A 30-minute English workout

After those 30 minutes, How much of that English can you actually use? Because there's a big difference between learning a word and making a word your own.

So you might recognise an expression when you see it, you might understand it when someone says it, but then when you're in a conversation, someone asks you a question and suddenly that vocabulary disappears.

You know it's somewhere in your brain, but you can't find it quickly enough.

And this is one of the biggest differences between being almost fluent and fluent.

It's not just knowing more words, it's being able to access the words that you know.

So in this episode, I want to show you how you can turn 30 minutes into a powerful fluency exercise.

A simple way to take new vocabulary and make it part of your active English.

And by the way, this is also the principle behind the Summer Speaking Challenge that I've created for this year.

Short, focused speaking practice that helps you stop collecting English and start using it.

We can talk about a type of vocabulary trap.

Now, I see this all of the time.

People are really concerned about what they think is a lack of vocabulary.

In fact, you might also recognize this yourself.

you probably actually have too much vocabulary.

You have notebooks, you have lists, you have saved articles, you have words that you've written down because you thought, ah, that's a great expression, I want to remember that.

And then you move on, you collect another word, and another, and another.

But here's a problem, and I'm sure you're aware of it.

Your brain doesn't learn vocabulary because you've seen it once.

You need to see or hear the word several times.

It helps to think about it.

It really helps to connect it to your own life.

But most importantly, you need to use that word.

Because as you know, there are different levels of knowing a word.

So you could say level one is when you've seen that word before.

Level two is when you know what it means.