Imagine you find a magic ring that makes you invisible. Nobody can see you. Nobody knows what you're doing. You could do anything. 

Take or steal whatever you want. Go wherever you like. Nobody could stop you. You could do absolutely anything.

There would also be no punishments, no consequences, no police, no negative judgments from other people, and even if you believe in God, they would not be able to see your actions.

Just imagine, you could do anything you want without the fear of consequences.

If you had this power, would you stay good, or would you become evil?

[00:01:09] 

This story is a thought experiment in the very famous book by Plato, The Republic. 

And this story asks us the question is, are we good because we are moral or ethical, or because we are scared of the consequences of our actions. 

That could be going to prison, getting a fine, getting judged by others, or if you believe in God, God seeing your actions and punishing you for them. Or maybe because you believe in karma.

This is a really interesting thought experiment to think about because when we think about our own actions, when I think about my own actions, am I good because I'm a good person or I'm scared of what would happen if I actually acted immorally.

[00:02:01] 

And if I had the power to act in a immoral or unethical or even illegal way, would I do so? If I could not be punished. 

That's the subject that we're discussing this week in my free English learning community. If you want to chat about it, we have live calls next week, and you can come to them.

They're completely free, and we can discuss this question.

In this lesson series, debates in English, I discuss the pros and the cons or both sides of an argument. 

#1 – My behaviour wouldn’t change

[00:02:36] 

First, I'm going to discuss the reasons why some people wouldn't change their behaviour, even if they had the power to do whatever they wanted without consequences.

Key Vocabulary

Moral (adj.) Meaning: based on your own sense of what is right and fair, not on legal rights or duties. For example, people acting according to their own moral.

Ethical (adj.) Meaning: morally correct or acceptable. For example, is it ethical to steal from the rich and give it to the poor?

Fine (n) Meaning: a sum of money that must be paid as punishment for breaking a law or rule. For example, you could pay a fine if your behaviour is inadequate.

Karma (n) Meaning: the good/bad effect of doing a particular thing, being in a particular place, etc. For example, doing bad actions is bad karma.

Immoral (adj.) Meaning: not considered to be good or honest by most people. For example, it’s immoral to steal.

Unethical (adj.) Meaning: not morally acceptable. For example, it’s unethical to do whatever you want with people’s feelings.

Discuss (v) Meaning: to write or talk about something in detail, showing the different ideas and opinions about it. For example, we will discuss this topic at greater length inside the community.

Essay (n) Meaning: a short piece of writing on a particular subject, written in order to be published. For example, there’s an essay prepared for this week’s topic.

Ethics (n) Meaning: moral principles that control or influence a person’s behaviour. For example, your code of ethics is different from everybody else.

Secular (adj.) Meaning: not connected with spiritual or religious matters. For example, the UK has become more secular over the years.

Shape (v) Meaning: to have an important influence on the way that somebody/something develops. For example, religion can shape the morals of a nation.

Commandment (n) Meaning: a law given by God, especially any of the Ten Commandments given to the Israelites in the Bible. For example, may people around the world know at least one of the 10 commandments.

Thou (pronoun) Meaning: a word meaning “you,” used when talking to only one person who is the subject of the verb. For example, thou shall not steal.

Upbringing (n) Meaning: the way in which a child is cared for and taught how to behave while it is growing up. For example, some kids have a very strict upbringing.

Explicitly (adv) Meaning: clearly or directly, so that the meaning is easy to understand. For example, your parents explicitly told you to not behave that way.

Consciously (adv) Meaning: in a way that shows that you are aware of something or noticing something. For example, the effects were more profound than we consciously realize.

Witness (v) Meaning: to see something happen. For example, you did witness your parents’ behaviour.

Subconscious (adj.) Meaning: connected with feelings that influence your behaviour even though you are not aware of them. For example, your subconscious can make you feel in many different ways. 

So, on Monday, I posted a weekly workbook, which was all about this subject, including videos, and an essay, and extra resources all about this subject. 

And I asked some of my community members what they thought they would do if they had the power of the magic ring.

[00:03:05] 

Some people said they wouldn't change their behaviour because they knew that if they acted immorally, or unethically, or illegally, then, they would still have to live with themselves. 

So, even if they wanted to do something bad or immoral, for example, stealing money from someone, then, they would still kind of experience the action of them doing it, and they'd have to live with themselves afterwards.

Because in their mind, and in their brain, they would know. That it's them who's done it and after they do something bad, they might feel guilty about doing it. 

And when someone has done something bad, this can really affect your mood and your personality, and you might think about it, and it might affect your feelings for a very long time.

So even though some people understand that laws and fear of judgments might stop people from doing things, some people have said that it's just their own feelings that hold them back. 

So, they might have a desire to do something bad, or they might even not have a desire to do something bad, but they have their own moral code of what they think is right and what they think is wrong.

[00:04:20] 

This moral code or moral compass comes from a wide range of places. It could be religious reasonings. 

So, for example, if you live in the United Kingdom, your, your ethics and your morality have probably been influenced by Christianity, even though Christianity is not a very popular religion in the UK anymore, it's still the biggest religion.

But I don't know too many people who actually classify themselves as a Christian. 

I don't even know that many people who classify themselves as practicing or I don't know many people in the UK that are actually a religious full stop.

Regardless of how secular the UK has become; the morals and values of people here have been shaped by the Christian faith. 

Everyone born in England can recite one of the 10 commandments. Thou shall not kill, for example.

[00:05:13] 

It could be the school that you went to, the teachers you had, the upbringing you had, and when probably most importantly, your parents and what type of role models they were and how they taught you to live. 

They may not have explicitly taught you how to live by giving you directions like this is wrong, this is right.

But you may have seen how they behave, and you might think that is the way how to behave and this might not happen consciously, like you're thinking: “Oh, I've just seen my dad do this thing, so I must do that thing as well.”

But I think kind of witnessing your parents’ behaviour definitely has a subconscious effect on people and their behaviour. And especially, Their values and morals.

#2 – My behaviour would change

[00:05:57]

Other people in my community said that it would change their behaviour, but they wouldn't do things that are classified as immoral or unethical in their opinion. 

