How to Learn English Through Stories and Improve FAST 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 (TOP TIPS)

so welcome to this English lesson I am going to start streaming this is a live lesson and welcome to you if you are watching live in this english lesson we're going to learn how to learn English through stories how you can improve your English by reading and listening to stories now if you are new here my name is Jack and I help English learners reach a high level of English so welcome to you if this is your first time here now let me double check everything is working okay it looks like it is people are joining live so if you are watching the replay know that this is a live lesson and here are some comments that people are leaving we got rife here 45th parallel cool name Nadia Dima bukhet Viviane say hi for me Vivian and ZZ hello these are two suliman's here and Allen is here we have a few others join in as well Olga who has been away for a while and it's good to have you back Olga and Evelyn from Bolivia who's saying skyfall Diego Ania i'm viviane just so many people join in live total as well yeah it's been a while total since I've seen you here so it's very good to have you again if you are just joining life we are going to learn how you can improve your English through stories okay how you can learn English through stories and I'm going to give you many tips here and at the end I'm going to give you some amazing resources as well and some recommended books that I think are fantastic for people who have an intermediate or higher level of English so that is the topic for today so just quickly look at your screen as I said before this is a live English lesson and I call this the to fluency show here on YouTube we go live on YouTube once sometimes twice sometimes three times per week this is a second time we have gone live on YouTube this week so let's start with the definition of a story because I think this is really interesting so look on your screen now now this is a definition taken from dictionary calm and the story is a narrative either true or fictitious in prose or verse designed to interest amuse or instruct the hearer or reader you can also call it a tale so it's a narrative it can be true or it could be fictitious in different types of formats and the design of this the idea is to interest someone to amuse them to make them laugh or to instruct them to teach them and notice here it says the hearer or reader because stories come in two main formats and we're going to talk about that soon but stories can be either written or they could be audio now things have really changed over the years because now we can listen to stories on our smartphones we can listen to stories on our computers we can listen to any story told in the world and it's an incredible thing in the past we had to listen to stories from our friends people who we were in the same situation or on the radio or on television but now we have access to so many stories both written and also audio so let's just see the comment section and we've cut just the ladies here as well anine says I'm a good listener but I can't speak English fluently excuse me Alan is here as well and Igor from Brazil so good to have you all here this is going to be a really fun lesson so there are two types of stories let's have a look at what what those are firstly nonfiction now a nonfiction story is based on fact it is based on fact the opposite is fiction which is based on imagination quick question do you prefer nonfiction or fiction nonfiction or fiction let me know in the comment section now personally I prefer non-fiction I prefer reading non-fiction I have I'll show you a couple one second I'm just going to find them okay so I have a couple here these are two of my favorite books the magic of thinking big and how successful people think so these are two books non-fiction I prefer reading nonfiction you don't see another of my favorite books very soon but let's bring up the comments let's see what people are saying and we have nonfiction we have fiction non-fiction doesn't matter fiction nonfiction I'm in the fiction Club very good both of them fiction both fiction and nsa's podcasts as well I like to listen to a lot of English podcast Sawa says non-fiction so we have a variety here I think mainly fiction now I think that I need to read more fiction I need to listen as well to more fiction and and it's something I'm going to do soon in fact it should be a resolution for me in 2017 okay next year I should read more fiction but let's move on the next thing I want to share is a quote about storytelling and stories and I love this quote so it's on your screen now excuse me I'm going to read this to you people are hungry for stories it's part of our very being storytelling is a form of history of immorality - sorry immortality - it goes from one generation to another that's Studs Terkel so storytelling is a form of history of immortality - it goes from one generation to another but look at that first sentence again people are hungry for stories people are hungry for stories now in this case to be hungry for or means you have a strong desire for so people have a strong desire for stories and one of the main reasons in fact where there's so many different theories on storytelling and people say it's part of our evolution it's part of the way we became human because we based everything on stories and I'm going to share a book in a second which it talks about this in such a fascinating way but first differ think about stories they are memorable because they stir our emotions so stories are memorable we can remember stories because we feel emotionally involved in stories so when someone is telling us a story sometimes we feel excited or scared or happy or sad and we feel like what the storyteller is feeling or felt during the time so if someone tells you a story a love story then it can make us feel really happy if someone tells us a scary story then it makes us feel scary and when our emotions are involved it becomes more memorable now this is linked to learning language and learning English because if you are listening to a story that's really memorable you're going to remember the words and phrases your emotions are attached to those words and phrases okay so it's one of those things that if you learn English through stories you're going to remember and be open to more language let's bring up the comment