Name: Rule # 1 For Excellent English Speaking Study Phrases, Not Individual Words
Uploaded: 2015-03-23T14:30:19.000Z
Duration: 12 min 14 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...

Hi, I’m AJ Hoge, one of the teachers of Learn Real English. And welcome to our video

The imperative

Now, let’s get started with Rule # 1 or Secret # 1. And Rule # 1 is to always learn

English phrases, and to never, never study just individual words.

So in this course we’re going to teach you a totally new way to

learn English, a totally new way to study English, so that you can speak English quickly,

easily, automatically, powerfully, confidently.

So what’s the old way of learning English? You know it because you learned it in school.

You’ve been using it for years and years and years. You

sit in a classroom. You’ve got a textbook. You memorize

lists of vocabulary words. You study lots and lots and lots of grammar rules. You do

lots of reading and little fake conversation drills and activities.

And this is the traditional old way of learning English but we

have a totally new and different way of learning it. And we’re going to teach you each part

of that, one part every day for a full seven days.

So let’s start with Part 1, Secret 1, Rule # 1…learn phrases, not individual words.

Now, of course, a phrase is a group of words. It’s a group

of words that naturally go together. This is very important. You

see, when you only study individual words, you are doing a number of things that make

learning difficult. Number one, when you study just an individual

word like a vocabulary, something in a vocabulary list, or

even in your notebook you write one single word and then you write the meaning or the

translation, here’s the problem. That word has no connections

to anything else. Therefore, it’s difficult for your brain to

That’s why you have to keep repeating again and again. You look at that list and you try

to memorize it. And then the next day you forget and then

you go back and you try to memorize it again and again and

again and again and again. And maybe after a very long time you might remember it. But

most likely you’re going to forget it, especially long-term.

And yet that’s the way most students are learning English

Here’s another problem with just learning single words. When you study just single words,

you’re not learning any grammar. But when you study phrases,

you are actually learning grammar. It’s kind of an

effortless, easy way to learn grammar. You don’t need to think about rules. You don’t

need to think about anything. And yet, you will be learning

correct grammar when you study groups of words instead of

Let me give you an example of this. Let’s just, y’know, take any phrase…like, um,

a simple, simple sentence. He was a bad dog. He was a bad dog.

Now, let’s imagine that you’re a new English student

and the word bad is new for you. Of course, I know you know it, but let’s just imagine

you go way back to the very beginning and your first year of

learning English and bad is a new word. Now the normal way of

studying that, you would write it down, bad, it would be in a little, y’know, a list.

And then you would study bad means not good, bad means not good. You’d probably translate

it to your own language. And then after lots and lots and lots of time, maybe

Well using our system, you do something very different. You would write down that whole

phrase. He was a bad dog. That’s actually a full sentence.

Or you could just write down was a bad dog or he was a

bad dog, whatever. And then every single time you study or review, you would always, always,

always study the full complete phrase. You would

never just study that word, bad. You would study the whole

Now by doing that you’re getting free grammar. How do you know? Well, because first of all

you’re getting that verb, was, right? Was, and that’s

just going to stick in your brain, he was, he was, he was.

You’re also learning articles. You don’t need to remember what that means. You don’t

have to even worry about it. And yet you know that it’s

correct to say, in this situation, a bad dog. He was a bad dog.

Some people say a, he was a bad dog. Both pronunciations are correct. So he was a bad

A lot of students have problems. When do I use a, or a? When do I not? When do I use

the? And you’re trying to memorize all these super

complicated rules and situations for it. Forget that. It’s too

complicated. You’ll never remember it. Just study phrases and you’ll start to feel when

to use it, when it’s correct, when it sounds correct and

when it sounds strange, when it’s not correct to use those things.

And, of course, this is true for all grammar; all phrases; all vocabulary. By studying a

full phrase or even a full sentence, always, always, always, you’re

going to get lots of grammar. You’re going to learn which

vocabulary words go together naturally. And you’re going to know when to use them in

which situations. Because sometimes, for example, there might

be a situation where there are many words that mean the

same thing. And yet we typically use one of them.

Like, we might say he was a bad dog. That’s a common phrase, a bad dog, bad dog. We use

that word bad to describe a dog who’s naughty, who’s

not good. But we don’t usually say horrendous. Now

horrendous means super super bad, really terrible. And yet we don’t usually say he was a horrendous

dog. It sounds strange, even though the meaning is basically correct. Yet, in normal real

English, not textbooks, but real English, we just don’t

use that word to describe dogs, not usually. I don’t know why.

There’s no real rule about it. It’s just that’s what we usually do. And every language

has these kind of word combinations that are more common, and

other word combinations which just aren’t used typically.

How do you learn that? Well you can’t learn it from any rules because there are no rules

about that. You have to learn it by studying phrases always.

Always, always, always study phrases. Review phrases.

Whenever you learn a new word don’t just write down that individual word. Write down

the full phrase, or even better, the full sentence that it’s

in. Always include the words that are around it. This is going to

help you improve your English speaking ability much, much, much faster Even better, when

you write down the phrase, also write down where the phrase came from to remind

yourself of the whole situation. So you might, let’s say you find a new word in a newspaper

article. Well first of all, let’s say the word horrendous.

You’re reading a newspaper article or you’re listening to the

radio and you hear that word horrendous. Hm, that’s new, what is that? And you write

it down. But you’re not going to write down just that