Key Vocabulary

Realize (v) Meaning: to understand or become aware of a particular fact or situation. For example, to realize that something is missing from your accounts.

Significantly (adv) Meaning: in a way that is large or important enough to have an effect on something or to be noticed. For example, money can significantly change the lives of people.

Vigilante (n) Meaning: a member of a group of people who try to prevent crime or punish criminals in their community, especially because they think the police are not doing this. For example, some people would become vigilantes if given the chance.

Greedy (adj.) Meaning: wanting more money, power, food, etc. than you really need. For example, there are too many greedy people.

Corrupt (adj.) Meaning: willing to use their power to do dishonest or illegal things in return for money or to get an advantage. For example, is easier to corrupt people with money.

Ubiquitous (adj.) Meaning: seems to be everywhere or in several places at the same time; very common. For example, corruption is ubiquitous in justice systems around the world.

Snowball Effect (adj.) Meaning: a situation that develops more and more quickly as it continues. For example, drugs have a snowball effect on people.

Slightly (adv.) Meaning: a little. For example, you get slightly better every time you lose.

Favour (n) Meaning: approval or support for somebody/something. For example, you only do what favours you the most.

Abuse (n) Meaning: the use of something in a way that is wrong or harmful. For example, is all too easy to abuse power.

Realistically (adv) Meaning: used to say what you think can actually be achieved in a particular situation. For example, to realistically reduce the crime rate.

Elect (v) Meaning: to choose somebody to do a particular job by voting for them. For example, to elect a new official for the government.

Inherent (adj.) Meaning: that is a basic or permanent part of somebody/something and that cannot be removed. For example, the selfishness inherent  in humankind.

Self-interest (n) Meaning: the fact of somebody only considering their own interests and not caring about things that would help other people. For example, self-interest is common in wealthy people.

It could be breaking the law and be illegal, like stealing money for example, they don't think stealing money from some people is a bad thing. 

Think about how rich some people are in this world, like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. 

If you steal some money from them, and even if you don't keep it yourself, you could do, but imagine you donated to charity or you end world hunger, for example. 

I know that's not as easy as it sounds but imagine if you steal money from the richest people or the richest businesses in the world and give it to poorer people in the world. 

Is that really unethical, immoral? It is changing their behaviour. There are no consequences, but what they're doing, is it unethical or immoral?

[00:06:52] 

Especially if it really doesn't affect Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk's life too much. I'm sure you could probably pull a million from them and they wouldn't even realize, but you could significantly change the lives of many people. 

So, if some people got the ring, they would act like Robin Hood. Steal from the rich, give to the poor.

Other people said they would be like a vigilantes, or they would fight crime or try and use their power of the ring for good. 

So, it would change their behaviour, but in their eyes, they wouldn't be doing things immoral or unethical. 

They would kind of be like a Batman or another superhero where they see evil or bad people in the world, and they would use their power to try and fight that. 

In their eyes this is not immoral or unethical as well It could be problematic for some people to take the law into their own hands like Batman does, but in their opinion, it's not unethical or immoral.

[00:07:50] 

On the other side of the coin, some people said they would change their behaviour, and that humans are naturally greedy, and power corrupts human beings. 

There are so many examples in history of when people get power, they get corrupted. 

And this is somewhat of a kind of ubiquitous effect, any country, any political system, corruption happens. And when people get power, they often abuse it. 

And even though ordinary people like us might think that they might not do evil things because they might feel bad. 

But once they get the ring and they start acting with no consequences, I think this could be a snowball effect where you might start to do small actions and then you do something slightly bigger and slightly bigger and slightly bigger. And then you're deciding which world leaders live or die. 

[00:08:41] 

You're completely changing the world in the favours of what you think is right or wrong. 

And that could benefit you and you could redirect resources and power and opportunities to people like you, people from your own country, political causes that you care about. You could do anything that you wanted.

If people had that power, I think it would take a very strong individual not to abuse that. And that's what people have said. 

They would like to think that their behaviour wouldn't change, or they wouldn't do immoral or unethical things. But if they had the opportunity to do it, they realistically think that they probably would in the end.

I'm sure you know a politician who made all these promises before they got elected, and once they got elected, they suddenly changed, and they were corrupted by power.

Maybe humans are just weak, and we need to reduce the amount of power that each individual has and try and spread it out as much as possible because humans just can't deal with that type of power because we are inherently self-interested.

[00:09:49] 

So, imagine you had this ring and this power. What would you do? Would you tell people how you really thought about them with no negative consequences for yourself? 

Would you steal money from richer people and give it to yourself, or people you love, or people who need it more than them? Or would you completely go evil and do whatever you wanted and not care about other people?

[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Today, I'm going to tell you about my recent holiday in Montenegro.

[00:00:06] What I want you to do, is to try and listen carefully and try to understand everything. I'm going to speak as naturally as I normally would, and I'm not going to slow down my speech.

I'm not going to stop myself from using complex or difficult words or phrasal verbs. I'm just going to speak like a native speaker would and tell you all about my holiday.

[00:00:32] Something crazy happened in the airport on the way back home, so make sure you stay to the end to find out what happened.

[00:00:39] If this is too hard for you, you can go into the description, join my free English learning community, and in there, you will find a transcript to all my YouTube videos, including this one.

[00:00:52] So me and ten other friends went to Montenegro recently. We booked this holiday a very long time ago.

With a big group of friends, especially 11 people, it's quite difficult for 11, 28, 29, 27-year-olds to find a date or a week where everyone is free, especially in summer.

Everybody in the UK who doesn't have children or isn't a teacher really wants to go away before about the 19th of July and after September the 1^st.

Because in between those two dates are the six weeks where all school children have their summer holidays and that's when the holiday prices go up significantly.

So, everyone wants to go before the 19th of July, around that date, or after September the 1st, and we were thinking about when we were going, trying to find dates, and no one could find anything.

Even in the early weeks of September, and we had to settle for quite a late date in September. We did do a little bit of research beforehand, to make sure that the weather was going to be nice.

Living in the UK, especially Manchester, the weather is not great here, it rains a lot, so when we pay some money to go abroad, we definitely want to have the sunshine.

[00:02:11] So after our research, it looked like Montenegro was still hot and sunny in September. However, that wasn't really the case. A little bit more about that later.