section and we have a great comment here they yearn for stories can we say that yes we can people yearn for stories they're hungry for stories they have a strong desire stories um so great that's a really good phrase to learn now here is that book I mentioned before civilization and new history of the Western world by Roger Osborne now he talks about in this book going from an oral culture to a written language culture and how that affected us how that changed the way we think how that changed the way that we act as a society and it's just fascinating to read so if you are interested in that subject about how we went from telling stories orally and have they passed down from generation to generation how we went from that type of culture to the written language and readin if you're interested in in that type of thing highly recommend that book so I'll show you that book again civilization a new history of the Western world now talking about stories I like to introduce storytelling into my lessons and on your screen you can see the video that I made yesterday's ago a Monday about how I run into a friend and I told the story about how I ran into a friend on the way to work and we had a conversation and I we use the word how the phrases how's it going want to grab a coffee let's meet up this Friday and I tell it as a story so it's more memorable for you I've got some more resources soon that are going to give you more stories we're going to give you interesting stories with language so that you can learn English and that link is actually in the description too it's going to have a look at the comment section and Pinar says how can we find stories for our English level I'm going to talk about that soon / now I've got some interesting links for you and some advice as well now let's get into some tips we're going to we're going to look at tips for books you know what kind of books you should get how to find the right books how you should really consume those books and then I'm going to talk about other ways that you can listen to stories from different websites as well because it's not just about books okay tip number one get the audio book so when you are finding books find the audio book as well you can find the audio book on Amazon you can find it in the library and I'm sure there are different ways to get these audio books two ways that a lot of people use but personally I prefer to stay away from I think you know what I am talking about but get the audio book listen to stories in fact what you can do is you can listen and read at the same time so when you have a new story when you get a new book get the audio book listen and read at the same time it's going to help you in a big way it's going to help your listening you need to get used to the sounds of English and if you listen and read at the same time then you can match the pronunciation to the words that you read and over time the more you do this and more you'll understand how words are pronounced how sentences are pronounced about all the different types of pronunciation - you know the different areas relaxed pronunciation reduce vowels those types of things so always get the audiobook if possible and what you can also do is you can read the book and then listen to it while you're doing other things now Amazon have a great way of doing this they have something called whisper net or something like that whisper sync where on your Kindle device you can listen and read at the same time but also if you listen for a while and then you go back to read it it goes to the place that you last listen to it's a great app to have if you can get that let's bring up the comment section and people are posting links to where you can find audiobooks and harry says what's a good way to start storytelling Jack if you want to I guess if you want to improve your storytelling good I think a good way to do this and another good way to listen to stories is comedy stand-up comedy when somebody is telling a story on a stage to people the difficulty here with stand-up comedy is that it can be quite difficult to understand the humor humor in general is difficult to understand and a great example to highlight this is that when if an American watches a British stand-up comedian sometimes they don't understand the jokes and the opposite to if a British person watches American stand-up comedy sometimes it can be difficult for them because the comedy is different they use different reference points the culture is different as well and comedy is very subtle so all about the small details okay so tip one get the audiobook listen to stories improve your listening tip to find interesting books find interesting books you know this is something I've talked about a lot you don't want to just read a book if you're not going to enjoy it do this a book that you have to read to learn English you can read anything there have been studies that showed that it it they took a group of kids and they split them into two groups and one group studied for the exam okay so they studied text for the exam the other group read whatever they wanted to read read things that were interesting for them in this group perform better than the of the group and the idea here is that any type of reading is good read things that are interesting to you listen to stories that are interesting to you so always find interesting books and I've talked about this many times I have talked about this a lot but it's so important because if you find something that's interesting you are engaged you are open to new language but also you are going to learn the words and phrases that you're going to use in real life okay because we talk about things that interest us I could read a book on horse riding for example in French and learn all the words and phrases but I'm never going to talk about horse riding I'm not interested in it but if I read a book about football and learn some words and phrases to talk about football then I can use this because I like football I like talking about football so it's always important to find books that are interesting to you um somebody asking about the camera 60 frames per second no I don't think this is 60 frames per second and I think it's 30 frames per second but it is a 4k camera Bruno says I like true stories and said that the best idea I think and subtitle YouTube soap operas yeah it's a great way to learn English and movies with subtitles Skyfall I'm reading start