Improving Listening Skills: Advice of a Native Speaker

A really cool teacher of English from Canada - Ronnie - advises on how to improve your litening skills. Watch and enjoy!

You might find her advice kind of obvious but are you sure you do those things to improve your listening?

Intonation and Stress

I didn't say he stole the money... Astonishingly, the sentence suggests 7 different meanings

To learn to express what you really think in English, follow the advice of the guy from the video.

So, what is it, you are always missing?

Listening vs. Reading

The new poll is on, which means it’s time we analyzed the results of the most recent one. Actually, they came as a surprise. I don’t mean the fact that listening beat them all astonished me. No, I kind of agree with those 48% of participants who believe it to be the most difficult skill to master. And I do not imply that speaking shouldn’t be on the second line of the chart as 40% of respondents insist. Writing came third with 12% in its favour, which is again not that astonishing. What got me stunned was the fact that nobody voted for reading.

In my humble opinion reading is definitely underestimated. It is a fantastic source of vocabulary and grammar. Unlike listening, reading appeals to understanding based on our knowledge of vocab items and structures in which they are used. And if we fail, the tasks become a guessing game. However, success in Reading fully depends on us and our knowledge.

Learning Thru Not Singing

I was trying to come up with my personal list of Top 10 Best Songs Ever. And you know… I failed! A lot of names, melodies, the lyrics… What are the criteria that should be taken into consideration when choosing the best song?

Pondering over it for a while I appealed to Google’s help. And it did show some patience and interest in my request. The usual 100500 links totally dazzled me. I looked through a few pages and got stunned. None of the charts were the same. In some of them I could find same names and same songs, in others – same names and different songs. Some of them appeared to be mysterious - the names I’ve never heard, the music I’ve never listened to.

As a result I decided to gather the in-my-humble-opinion-best of the best list according to my personal preferences. Here goes the most biased best baker’s dozen of songs ever:

1. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin

2. Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd

3. Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen

4. Hey Jude - The Beatles

5. What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong

6. Imagine - John Lennon

7. One – Metallica

8. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door – Bob Dylan

9. The Winner Takes It All – ABBA

10. My Way - Frank Sinatra

11. I Just Want You - Ozzy Osbourne

12. Sweet Child of Mine – Guns’n’Roses

13. If Today Was Your Last Day - Nickelback