[00:02:21] We settled on Montenegro as the country we wanted to visit because some people in the group had been to Montenegro about 5 years ago and they really wanted to go back and the rest of the group had never been.

[00:02:33] A lot of people in the UK have been to many places in Europe, especially Spain, France, Italy, for example, but Montenegro is not a very popular tourist destination for British people generally.

[00:02:46] I've heard the tales and the stories about the amazing, beautiful mountains. And I was curious, so I was pretty happy to accept the suggestion of Montenegro.

[00:02:56] My holiday got off to a little bit of a stressful start because we were going on a Friday. And our flight was in the afternoon. I think it was one o'clock. And for some reason I did not pack the night before or even a few days before.

Instead on the Thursday night, me, my girlfriend and her sister watched the new rings of power episode because they come out on Thursday, and instead of packing we did that.

[00:03:20] I regretted this in the morning because once I woke up, we realized how much we had to do that day before getting to the airport around 11 o'clock. And that was a pretty stressful morning, and we were pretty late to the airport.

[00:03:33] Usually people try and get to the airport about two hours before their flights in the UK, and I think we got there about 90 minutes before the flight. In the UK.

It's pretty common place for younger people to have a pint of beer at the airport, regardless of what time it is.

[00:03:50] So once we joined our friends, they were all having a pint of beer, obviously. But we didn't have too much time, and we weren't able to get one, but I don't really mind I didn't really mind.

Once I went on holiday and we were the first flight out of Manchester, and I think it was probably around five-ish in the morning or six-ish in the morning.

[00:04:09] And we were the first, first flight out of Manchester that day. And I remember having a pint of beer at like three or four o'clock in the morning. Just because it's a tradition Call us alcoholics; we just are people of tradition.

[00:04:23] However, even though it was a stressful morning, there were no problems with the flight. We got there pretty smoothly. I think the flight was around 3 hours and a bit.

I downloaded a podcast for the airplane, it was about the Roman Empire and Lex Fridman was interviewing a historian, and it was talking about the Roman Empire for three hours.

[00:04:45] So I think I listened to about an hour of that. I also listened to an audiobook of How to Grow a Successful Community. If you don't know, I have my own community for English learners. If you want to join, it's free, go in the description.

But what else did I do? I also played this really fun game called the flag quiz, because I don't have many apps on my phone or games, for example, but especially ones that work offline without internet connection.

[00:05:11] But I did have this game called the flag quiz, where basically, it's a multiple-choice quiz where they give you a... the name of a country and you have to choose the flag, or they show you a flag and you have to choose the name of the country.

Seems pretty boring, but it was a big challenge. I think there was 199 questions, and I got pretty obsessed with playing this game and I played it all throughout the holiday and I actually eventually completed this game with one of my friends and got 199 out of 199.

So, I might leave a link to this game in the description because it's pretty fun.

[00:05:41] I also started reading my new book on the plane I've started reading a big book. It's got about 800 pages in it called Shantaram.

Not going to go into details, but I got bored of reading Dune and I gave up. I've been reading it for a long time.

[00:05:56] I think I just couldn't get into it because I know the story already. I've watched the two films, so there was no motivation for me to really read it.

[00:06:05] When we got to Montenegro, we left the airport. We were surrounded by taxi men. I did ask the question to one of my friends.

Do you think there's any country in the world where the taxi drivers are mostly women? Because I can, like, when we got to Croatia, you're surrounded by men trying to get you in that taxi, say in Montenegro, the same with probably every country that I've been to outside of an airport.

[00:06:29] There are just 20, 30 men kind of asking you, if you want a taxi, why is it always men? Where are the female taxi drivers?

[00:06:35] After we picked up our rental cars, we drove to our villa, which was about one hour away from the airport. And it was pretty sketchy. The first car that we got into the headlight was broken. So that wasn't ideal.

So, we needed to go back to the dealership or the place where you get the rental car from and exchange our car, no problem.

[00:06:55] Then we drove there. Some people went to the supermarket on the way there, because we were staying in a villa, we had to make our own food. So, it made sense to stop by a big supermarket on the way and pick up some food and booze.

We were pretty hungry because some people ate maybe in the airport or just before we were on a Ryanair flight, so we didn't want to, I… I'm guessing most people didn't get any of the food on… on the flight because plane food is pretty bad and we arrived around six… six-ish, probably seven and we were waiting a while for the cars.

So, I think everyone's pretty hungry. So, we've got some nibbles for the evening. Actually, someone made pasta, which was pretty delicious.

[00:07:34] But let's get to the exciting stuff. What did I do in Montenegro? It was pretty busy. Usually when I go on holiday, it's a little bit more relaxed. Just kind of like experiencing the sun, sunbathing, drinking a few beers, reading my book, just chillaxing.

Sometimes if it's like. Not a city break. If it's a city break, it's a little bit more active, lots of walking, exploring, things like this.

[00:07:55] But some holidays in the sun, especially summer holidays are kind of more relaxation for me, but this holiday was crazy. I've never done so many things in a week.

And because we had three rental cars every day, we basically left the villa, and we did different activities.

So, on one day we went to the beach and the beach was really interesting because at the beach you were surrounded by these huge gorgeous mountains and it was really nice to be at a beach and have like a beautiful, beautiful scenery that wasn't just the beach.

[00:08:27] I just knocked over my water bottle.

[00:08:29] Rewinding one day, the first day actually, we did stay at the villa because that day was supposed to have the nicest weather. It was like sunshine all day, 27 degrees Celsius which in my eyes is ideal.

[00:08:41] After the beach day on the second day, we did go on a road trip and during this road trip, we spent a lot of time in the car getting to these beautiful places.

Because the whole idea of this road trip was going to see the beautiful sights of Montenegro. And the beautiful sights of Montenegro are the landscapes and the mountains.

[00:09:00] So we went in the car, we went up the mountains. There were lots of hairpin turns, like this. Very, very sharp, all the way up the mountain. Luckily on this mountain there were like barricades to kind of block you falling off if you went over the edge.

So, it was pretty difficult to fall off. But the problem with getting up this mountain and getting down was that the path was really narrow and you could only just about squeeze two cars into on, on the, on the road.

