How to learn everyday English | Canguro English

so you want to learn every day english the natural authentic language that people are using every day to communicate the only problem is that there's too much english it's too much to learn where do you begin and i totally understand this problem in fact that's the reason that i love language because it's so big and so complicated and there's always so much to learn but also because language is so deeply human now i've spent the past 10 years in the classroom motivating students to do this one very simple thing which is the trick to learning everyday english and that's what i'm going to be teaching you today so let's get started so in general we understand language really well especially english which is one of the most widely studied languages in in the whole history of the world but although we understand english very well it is still mysterious and it still conforms to some mysterious laws of the universe and one of those laws is zipf's law zip's law tells us about word frequency in english it tells us that the most common word in english is twice as common as the second most common word in english and three times as common as the third most common word in english etc etc etc which means that if you put english word frequency on a graph you get this beautiful straight red line now the mysterious thing is that this is not just true for english but for all languages in the world even extinct languages or invented languages like esperanto and even for languages that have never been translated so this means that the most frequent 100 words in english make up about 50 percent of everyday english and the most frequent 800 words in english make up about 75 percent of everyday english this is fantastic news so now we have a shortcut to learning english vocabulary except it's not that simple you see when we actually start to take a close look at word frequency in english when we look at taboo words or we look at words that are related to a specific culture we start to see that zip's law isn't really a law it's more of a guide you see zip's law exists not because of some mysterious thing in the universe it exists because of meaning and people and that is something that we're going to talk about at the end of this video but first we need to talk about fluency so let's try to create a definition of fluency so it's not about having a huge vocabulary because there are plenty of native speakers who are fluent who don't have a big vocabulary at all and it's not about fast speech or continuous speech because again there are plenty of native speakers who take long pauses or speak really slowly and it's not about having perfect grammar because there are plenty of native speakers who bend or break the rules of grammar in fact i think that the whole concept of grammatical versus ungrammatical doesn't even make any sense what we should be talking about is acceptable versus unacceptable language and this varies over time and space people in new york talk differently to people in london and people in london in the 1920s talk differently to people in london now so how can we define fluency well for most people when they talk about fluency they are talking about being able to combine the right type of grammar and the right type of vocabulary spontaneously so maybe that's the trick to learning everyday english it's about memorizing that high frequency vocabulary and memorizing those grammatical structures and then fluency well unfortunately it's not that simple let's take a look at one of the most basic sentences subject verb object i eat pizza and now if we want to be fluent we can just take our vocabulary and plug that vocabulary into that structure the problem is that that also gives us the sentence i shout cats but unfortunately it gets worse because we can have a sentence with the correct grammar and correct vocabulary but it's not acceptable for example you can say i got dressed you could also say i put on my body my clothes of mine perfect grammar perfect vocabulary not acceptable but then you can have something in between the two like i put on my garments now this is not as unacceptable as my second example but also it's not as acceptable as my first example and this is where the problem of learning everyday english begins because language is infinite there are infinite possibilities so being fluent and using everyday english is not about using all of the possibilities because a majority of those will be unacceptable it's actually about limiting the possibilities learning everyday english is actually about a process of elimination and that's why obsessing about studying grammatical structures or memorizing word lists won't help you because it doesn't give you those everyday combinations in fact this is a really big problem in general with people learning languages people treating language like it's mathematics like if they can memorize the formula then they can use this formula to create natural english but that's not how it works at all you see most of the language that we use every day is actually memorized pre-fabricated constructions so we know that in english there is more than one way of saying the same thing hello good day to you sir top of the morning to you but some of these combinations or these prefabrications will be more favored than others more natural more fluent and in 2000 brit ehrmann and beatrice warren proved that more than 50 percent of the language that we use every day is made up of these pre-fabricated memorized constructions everyday english is about conventions cultural conventions everyday english is about people it's about the language that we have all decided together is acceptable and so that finally brings us to that one trick to learning everyday english and it's not a trick that you're going to find in a workbook or an app or a course or a system because the trick is to use your english for authentic communication with real people because language is about people it's impossible to learn a language without other people using your english does not mean more hours studying it means listening reading conversation and those are things that nobody can give you and you can't buy practice is what gives you fluency so be smart about where you invest your time and your money and always remember that language is about people and you can't buy everyday english and you can't buy fluency i'm christian this is kangaroo english i'll see you in class you

Channel: Canguro English

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Keywords: canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english, learning english, learn english, english teacher, english grammar, grammar, linguistics, how to learn everyday english, everyday english conversation, everyday english listening, everyday english speaking, everyday english for esl, everyday english words, everyday english phrases, everyday english vocabulary, natural english speaking, natural english grammar, natural english conversation, natural english expressions

Id: jwxZSnYNwAs

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020