Winter in the United States
A while back, I made an episode about a snow trip my family had with friends. That was episode number 50, and it was a Chats with Shana episode – so less structured than other lessons. In it, I managed to cram a ton of important vocabulary words related to the topic of snow. Today, you’ll hear some of those words again and so much more.
This lesson is all about winter and cold weather. Everything from temperature to snow and snow trips, places to go skiing and snowboarding. Man, there’s a lot crammed into this episode, so stay tuned.
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This is a 5-minute English episode, and just like other 5- minute English episodes, you will be exposed to terms and phrases, collocations and expressions, all related to one topic. I call this fluency one topic at a time because by the end, if you learn the material well, you should be able to have a conversation with a native about this topic.
This is an intensive listening lesson. You won’t likely understand everything you hear, and that’s one hundred percent, OK. That’s the reason why the audio was short. You can listen to it multiple times.
If this is your first time listening to an episode like this, you might be asking yourself, How can I make the most of this lesson?
Well, listen to the audio once all the way through. Don’t do anything other than listen with the goal of getting a good overview of the story and understanding the gist. Then, while listening a second time, why not transcribe the story? So write down the story on a piece of paper word for word. Once done, analyze the text and pick out about 10 words and phrases to look up in a dictionary. Don’t overwhelm yourself by looking up everything; keep it simple.
Once you have the definitions for unknown words, listen to the audio a third time and you’ll be amazed by how much you understand.
Of course, as a language learner, you want to effectively remember the words that you picked. So there are plenty of things that you can do with your newly learned words and phrases in order to help with retention. Some people like flashcards, perhaps storytelling – writing a story with the words. Maybe even creating conversation questions to ask your language teacher or language partner.
My favorite way to learn is a bit old school. It’s just by writing original sentences using new words and phrases. Writing in general is a creative task, and it can help you formulate your ideas, so as if you were in an actual conversation with someone or creating sentences on the fly.
It’s simple, but very effective. If you write something, it also helps with retention.
The second option, if you are not interested in doing this all on your own, is getting the premium content I provide. So 5-minute English lessons contain the PDF transcript, definitions for all of the challenging words and phrases, exercises, phrasal verb work, conversation questions and quizzes. There’s also a segment on pronunciation and a bonus video to take your learning further.
If you’re interested in this idea of fluency one topic at a time, or just want to access the premium content, you can find it at americanenglishpodcast.com. A link will be provided in the episode notes for you to check that out (see below).