[00:09:29] So every time the. A car came past us. You had to really slow down and it was very close.

[00:09:36] However, the views from the top of the mountain were spectacular. I've never seen a place in Europe like this. I've been to New Zealand and the mountain ranges, and the scenery is beautiful, but I haven't seen a place like this in Europe.

[00:09:49] The second part of that day, we went to a little bit more of an undiscovered mountain and the views here were even better, but the path that was very, very dangerous and a little bit dodgy because those turns that I was telling you about, those hairpin turns, this time they had no blockade.

[00:10:09] Or barrier, whatever you want to say, and if you kind of slipped, you'd probably fall to your death. So luckily, no one died.

[00:10:16] After this long journey, we were thinking about going to this lake and going on a boat trip, but it was getting pretty late.

So, we decided just to drive back to Budva, where we were staying. We were staying in the mountains near Budva, actually.

[00:10:28] And on the way back, we stopped at the beach for the sunset, which is beautiful. We all went in the water. It was pretty cold. But it was a beautiful end to a great day.

[00:10:38] That night there was a thunderstorm it was raining pretty hard. When we woke up, because we were so high up in the mountains, it was so foggy or misty that you could hardly see.

And it was really atmospheric to be honest, because you could hear the, hear the thunder, you could see the lightning and it was so misty and foggy… knocked my water bottle over again.

[00:10:58] It was so misty and foggy that it just looked pretty cool from the balcony. Like you'd look around and it was like, well, this is actually pretty weird. It looks pretty odd. It was, it felt like the start of a zombie apocalypse.

[00:11:09] I think the night before we did lots of drinking and we, I think we did a quiz that evening and I think some people got pretty drunk and we stayed up pretty late.

So, we had a very relaxed morning because we knew the storm was coming and we just took it easy. Then in the afternoon, we found this like tavern or this restaurant, which was about an hour's walk away through this nice hike.

[00:11:30] So once it stopped raining, we put on our hiking boots and our jackets. We went on this hike down the mountain and went to this restaurant. This restaurant was completely empty.

No one else was there apart from the owners, but they had lots of kittens and dogs running around, which is pretty cool if you like animals.

[00:11:46] If you don't and you're allergic to them, like one person there, not so enjoyable. I ordered a fish soup from there for five euros. And those kittens and cats were pretty interested in that fish soup.

And they didn't leave me alone the entire meal. But they're pretty cute, so can't complain.

[00:12:02] Once we were done eating there, we had to walk back up the mountain, which was actually pretty challenging. And it was getting dark, so we just got home before it got properly dark. But I was so happy with that day.

And that day was probably one of my favorites because when we woke up, we thought, “Oh no, what are we going to do today?”

[00:12:21] Because we thought it was going to be raining all day, but it turned out to be really fun and that restaurant slash eco-tavern was actually really enjoyable.

[00:12:29] The rest of the trip, we went into Budva for a meal one evening. The restaurant there was great, the waiter was a little bit weird to begin with, but we warmed to his sense of humor by the end, and we tipped him quite nicely.

[00:12:41] Because it was the end of season, there wasn't too much happening in Budva afterwards, we went to this really nice bar and had some drinks there, but around 12 o'clock it seemed like everyone was dying.

We did go to this one club. Type thing and we walked in and did a complete 180 and walked out because it wasn't really our vibe.

[00:12:59] We got a taxi home and the taxi into town was 30 euros per car we got scammed by some Montenegrin taxi drivers and they were arguing about who was able to take us.

[00:13:09] Clearly, they were fighting for scraps of tourists, kind of late into the season. They probably didn't have that much work that night.

So, I think they were arguing about who gets that job because they knew it was quite far away and they knew they could scam us. So, there was a... a night rate, and I've never seen a taxi meter go up so quickly in my life.

[00:13:29] It was like, you're watching the meter and it's like 12, 13, 14, 15. I'm talking about euros. So, it was pretty heavy. So, it was pretty expensive.

And when we got to the top, there was three cars and I could hear some of my, once we arrived, because I was in the last taxi, we could see the two cars in front of ours stopped.

[00:13:48] They were kind of discussing the prices and maybe arguing with the taxi drivers outside of the cars. And the first taxi had charged the group 50 euros. The taxi That was second, charged the group 60 euros, and the taxi that I was in was asking for 70 euros.

So, there was a bit of a dilemma, a bit of disagreement, I think they lied to us, I think they promised to one of the people in the group 30 euros.

[00:14:14] But they obviously did some night rates on their meter or like doubled the meter speed or something like that. So that sucked.

We were able to negotiate on price and we came to like an agreement, but it wasn't really happy, but like, what can you do?

We weren't really gonna argue and cause a problem or a scene with three Montenegrin taxi drivers in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere, where they know where we were staying. Probably not too wise.

The… the money that we had to pay extra split between 11 wasn't. isn't substantial It's not gonna, you know, it's not gonna break the bank. So, it's okay. It was okay in the end.

[00:14:52] Other days we did a boat trip in the lake, which is pretty cool. We also visited the old city of Kotor, which kind of like the beach was really nice because in this old city, you were surrounded by mountains again, and it was pretty unique to be in like an urban space surrounded by like natural beauty.

[00:15:11] Especially those are really high mountains. So every day we were doing something different, lots of drinking, lots of late nights, so after I finished the holiday, I felt like I needed another one.

[00:15:22] Overall, it was a great holiday. I completely loved it. Montenegro was beautiful. I'm sure you will see that from some of the pictures that I will show you. I completely recommend it to people.

[00:15:33] However, I would say do get rental cars because they're pretty necessary and you want them to have that freedom of exploring the beautiful country.

[00:15:41] A great way to wrap up summer and now we're on for the gruelling, cold, miserable, dark, damp winter in the UK.

[00:15:52] If you understood 80, 90 percent of this video or even more, your English is excellent. Well done.

[00:15:59] I completely forgot to mention what happened at the end of the holiday. So, I'll tell you now.

Basically, when we got to the airport, two of our friends checked in to the flight quite late and when they checked in on their phones, it didn't give them a seat number, which is a little bit strange, because usually they give you a seat number.

 You know what seat you're sitting in. But it's said that they didn't have a seat number, and they had to go and check in, in the airport.