with why from simon Sinek I find it very interesting yeah I started that book but I actually preferred his TED talk his presentation on it so we'll find that someone says really interesting books are hard for me to find yet sometimes as well it just depends on your motivation sometimes you don't feel motivated to read a book like you you're not in the mood to do it but if you find a good book there's nothing better than that okay so tip to find interesting books however there's a problem with interesting books and it's related to tip 3 tip 3 is don't make it too difficult don't find books that are too difficult and this is one of the biggest problems for anyone learning a language because you want to find interesting books you want to find books that interest you but sometimes those books are too difficult to understand especially some novels where they use very dramatic and poetic language when they do that it can be really difficult to understand what is happening so what we want to do we want to find that balance here we want to find a balance between interesting books and books that we can understand because if there are too many words and phrases that we don't understand is too difficult to read and it's not enjoyable so I've got some advice for you on that soon but yet tip 3 don't make it too difficult look at tip 4 so on your screen okay tip 4 join a book club join a book club now my wife is part of a book club in fact she is going to her book club tonight she's going there tonight so this is where you read a book and as a group you meet and you discuss the book now this is great for many reasons you're going to make new friends you're going to you know be able to practice their words and phrases that people use to discuss this book but also it makes you actually read something because you don't want to go to a book club without having read the book if you go there if you haven't read the book that it's really embarrassing so it makes you actually do it it makes you read the book it gives you a deadline to read the book so joining a book club can be a great thing to do now you can do this online or you can do it in your local area and obviously what we want to do to improve our English is to find a group who want to talk about the book in English want to be able to talk about it in English read the book in English and talk about it in English in fact a while ago my wife was thinking about starting in a book club for English learners and we might do that again in the future where we can choose a book and then every month meet talk about that book learn the vocabulary etc let me know if you think that's a good idea in the comment section so tip for join a book club let's look at the comments and Jae Pablo let's go create one exactly and Felipe says how to balance between input and output yeah I'm it is a tough balance but know that with input the more you do the better your output will be it's also easier to get more input than output it's easier to listen to something than have a conversation with someone but I also think it's important as well to do output in a way that isn't just always conversations to repeat phrases to write down phrases so there are many ways that you can do that as well but a really good question and 45th parallel I like reading short stories yeah that's a short stories fantastic because you don't have to commit to a long book instead you can enjoy a short story enjoy another one and another one and Helen do you mean to read books adapted to different levels of English yes we're going to talk about that soon okay I'm going to talk about books that have been adapted but next tip five are you ready look on your screen now tip five is this test a book first test a book first now I'm sure you've done this you read reviews of books and you buy them or you go to the library you just take a few books and take them home but once you start reading them you don't enjoy them they're not for you you're not going to get a lot out of them so what I recommend you do is test it read two to three pages of the introduction or go to the middle of a book and start reading and then just see if it's for you now you can do this for free on Amazon where it says look inside a book if you just go to Amazon the website and then find a book click look inside usually you can read ten pages for free so that means you can test that book first to know if it's going to be interesting and okay for your level remember it's that balance between interesting and not too difficult to test the book first test it before you start reading tip number six stories are everywhere so we're not just talking about reading books here we're talking about listening to stories and reading stories so excuse me stories are everywhere we talked about a great example with stand-up comedy where we can listen to stories and comedy is something that is memorable again a story can amuse it can make us laugh go back to that original definition from dictionary calm designed to interest amuse or instruct so with stand-up comedy we're talking about amuse we're talking about making people laugh and when we laugh we remember stories again it's our emotions and we remember things that we are emotionally involved in so again stand-up comedy is fantastic although it can be a little bit difficult so yeah stories are everywhere I'm going to give you some examples now are you ready first one BuzzFeed have an article the link is in the description 12 storytelling podcasts that you need to be listening to so these are podcasts or radio shows that tell stories and if you go to that link in the article below in the description then you'll be able to have a look at these podcasts and just like I said test the book first we can test podcasts listen to number one see if you like it if not go to number two test it first we don't have to listen to things that were not interested in now look on your screen I'm sure I'm going to just change the address in the bottom I'm sure you have I'm sure you've been to this website Ted calm TED talks so most TED talks start with a story when I was at college I weighed 500 pounds I have lost this much weight I felt so bad I felt so terrible but there was one day when I met a friend and this friend told me it really interested Stu and he said this so what they're doing in these TED talks that is not real by the way that's just imaginary but what they're doing in these TED talks is they're