that you will not change Here are some examples what you should say. Here is my books, your school, our dog in some languages. What a possessive looks like depends on the Now Here's a similar example in Serbian. To illustrate it better, I put the knowns in singular and plural. This means I book I books, we dog, we dogs. So here we should say more dark *** more you continue Nash Bus Nash Iptc. You can do this with verb congregations again. I'll give an example in English, but you should be able to apply the rule for your target language. So go ahead and say he buys, We buy, I don't have, she doesn't have. You can do it in the past and future tenses as well. You can also make these for plural one cactus to kept I. If you're learning a language with cases you can do the same. For example, here's locker tive and Serbian Puglisi, not Hosni no stole Nairo Drama. When you learn this well, you can add adjectives to these mounds and then change them together again. That's how Serbian works. But if this is not applicable to your language, that's fine. I recommend writing long lists and not worrying if some words air repeating. The point is that you have an opportunity to actively say those things over and over again . If you save the lists, you can go back to them whenever and simply do a review. You can make drills in various ways. If you're having trouble with remembering the exceptions, make a drill using Onley exceptions to a rule. These should help you overcome the translation process that many people struggle with, and it's a compressed type of exercise. In essence, it's the same as those exercises that require you to use the words in brackets. But on a small scale, you can quickly make them on your own and practice all the new things or the things you're struggling with. So once again, they're good. If you make many drills for each grammar point doing less than 10 just isn't going to be so effective in the next lesson. We'll have a quick review of this course and talk more about the project. 13. Recap and Project: in this lesson. We're going to talk about what we learned so far, and I'll give instructions about your poster project. I gave you new ideas on how to do homework. This should help you see your assignments in a new light as an extension to your class and as an opportunity to learn more, not just as a boring chore. We talked about how to use audio recordings, texts, exercises, how to learn vocabulary, improve speaking and how to make the most out of your actual language sessions. I listed out the most common mistakes I see people making without being aware of them. These warnings should help you see yourself from a teacher's perspective and see the consequences of certain behaviors you may have. The chapter about knowledge is there to teach you the difference between active knowledge, what we use and passive knowledge. What we recognize and remind you that recognising words only may get you in on uncomfortable situation. Once you get to speak, you had a bonus chapter, which aims to help you make Quicken short exercises to practise different grammar points. Finally, we're talking about your project. This is what the template looks like you can fill it up any way you want. Use big or small letters, drawings, different colors, fancy lettering or simple black print letters. Think about what you learned in this class and look at your notes. Include the points that made you the most inspired and that resonated with you the most. Feel free to print it out in a small or large format or redraw it in your own unique style . The better your poster looks, the more you're likely to look at it and the happier you'll be to use it as a reference, then share your work in the community section. I'll be happy to see it. Also, if you're interested in the Serbian language, please subscribe because I'll be posting new courses for Serbian language. Thank you for staying with me through these class, and I wish you all the best in conquering your new language.