So when they, they thought they had checked in properly, but when they went through security and they kind of went to scan their flight boarding pass, they told them, both of them, to go back to where you take your suitcases to check them in and they found out that the flight, Ryanair, the company Ryanair had overbooked the flight so they had sold too many tickets for how many… how many seats the actual plane has.

So, they thought that they might have to, they thought that they might miss their flights because they wouldn't be able to get on. So, they were pretty nervous about that.

[00:17:08] They, it was a Friday and they, they were told that the next flight back to Manchester was on Monday. So, they'd have to stay the entire weekend. And one of them had to go to work on Sunday and do like a handover.

And he wasn't going to be able to make it. I think he was flying to a different country for work on that Monday.

[00:17:27] So that was pretty scary. So that wasn't ideal. They went through and what they had to do was they had to wait, they had to wait until everyone got on the plane to, to see if someone hadn't turned up for their flights and there would be space.

So, we… we kind of said goodbye to them when we were getting on the plane because they had to wait until the very end, we thought they wouldn't be able to get their flights.

[00:17:51] They waited, and luckily, I guess one or two people didn't show up for their flight, so they were allowed to get onto the airplane and come home with us, but it was a bit of a rollercoaster of, “Oh no, we can't… we've… we can't get on the flight. Actually, it could be nice to stay in Montenegro for a few more days” and then, “Oh, actually, we are going back home.”

[00:18:12] So, bit of a, a weird situation, but I couldn't believe it that… airplane companies and airlines are legally allowed to oversell the flights to make more money.

It doesn't seem like it would be profitable because they'd have to pay for compensation. So, they'd have to pay for people to stay in hotels and their next flights.

[00:18:35] And things like this and probably spending money for the days that they were stuck as well. So, it doesn't seem like it would make money and be profitable, but I guess someone is running the numbers and it probably does work out profitable, which is why they do do it, I guess.

[00:18:54] But still, it seems very unethical to, to do this because… I'm sure some people… this has happened to some people, and they have missed very important flights and missed things like weddings or things related to work. So, I didn't even know that companies were allowed to do this, but pretty shocking.

[00:00:00] In this video I'm going to share with you three tips on how to speak and understand native speakers. 

So many people learn English from their native country with teachers from that country as well and they often speak English with their classmates or with people from their own country. That's not a problem.

[00:00:24] There is no problem with tutors, not from England or the United States or New Zealand or Australia. They can be as good as native English speakers. 

However, it's a very common problem that lots of people learn English to a good level, but when they go on holiday to England, they start working with British people, for example, they are like, whoa.

[00:00:47] Hold on a second. What language are they speaking? Because it doesn't sound like English.

[00:00:52] This can be really frustrating and annoying because you might think that you have a good level of English. 

Like you may have a B2 certificate and you're thinking, “I'm good at English. I'm an upper intermediate. I can speak fine. I can order food. I can have casual conversations. I can understand or even watch television,” for example.

[00:01:13] But when it comes to speaking to native speakers in the real world, it's a different experience.

[00:01:19] The first tip I have for you is learning more specific vocabulary related to that region, especially informal words, slang, and phrasal verbs.

[00:01:31] There is a TV show about crime in London called Top Boy, and the language used in that show is predominantly language that is used by working class or poorer areas in London. 

So, if someone like my parents watched that, who are middle class and from a town in the middle of the country, they might not understand a lot of the language that's being used.

[00:01:57] In the UK we have lots of different regions, and in those regions, they will have specific words for specific things. 

For example, there is a bread roll, and some people call it a bap, some people call it a roll, and some people in the north of England call it a barm cake. 

When I moved to Manchester, I didn't know what a ginnel was, it's an alleyway behind people's houses.

[00:02:23] While there are many specific vocabularies for these smaller regions, there will be some informal words, some slang words, and definitely phrasal verbs that are used all throughout the country.

[00:02:35] Phrasal verbs are particularly horrible and difficult because you may know the two words. 

For example, I'm looking forward to this weekend. You may know the word look. You may know the word forward, but you might not know that looking forward to something means that you are excited about something that's going to happen in the future.

[00:02:56] And even if you do know the two words or the three words involved in the phrasal verb, you might, well, you probably won't be able to guess what it means even with the context.

[00:03:07] So you have to learn these phrasal verbs. One of the ways that you can learn these phrasal verbs and informal and slang words is just by increasing your input. 

That is listening to more native speakers speak or listening to people who have lived in that country and used that dialect a lot as well.

[00:03:23] So if you're working with British people or moving to the UK, then I would recommend listening to podcasts or watching TV series or chatting to as many British people as you can. 

And then you will be exposed to more phrasal verbs, more slang, more idioms, for example.

[00:03:40] This is an automatic and subconscious way to absorb more vocabulary. There are lists online. If you search British vocabulary, phrasal verbs slang, you'll be able to find a long list of these on the internet. 

If you want to use flashcards or however you learn your vocabulary, you can do it like that.

[00:03:59] But that is my first tip is to learn the specific vocabulary, especially phrasal verbs, because they are horrible.

[00:04:08] My second tip is to increase your input again. And it's not just any old input, it's listening to native speakers speak. 

Because often when you are listening to materials made for people learning English, they may speak at a slower speed. than what they normally do. 

So, when you go into a normal conversation or when you are having a discussion with people and they're speaking at a normal speed, you might think, hold on a minute, they are speaking very fast.

[00:04:40] So you need to get used to that. You need to train your ears to be able to keep up the speed. It's okay. 

If you need to slow it down for now on YouTube and Other things, other video streaming services or podcasts, you can slow the speed down if that's necessary, but really try to work up to a normal speed and try to listen to as many native speakers speak casually and normally as they do.

[00:05:06] So if you are able to listen to content, podcasts, TV, where, where it's not designed for language learners, just listen to that as much as possible, because the speed can be very difficult. 

Like, I remember when I was learning Spanish and people would speak to me in Spanish, and I was just like, that sounded like one word, and he spoke for 30 seconds.

[00:05:30] It's not only the speed that you need to train your ears for. It's also the accents and very much like the vocabulary. 

We also have to think about choosing the accent that you're training your ear for. 