telling a story to engage you to make you interested in what they're going to teach so they're telling you a story in nearly every TED talk what should TED talk there's always a story always a story usually the story is I wasn't doing very well and then I made a change and now I'm doing very well I was really bad at this but I made a change and now I'm doing this a lot of those stories are like that so ted.com TED talks a great way to listen to stories and a huge benefit of this website this is huge they have transcripts so you can listen and read at the same time you can watch these videos and you can see the transcript it's an incredible thing and take advantage of it take advantage of this next probably my favorite resource I'm going to just delete that because it's not BuzzFeed this is probably my favorite resource for you guys English listening practice this is where I tell stories on my YouTube account here on YouTube and you can listen to them you can listen to these stories most of these stories have transcripts they have language analysis I just tell stories about my life so that you can listen to them feel engaged and learn language in a natural way so I have a playlist below check it out watch these videos watch them all and listen to interesting stories and learn fantastic English so quick recap we have podcasts fantastic listen anywhere TED talks full of stories and you get the transcript it's free as well and the best resource in my opinion is this channel here let's have a look at the comment section before I give you one of my favorite stories of my favorite books for English learners and justly said you should drink more water yes this is water today it's not a smoothie if you saw my lesson the other day and hey let's have a look I'm polish but I live in the UK thank you for your lessons good to have you here we're in the UK are you from I've got someone from Aleppo Ted sword or Ted or abbreviation and Ted talk talk TED talks if you just search for Ted calm you'll be able to find it we've got rabbir here as well good to have you okay let's move on let's move on look on your screen recommended books I have one for you I mean I've already introduced a civilization if that interests you but if you're interested in general fiction I recommend this the Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time the Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time so I actually read this think in 2007 I am yeah it was while I was traveling I read this while I was travelling when I visited my wife in the US she wasn't my wife at the time but we were dating you know we were in a relationship and she loves reading books my wife loves reading books and she had this one and I started reading it and then I was hooked it got my attention but it's a fantastic story but not only that it is very simple language it uses language in a simple way in an everyday in this way because a lot of novels they use as I said before poetic language fancy long words that people don't use in conversation but this book it's such a simple book to read relatively and I think you're really going to enjoy it there's also sorry there's also an audio version too okay let's have a look at something else as well this now someone asked about this before graded readers and I'm not going to give you specific ones but if you just do a search for graded readers these are books that have been adapted for intermediate or beginner or advanced learners of English so if you are intermediate if you are advanced or a beginner you can choose a book relative to your level and this solves a problem in many ways firstly a lot of these have audio a lot of these books have an audio version secondly their interest in the stories that are really interesting I used the gladiator when I was teaching in Spain so I use I bought this book and I used it in my lessons so you can buy books like the gladiator any kind of famous book but then what they do is they simplify the book and use everyday English they use English according to everyone's level and it's a great way to read interesting books that aren't too difficult to understand and also have audio so on your screen search for this graded readers and I'm sure a lot of you have used them before as well you've probably used them in class or you've seen them in local book shops you've seen them online that everywhere graded readers so take a look at that very good and wife says graded readers are really amazing they are i mean the such a good way to learn English and let's have a look I read books in English that I did like in my native language Helen great yeah if you read books that you have already read in your native language then you understand the story you understand what's happening and then you can fill in the gaps you don't have to concentrate on every word you already have the story in your mind and then you can focus on the words in the language yeah it's such a great way to do it okay everybody thank you so much for watching this lesson if you have watched this far then please give it the thumbs up and also share it with your friends and if you are new here just click that subscribe button there'll be a picture on my face soon just click that button click Subscribe and then you'll get notified when I go live and notified when I upload a new lesson now there's one last thing what I want you to do in the comment section is to let me know your favorite book your favorite ever book it doesn't have to be the one one that you read in English but just let me know what is your favorite book of all time what is the best book you have ever read and if you have any more tips about learning English through stories then please leave them below as well so everybody thank you so much for being here this has been so much fun and we've had over a hundred people watched this live which is fantastic and 103 people are watching this right now again if you're watching the replay thank you for being here speech I'll soon keep learning English and I'll see you in the next lesson bye everyone

Channel: To Fluency

Views: 71,940

Rating: 4.938519 out of 5

Keywords: learn English through stories, learn English through story, best books English, how to learn English, english audiobook, learn english through story, english study, learn english, learning english through stories

Id: CbzGYCptGyE

Length: 36min 3sec (2163 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2016