As we’ve mentioned before, learning vocabulary is one of the most important and hardest aspect of learning English. Ultimately the best way to learn new words is from context and picking up words through extensive reading, but most people need to and want to take a more explicit to learning vocabulary by memorising new words. But, how do you know what words to learn?
Education is changing, it has to change. The world of work is not the same as it was twenty years ago, let alone one hundred and fifty years ago, when mass education was first widely rolled out to provide educated workers for the industrialising world. The problem facing education today is that the knowledge that you learn at school or university is quickly becoming out of date because of the pace of change in technology and the work place. The question then is, what do I need to learn? First of all you need to learn to be a “dynamic learner”, someone who is able to develop their skills and knowledge as needs arise, but more than gaining knowledge, you need to harness four key skills that are transferable across domains - the "Four Cs” of creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.
As adult language we can take advantage of some shortcuts to help speed up the learning process. One simple way is to find words that are almost the same in both languages. This is quite common among languages, such as Spanish and Italian, that have a common origin, but what about with English and Japanese? Of course, you already know the answer: katakana words.
What kind of English lesson do you like? What kind of lesson helps you learn English the best? I’m sure you all have your own ideas about the best way to learn English, and over the years there have been a number of different styles in teaching a second language that have been in and out of fashion in the English classroom. To help you understand some of the approaches that we, and others use, we thought we’d give you a brief review of the popular styles in English teaching, that way you can understand more of what we do and think about what works best for you.
Learning new vocabulary is difficult but there is one technique that you can use to help optimise your ability to remember. In fact it’s something that you’ve probably already used if you have ever you used a language learning app such as DuoLingo, iKnow or Memrise, because they are all based around the same principle. This principle is called “spaced repetition”.
One thing that most learners are concerned about, and that we’ve talked about before, is improving. But, how long does it take to get better at English? It is a difficult question to answer, but there are some guidelines we can give, so that you have an idea of how much you need to work to jump up a level.
What’s the best way to study? In general or, specifically, for a test? Over the years there has been a lot of interest and research into how people learn and remember things from. Here are some tips we have for better studying.
There is a simple secret to learning English faster and better. Reading. Yes, reading!?! And reading a lot! This is called extensive reading and it is probably the best thing you can do outside of language lessons to improve your English. Here we will explain some of the reasons why it is so effective.
One of the principle difficulties students have when learning a language is knowing what to study at home between lessons. So here are some pointers on how to study at home.
