Off Like a Herd of Turtles

The new year has begun. Are you easing into it? After resting (I hope!) and eating (a lot), have you set your goals for the coming year? Let's talk about how far we've come and where we are heading.

SMART Goals and Fire-fighting

I think the beginning of the year is a time of dreaming and planning, but also of tying up loose ends, pruning our lives in general, and managing random events like we do all year long.

Knowing how to set up SMART Goals is really cool, but so is being able to manage unexpected events. Do you stress out over unexpected things or just recalculate your route, like the GPS in your car when you decide to not follow it? What skills do you need to manage these two ends of the spectrum?

These are the concepts behind the third Conversation Starters newsletter. It’s time to take advantage of the moment and check out our goals and current situations, and in the meantime, we can learn how to express our future plans.

Different Ways to Talk about the Future - Part 1

January is a good month to check your knowledge about future tenses to make sure you articulate your intentions and resolutions correctly.

English speakers have lots of options when they decide to talk about the future. In addition to “will” and “going to”, you can use the present simple and continuous tenses plus time markers, such as “today”, “tomorrow”, or “at 2pm” to communicate specific details about your future plans.

Take notes and don’t forget about the quiz on Engvid.com!

The Certainty Conditional

This is the first video in the shortest and most to-the-point series of videos about conditionals I could find.

In other languages, specific verb tenses may be used, but in English, we have “if clauses” and “results” in different tenses to convey facts, hypothetical situations, wishes, and more.

We use the 0 conditional to talk about facts. Here are two examples:

If you practice speaking every week, your conversation skills will improve.

Your English will get better each week if you do your homework.

Transportation Questions from 2016

This video calls attention to problems that still exist and we can talk about what we can do, as well as what we can see happening around us. For one thing, electric cars and vans are much more common than they were seven years ago.

From a linguistic standpoint, the speaker uses interesting visual descriptions to help convey size and magnitude. Also, at one point he says that he doesn’t have a “silver bullet” for this problem. Have you ever heard that phrase? Do you know what it means?

This is an idiom, like the title of this newsletter. What do you think it means to be “off like a herd of turtles”?

Try Harder When It Matters

Adreniline runs high and hopeful at the beginning of the year, only to dwindle and often fizzle out before February 1st. Is there a a way to actually make the changes we want and not burn out at the same time?

What does success mean to you? Are you going upstream or downstream right now?

Subtitles ON or OFF?

Do you use subtitles? In what language? In this video, a language learner dicusses why he thinks they are a good idea even on a beginner level.

Personally, I think that subtitles can be very useful when there is difficulty understanding an accent, or if a scene in a film or series is noisy or very quiet. Original language subtitles on an English or American movie will help you with pronunciation and listening practice, but subtitles in your own language would allow for better comprehension of the scene, especially if the actors speak quickly.

Talk to you soon,

Marsha

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