If you're going to move to the UK, move to the UK, working with British people, then listen to more British people, especially the people that, for example, if you are going to be working in Birmingham, watch Peaky Blinders.

[00:05:57] Find podcasts or celebrities who are from Birmingham and try to listen to the accent as much as possible.

[00:06:05] Listen to music artists, you know, the UK and the United States have a lot of music artists. They also have loads of TV and films. 

So, there is so much content out there for you to absorb and listen to and really train your ear by for that specific accent, if you are moving to the UK and you are finding it difficult to understand British people.

There's no point listening to Americans or listening to Australians, because even though you will be listening to English, you are listening to a different type of English and they may speak completely different, well, I know they speak completely different than people from the UK.

[00:06:42] The UK has so many different accents. So please try and like work out which one you really need to listen to more. But listening to British people in general will be helpful regardless of what city or region they're from.

[00:06:54] And the third tip is exposure and practice. For some reason, people, when they're learning a different language, find it a little bit scary when they're communicating with native speakers, rather than people also learning the language. 

I remember when I was doing my podcast with a YouTuber called Veronica.

[00:07:15] She is a Russian native speaker, and she speaks English perfectly. You can't really get much better than her as it comes… when it comes to someone who has learned it as a second language. 

However, she revealed to me when we're having a conversation or in one of our podcasts, that she still gets a little bit nervous when speaking to native speakers in English well, more so than she would do when speaking to an English learner, which was crazy to me because she is so good at speaking English.

[00:07:44] And this is not just an example or experience of hers. This is the experience for many people. So, one way to overcome this and combat this fear is just by exposing yourself to more native speakers. 

And even if you do live in a different country, then online, find a tutor, find a community like mine where you can speak to people.

[00:08:05] Actually, I'm the only native speaker in my community. So… but you can speak to me. But yeah, find native speakers. wherever, online, in person, and just get used to that experience of speaking to native speakers, because most of us are nice, I think. They're not going to laugh at you. They're not going to be mean.

[00:08:24] So I think with enough practice, repetition, exposure, these fears can go away, and they'll be… you'll be less scared when communicating with them, and if you're less scared, then communicating will be a lot easier.

[00:08:39] If you thought the video was useful or you found it enjoyable, then please consider subscribing to the channel because I do put out lots of different videos with a wide range of topics. 

Sometimes I give advice like this, sometimes I actually make my own content for people to listen to. And also, if you want to join my free English learning community, go in the description and you'll be able to join for free.

3-DAY WEEKEND LISTENING LESSON

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name is Sam. I help English learners immerse themselves in the English language by focusing on subjects like politics, psychology, philosophy, society and culture. 

Today I'm going to bring to you a listening exercise where I tell you about my weekend. Recently, we had a three-day weekend in the UK.

[00:00:21] For no particular reason, it was just a public holiday on a Monday, celebrating summer, I think. 

So, I'm going to tell you about my three-day weekend and what I got up to. Your job is trying to listen to me tell you about this weekend very naturally.

[00:00:40] I'm going to not hold back with my language. I'll be speaking at the same pace that I normally speak at.

[00:00:46] If you are finding it difficult to understand everything I'm saying and you would like a transcript of this video, you can join my free English learning community. A link is in the description. 

You will be given content every single week so you don't have to find it yourself to make sure that you're reading more and listening more and watching more videos in English, but you will also get all the transcripts to every single video I make. 

[00:01:11] So on Friday, my girlfriend had a medical procedure, so I spent a lot of that day looking after her. 

I went with her to the procedure, and I came back home. Then I went to the gym in the afternoon. I trained the bottom half of my body, so legs.

[00:01:26] And then I made her dinner, and we watched a film. We were just taking it easy because she needed to rest, so we chose to have a relaxing Friday. 

We watched the film Aliens, because I don't know if you know, but there is a new Alien film from the Alien franchise in the cinema at the moment. I really like the first one, it's called Alien.

[00:01:49] Some of the others, I haven't watched in a very long time, but I don't think there as good, but I realized that I haven't watched the second alien film which is called Aliens. 

It's basically the same film as the first one with more Aliens in it. So, Alien, first one - one Alien. Aliens, second one, more Aliens.

[00:02:10] I really enjoyed the film, I gave it 5 stars out of 5, so basically a great film for me. 

I thought it was really thrilling, very exciting, didn't… I kind of could guess what was going to happen because I could see the similarities between the first one and this one. 

But still, a really enjoyable film, even though it's quite old now.

[00:02:30] We didn't really plan anything too big for the weekend because we… I didn't know how my girlfriend would feel. 

She felt okay on Saturday, and we decided to go to the pride event that was happening in Manchester. 

So, this is a yearly celebration of the LGBTQ community and some of my friends who are amongst this community, I guess, were going and they were spending the entire day there and going to some event afterwards where they would get drunk, probably, definitely, I think they definitely did.

But there is a parade where there is… a lot of the streets are kind of blocked off for this parade where lots of floats go down and vehicles go down and different companies sponsor these different vehicles.

[00:03:16] And basically there's a long, it's like a marathon, I guess, but people are walking and dancing and celebrating. 

There's People watching and cheering and cheering them on and supporting them and clapping them and just enjoying their presence. So, we went to the parade in the morning. I think we… well, I think we left at around half 12.

[00:03:33] Actually, we got the train into the city center. I did go for a jog beforehand because I wanted to go for a run that day. 

I wanted to do some cardiovascular exercise, but my knee has been hurting a little bit recently, so I didn't want to go for a full-on run. The dog also needed walking. We have a small French bulldog.

[00:03:55] He's almost two, called Alfie and we needed to take him for a walk because we didn't want to take him to the pride event, or the pride parade.

Because there'd be lots of people there, there'd be lots of loud music there, so I didn't think it would be a suitable environment for him, and I don't… we didn't think it would be a great idea to bring him because people might tread on him.

Don't want that to happen, so we needed to take him out for a walk so he'd be tired and he'd be okay at home alone.

[00:04:25] So instead of taking him for a walk, I thought I would kill two birds with one stone, and I would go for a jog with Alfie, even though he is a French Bulldog, he can run. 

So, we just went on a short jog. My knee did hurt a little bit, but it wasn't too bad. I think I will be able to run on it pretty soon.

