Александр Чумаков – Boost up your English (страница 2)
And of course, in order to write better I learned from the best. Famous writers helped me enormously. Roselyn Brown, for example, once said, “Writing is a job. It is not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule you time and stick to it”. Walker Perry said, “You’ve got to sit down and follow the schedule. Unless you do that, you won’t ever do anything” Earnest Hemingway said, “I rise at first light and I start by rereading everything I’ve written to the point I felt off”. And of course, Steven King says, “Don’t wait for the Muse. Don’t wait for inspiration. Your job is to make sure that the Muse knows where you are doing to be every day from 9 till 11”. This helped me to grow as a writer. I never wait for inspiration to come. I don’t wait for the Muse. I made it a rule, and now my job is to make sure that the Muse knows when I am going to be busy every day, for example, from 9 till noon or from 6 till 11. I sit down and begin to write even if I have no ideas what to write about. I make characters. I give them what they need and why they need it. I look behind my characters. I breathe lives into them and walk them through difficulties and guide them when it is necessary. And then inspiration comes. It always comes during work rather than before it.
Than starts revision. I revise it. I call my friend who is a fantastic English speaker, a native speaker, a teacher in University of Chicago. We go though the whole thing and we change it. It takes a lot of time. I read it aloud and he listens to me. He likes to say, “Say it again. I have to hear the melody of the sentences.” And if we like the way it sounds, we don’t correct it, but if we don’t we make changes. It changes things. ““I need to hear the music of the language. I need to hear the intonation” he likes to say. He makes great improvements. It’s always better. Then in the studio I make some changes as well. And then in teaching the students change, they change it because they live through the characters when they learn the stories. I get credits for all the improvements because I am the writer. Isn’t that nice?
When I finish the book I go and celebrate it. I think it is very important to celebrate your achievement: to give a party, to treat yourself with something nice, good and beautiful. I enjoy my success. It is a sign of maturity, I think.
And I want to you to know that I am grateful to everyone who helps me and ever helped me before. It’s my family, my mom, my friends and Jesus. I mean Jesus Christ. I love to say, “I love Jesus and Jesus loves me”. I am a strong believer that no one can do anything good without other people and without something that is bigger than you.
That’s it for now. See you next time!
WHY ARE MINI-STORIES SO POWERFUL?
Why are mini-stories that powerful?
Mini-stories are powerful because I deliberately use the most common verbs like: go, come, take, give, wish, run and there is so much repetition in these stories. And the questions come and again they should be very, very easy and very much comprehensible. So you answer the questions without thinking.
And you no longer deal with the story; you focus on the most common verbs we use in daily conversations.
What do you get from this? The same words, the same questions and you get the basic structures of the sentences with so much repetition.
Even if you start as a beginner it is first noisy and then with time it gets clearer and clearer to you and you feel more and more confident in what you are learning.
Some of the stories are easy, some of them are difficult. Why? It is because of our brain again.
The brain requires two things: repetition and novelty. Novelty it is not necessarily to be something new. It means when you learn something using a lot of repletion, you eventually get tired and bored and you need to give your brain a kind of break. It can help you develop the flexibility of brain.
If you stay with simple stories and never push yourself to harder stories, it is easier for you to get that boredom. But if you push yourself and make yourself learn something a little bit more difficult than you did before, your brain becomes more alert and more alive and you remember much better and faster so you learn better and speak better. That’s why mini-stories are so powerful.
WHY DO MY COURSES?
To know the answer ask yourself these questions:
– Do you get nervous when you need to speak English?
– Are you afraid of making mistakes every time when you need to speak English?
– Do you want to understand and to be understood when you speak English?
– Do you want to get automatic respect from people when you speak English?
If you answer «yes» to any of these questions, I go, "Boost up your English" is what you need!»
If you want to speak true, real and excellent English.
If you want to think in English, do my English course, which is called «Boost up your English» and I promise you will boost up your English. You will improve your English. You will elevate your English. You will start speaking English the way you never did before.
Now let me tell you what you learn in «
There are 7 units and 3 months of audio lessons.
Each Unit, each story includes:
First: a crazy, funny, and stupid story.
These stories teach your brain:
– to understand English Grammar intuitively.
– to remember words with your ears, not with your eyes.
– to leave behind boring English lessons and
– to create new positive and strong emotions, every time when you speak English.
Eventually, these stories teach you:
– to stop being afraid of making mistakes.
– to stop translating from your language to English.
– to understand that English can be easy and fun.
Second: The vocabulary lesson.
With these vocabulary lessons your pronunciation gets better, your understanding gets better and your listening abilities grow faster. This is a bridge between the story and the mini-story lesson. This lesson will help you build that bridge. The vocabulary lesson also teaches you one very important thing that all native speakers do. What is it? It teaches you to paraphrase. In other words, it provides you with the synonyms you need to say it differently. It teaches you to use them correctly and to speak English accurately.
It gives you freedom.
Third: The mini-story lesson.
These mini-story lessons are the most powerful, the most important and the funnies ones. With the mini-story lessons you teach your brain English grammar intuitively, playfully like a child by answering easy and simple questions. Yes, grammar is boring. Yes, grammar is difficult. Yes, grammar is very difficult. But if the input is so interesting and so comprehensible you forget that you are listening to English. The world disappears around you. You enjoy the process. You acquire the language. Grammar takes care of itself.
Forth: The POV Lessons.
What do the POV lessons mean? POV Lesson. They mean the Points of View Lessons.
In this lesson I am telling the same story, but from a different point of view. I mean, I use different time-frame. Usually it is the Perfect Tense and the Future Tense.
Too many students try to go ahead. They want advanced material, advanced grammar, advanced vocabulary, and they say, «I already know the beginning stuff.» Well, you know it intellectually, but you don’t really know it deeply. And most students really need to go back and focus more on the core, the basic, the fundamental parts of English: simple sentences, the past tense, the present tense, the future, the perfect tense, the stuff we use every day in conversations, you need to master that.
That is why the motto of this course is «Repetition is the mother of a skill»
Fifth: My comments
In this lesson I am going to talk briefly about the story. I am going to say just a few sentences or maybe more in order to support the message of the story. I am going to philosophize just quickly say a few sentences about the story itself – just a very short summery of the story. And then I am going to give you my own ideas on the story or I am going to offer other people’s ideas that can help you understand the story much better. And of course, I am going to focus on the moral of the story. In other words, what the story can teach us and what we can learn from the story to improve not only as an English speaker but also as a human being. All this, I am sure, will help you get the main idea or ideas, the message of the story and of course, you will listen to English more, you will learn more and you will enjoy it more.
To stay committed to learning English, to remain curious about learning English and to maintain your motivation for learning English, I encourage you visit my YouTube channel which is English is easy and fun.
Here is the QR Code with the direct access to the channel. Just scan it with your phone’s camera and it will take you there. I am sure you will be enjoying it. See you soon.
WHY DO WE LEARN STORIES HERE?
Why do we learn stories here? That is a great question. You know, how much I love the “Why-questions”. Let me tell you why all my books, why all my English courses have stories and why the method I use when I teach English is called a story-telling method.