Name: 3 Keys to Learning English
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T18:07:37.000Z
Duration: 10 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey, funny, I've got my keys, you've got your keys.

Present continuous

I got my keys out because, well, Mr. E and I want to use a key specifically, he's using that key, to teach you the three key subjects that beginners should study.

And what I mean by that is when we say a key subject or area, there are three things that if you start this particular way, your study in English will be fun, exciting, and you'll get really good at it.

Now, sometimes people study different things in English because they think, oh, I have to study this first and this first, and it actually makes the job of learning English harder.

So, this lesson, we're going to give you, well, we're going to give you some home building.

We're going to talk about homes, and doing so, in doing so, we will teach you about learning English.

So, can I tell you a story, a real quick story about three little pigs?

If you're my friends from Muslim countries, we'll change it to the three little chickens.

Same story, you change the visualization, okay?

Anyway, a long time ago, there were three little pigs, chickens, and they lived in a forest and there was a piglet called Strawsy, one called Woodsy, one called Brixy.

Now, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but the one pig, chicken, had a house made of straw.

It wasn't a very good house, it was easy to blow down, and there was a wolf that wanted to eat the little piglets and chickens, and he would blow down their houses.

So, he blew down the chicken's house that was made of straw, then he blew down the one made of wood, but the brick one he couldn't blow down.

And the reason why I'm telling you this story is because the brick one had a great foundation, it was made from a great blueprint, and when he built that house, there he is there.

That's what I have in mind for you in this lesson, so let's go to the board.

First one we're going to talk about is the ground.

When you're a beginner student, just put away the English books, put away...

This is just one particular lesson, so in this lesson I'm asking you to do this.

Put away the books and the movies and that, and start with simple vocabulary.

A lot of times when you're a beginner, you're trying to grasp and get everything.

I've got to do grammar, listening, conversation, all of these things, and simply if you get some basic vocabulary, it will help you a lot in your way of communication.

Things that you want to learn, here's an example of vocabulary.

This is a door, this is a roof, and this is a window.

When we build a house, we start at the foundation, and the foundation is basically the ground, and in language, the ground is vocabulary.

If you have very good vocabulary, you can actually start communicating with people.

Water, drink, I. Grammatically, that's bad, but at least I know you want water to drink,

So, words we want to start with are some basic words.

We want words like I because, well, I am human, I want to communicate.

You, so you know that I'm speaking to you.

We might want to go where, like where toilet.

Toilet, basic vocabulary, and already I've said where is the toilet.

I don't have to have the grammar, you can understand it.

And so can other people who speak English understand when you're speaking to them.

So, like when we make a house, and Brixie the Pig, when he made his house, strong, we need a good foundation, and that starts with good vocabulary.

Now that we've done that, I'm going to introduce you to a word, a vocabulary word called blueprint.

If you've ever seen when someone makes a house, they have this paper, it's called blueprint, it's on sort of a bluish paper like this, and then it will have something like that.

I know this isn't a house, but it will have diagrams of how the house should go together.

And here, you will notice I put roof, there is a roof, there is a house, and there is the foundation.

Remember, the foundation is grammar, so what is this that I'm talking about?

This is grammar, because after you learn vocabulary words like I water, isn't it quite enough that I'm thinking, is there something wrong with your brain, son?

Grammar gives structure to our vocabulary.

One of the things we want to work on is like subject-verb agreement, right?

Many students make the mistake of saying she go instead of she goes.

Subject-verb agreement is one of the basic grammar principles we want to learn, yeah?

Then we can also look at prepositions, what?

Prepositions of place and time help us to organize our world, yeah?

So we can look at prepositions, we can look at subject-verb agreement, these are the type of things, and things like the simple past to tell me there's a time that I did something and now I am doing something.

So knowing subject-verb, like pronouns, then knowing, I'm sorry, prepositions, where things are in time and space, and understanding that there's a difference in time brings a fullness to the language, and that's why we need grammar, because it brings structure so people understand.

Just like you would never put the roof on the bottom of the house, grammar tells us

A goes to B, B goes to C, and then we have a house.

Well now that we've got our vocabulary, simple things, and now we've built the house or we've got a blueprint for what the house should look like, it's not a house, we're just saying we must do these things to create one, then we must build a house, and there is Brixie there in his house.

My god, I just sounded like a terrible 1950s commercial.

No wolf's going to blow that over, right, Jack?

Anyway, so we build, and how do we build?

Because we've got grammar and vocabulary, that is through speaking and listening.

We use active listening to take information inside so we can actually learn more, because we learn more from listening, even though I love to talk, than we do from talking.

So we combine these two to listen to others' vocabulary, other grammatical structures, we take that information in and we do what's called active listening, we pay attention to what someone's saying so we can get ideas of what they mean from the context, what's going on around us, and the words they're using.

Then we use questions, we ask questions to facilitate or help us learn.

We ask questions as in, what does that word mean?

We actively use questions, not just talking about things like, oh, the weather, I ask questions to improve my knowledge.

So with active listening and asking questions, we can get a lot of knowledge, we can get a complex level of language.

Finally, we take those two together with then speaking clearly, finally I say speaking, through clear speech.

With good vocabulary, with good grammar structures, after listening and asking questions, we can clearly give or we can be very clear in our conversations with others, direct with them, give them the fuller meaning of what we're trying to say, and have true communication.

These are the three things that beginners want to focus on.

A foundation, work on the grammar, sorry, grammar.

I keep saying grammar, I want to say vocabulary.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

3 Keys to Learning English

context

vocabulary

structure

solid