[00:04:44] We were at the pride parade for about an hour. I went with my girlfriend and her sister. We met one of my friends there and his boyfriend and his family was there as well. 

I also saw another one of my friends there and my girlfriend saw some of her friends there as well.

[00:05:02] We were about there… there for about an hour and an hour and a half. She had never been to one of these events before. 

I think I've been to one in Leeds while I was at university there. And I've also been not to a parade, but I've been, been to another pride event in Manchester. But I've been to a parade before.

[00:05:19] It's quite commercialized at this point because you just see big companies, like send… like vehicles of some of their employees who maybe are part of this community or want to show support for this community. 

So, it's a bit weird just to see, like, supermarkets and airlines, send… kind of vehicles down with their employees.

[00:05:40] It just seems like they're using it for advertising. And you do question how much these companies actually genuinely care about these events. I think they're just doing it for social acceptance and advertising essentially. 

So, there is a commercial aspect to it, which I don't particularly like, but it's nice to see people celebrate being themselves.

[00:06:01] And obviously I support this community. So, I was quite happy to show my support there as well.

[00:06:06] We got home in the afternoon and took it quite easy. We were just resting and relaxing, thinking what we're… working out, what we wanted to do the rest of the day. 

We had the idea of going for some food, and there was a very small pizza restaurant or shop that was close to our house before, and it upgraded its venue to a much bigger venue.

[00:06:28] There was a food hall there, and the food hall closed down, and this pizza shop or restaurant took over. And we were yet to visit the new venue, so we thought we would walk there about six o'clock and try and walk in and get a table. 

But they were fully booked, so they turned us away, even though we were loyal customers to the old venue, which we did say, but that didn't work.

[00:06:52] They were fully booked. They couldn't squeeze us in on a small table, which was a little bit annoying. The staff were a little bit patronizing as well. So didn't really enjoy that, but I'll still go back because they do sell good pizza.

[00:07:04] Instead, my girlfriend, and her sister ordered a Indian take away, but I'm trying to save a little bit of money, and I'm trying to eat healthy. So, I cooked some food, and we watched another film. 

We watched Predator! Because the Alien franchise and the Predator franchise actually do link up at some stage and there is an Alien versus Predator.

[00:07:25] I don't think this film is actually particularly good, I haven't seen it in a long time. But I haven't seen the film Predator before and neither had my Girlfriend or her sister. 

So, we watched it, has Arnold Schwarzenegger in. Pretty fun film, not as good as the Alien film in my opinion.

[00:07:41] It's still quite fun. It has very similar themes in it. So, it wasn't too surprising. You could guess what's going to happen again, but still fun to watch. I do recommend.

[00:07:51] On the Sunday I woke up quite early because I had a few things to do, needed to get the house ready. 

We were leaving Manchester that day and we were going to drive to my parents’ house because my parents are away in Sweden, because my sister lives there. 

[00:08:04] They were away visiting her. I have the dentist in my hometown on the Tuesday as well. So, I needed to go. So, I thought, why not spend the bank holiday weekend there? 

But we stopped off in the Peak District, which is near Sheffield in the North of England to meet some of my girlfriends, friends from university that are getting married next year, and they invited me to the wedding and I've never met them.

[00:08:28] So I thought it was a good idea that we meet them before. Well, I didn't think it was, they thought it was, and my girlfriend just wanted to meet them anyway. 

So, we decided to meet up with them in the Peak District and go for a nice countryside walk there. So, the four of us include, well, not including the dog, five of us went for a walk there.

[00:08:45] It was quite nice. Then we drove to my hometown, and we took it easy. We actually stopped off at a pub after the walk and we had a Sunday roast, which is traditional Sunday food in the UK. And that was pretty big. 

I had three different types of meats on my plate, and I think it was 1,700 calories. So, it's quite a lot of food.

[00:09:07] We ate that about 3 o'clock, so I wasn't too hungry for the rest of the day. So, ate no more food that day. Did have a little bit of red wine in the evening though.

[00:09:16] So, quite a lot of driving on the Sunday, but luckily my girlfriend was driving, so no problem.

[00:09:23] So we were in my hometown on the Monday, and we wanted to make the most of the day. So, we woke up quite early for a day off and we went on a big long walk about nine kilometers in the countryside up some big hills.

[00:09:36] The French bulldog Alfie was a little bit tired because his legs are quite small, and he can't breathe too well because he's a French bulldog. 

So, he was quite hot by the time he got to the top of the hill, but he managed very well for his size and condition. 

We came home, we were deliberating if we should go to another pub and eat some more food, but we thought we'd save some money, and we had a full English breakfast.

[00:10:00] Instead, we went to the supermarket, bought all the ingredients and made it ourselves. We relaxed the rest of the day. We finished watching Troy, which we started the night before. I've not seen that film before. 

So, we finished watching that film on the Monday. My girlfriend did a bit of reading in the garden, also played on her Nintendo Switch, while I did a little bit of work that I needed to do.

[00:10:24] Hmm. Then we cooked a spaghetti Bolognese which took quite a long time, but it was delicious. And we just chilled for the rest of the evening. 

We were going to finish a film that we started ages ago called Princess Mononoke. It's a Studio Ghibli film. It's like animated film but we didn't end up watching that and we did a bit of reading in bed.

This is why you shouldn't be scared to speak English

[00:00:00] When I moved to Madrid in Spain to become an English teacher, I needed to speak Spanish. 

I was really nervous about speaking Spanish and I was always anxious about making mistakes and thinking that other people were going to think I was either stupid or an ignorant British person abroad.

[00:00:21] And let's face it, there are quite a few.

This fear of making mistakes and not being perfect when I spoke Spanish really affected my confidence in the Spanish language and it was one of the main reasons why I didn't progress very well with my Spanish level. 

I was quite good at reading, and I could understand quite a lot when people were speaking.

[00:00:46] However, when it actually came to my turn to speak, I was really bad at it. 

And as an English teacher, I've had so many students come to me with a fear of speaking English. A lot of them have really good levels. They can understand complex texts. They can listen to TED Talks. 

But when it comes to speak, they really can't do it unless they're talking about something very simple, or they're using language that they're extremely comfortable with.

[00:01:15] So in today's video, I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't be scared to make mistakes when talking English.

There are two main reasons why you shouldn't be scared. The first reason why you shouldn't be scared to make mistakes when speaking English is that native speakers make mistakes.

[00:01:31] If you watch this video, I have probably made one mistake somewhere. I have probably spoken not using perfect grammar. I may have even just made a mistake then. 

When we're writing and when we're speaking, they're two very different things, and usually people speak in a very different way than how they write.

[00:01:49] And if you listen to any conversation between two native speakers, they will speak grammatically incorrect all the time.

Often, they make mistakes. I hear people say could of instead of could have a lot. I hear mispronunciation a lot. 

One of my friends says “I borrowed him a book” instead of “I lent him a book.” I do correct that mistake, but no one really corrects anyone's mistakes unless it's a really big one. 

And people make mistakes all the time, even in their native language, and people don't really care that much. Because communication is not about not making mistakes or being perfect. It's about delivering a message. 

It's about sharing your thoughts and it's for the other person to accurately understand what you are thinking and what you are feeling.

[00:02:38] So, it's okay if you make a small mistake. It's okay if you make many mistakes. Especially if it's an informal, casual, and friendly conversation. It's not in an important work meeting. Then, what's the problem? 

If you've expressed yourself the way that you want to, even if there's a mistake in there, that's fine.

[00:02:56] And it's fine because it's normal, it's expected, and even native speakers do that as well. 

So, why would you hold yourself to a standard? That not even native speakers hold themselves to. Why would you expect to be perfect when native speakers aren't perfect?

[00:03:13] People who have lived in England for 80, 90 years will still make a mistake. Not because they're old. Because it's normal to make mistakes when we speak. And even when we write. 

So, that should give you a little bit of peace the next time that you're scared about making mistakes… is that native speakers make mistakes.

[00:03:33] The second point is that it's actually quite good to make mistakes. If someone corrects you, which they probably won't to be honest, but if they do, that's how you learn. 

If you're always perfect, you're never going to learn. If you win every chess match you play, you're never really going to learn anything.

[00:03:48] If you lose, you learn. If you make mistakes, you learn. So don't fear the mistakes, embrace them. That is part of the language learning experience. That is how you get better. 

And if you are in an environment like in a classroom or you have a one-on-one tutor, this is a place and a person who can correct you when you do make these mistakes, and you can learn from them.

[00:04:11] So to summarise. People probably won't correct your mistakes, like if you're speaking to a waiter or to a friend or someone in public in English or a language that you're learning, it's very likely that no one's going to say anything. 

They're not going to laugh at you, they're not going to say “everybody, look, Sam just made a mistake with his pronunciation,” that's probably not going to happen.

But if it does, if that small percentage, if that small chance does occur, and it happens, and they say actually hold on, it's pronounced like this, or you made a mistake with your grammar there, I've never heard anyone say that.

But if someone corrects your pronunciation, for example, it doesn't matter, it's okay, it's just one of those things, move on, get better, and hopefully, in the future, you won't make that mistake again.

But even if you do, that's fine as well, you're learning a different language, that's difficult, people make mistakes. Just go easy on yourself.

[00:05:05] The fear of making a mistake will often hold you back in conversation. You won't experiment with using new words. 

You will stay within a small comfortable range of words that you know and you're comfortable and familiar with and you'll never grow and expand. 

So, challenging yourself, making mistakes along the way is just all part of the process and they should be embraced rather than feared.

[00:00:00] If you don't know how to pronounce a word in English, I know the best tool for you.

You can find real examples how the word is said in British English, American English, even Australian English. It's completely free and works for so many words. Let's have a look.

[00:00:18] So, if you go on Google or any search engine of your choice and type in YouGlish; like “You" from YouTube, “Glish” from English, and you go on this one, or you just go on “youglish.com,” consent to their cookies and search for any word that you are interested in learning how to pronounce.

So, for example, I'm going to type in the word bounce. You may have seen this written down. You may not know what it means or how to pronounce it.

[00:00:51] You search it in YouGlish. And it will give you examples from YouTube of people saying the word bounce. So, this is one video out of 8,183.

Let's have a listen. “These waves of air pressure enter our ear canals and bounce off the eardrum.” And bounce off the eardrum. Okay, it even shows you the sentence here. So, you can see it in context as well, which is excellent.

[00:01:22] Let's have a look at the next one

[00:01:26] “Its also got a real sort of bounce to it” Bounce to it. Did you see how different that was? That shows you how the same words can be pronounced completely differently.

So, if we go on UK, we'll hear some British people saying the bounce, so the first one was a British person.

[00:01:44] “And the idea was that sunlight would bounce off the mirror.” Bounce off the mirror, sounds quite similar. “These kinds of events, but the only way of seeing how they actually bounce back.” Bounce back, okay, phrasal verb.

“And even light particles they can convert often bounce off them.” Bounce off them. Okay. Let's have a look at an American saying bounce. “Its also got a real sort of bounce to it, which is.” There you go, same one.

[00:02:07] “Why? Just keeps me balanced and I can bounce things off for,” okay. “We'll… we'll bounce around. We're gonna go there.” We'll bounce around. “Than just a single bounce around.” Single bounce around the corner.

Let's listen to some Australians. “Bounce ideas off others.” Bounce ideas off.

[00:02:25] “We could project off, bounce off with a long one.” This is great because you can see so many different people from different parts of the world pronouncing the same word.

If you do want to practice saying it yourself, you can just say it after them, or you can type it in Google, “bounce pronunciation,” and you'll be able to see what it sounds like.

[00:02:48] Bounce. You can choose the pronunciation as well, British or American. It's a bit more robotic and it's not real people saying it like YouGlish.

But yes, it still can be really helpful. You can slow it down. “Bounce.” Bounce. Okay. Yeah, so that's the tool. So that's the video. Very quick. Just wanted to show you that excellent tool that I came across because I think it's fantastic.

[00:03:17] See you later.

How to Find an Online English Teacher

[00:00:00] In one of my recent videos, I gave some advice, saying that if you want to improve your English, you may need some help from an English teacher.

I'm not just saying that because I'm an English teacher, but I know the value of having someone who is an expert that can identify some of your weaknesses and tell you those weaknesses and then help you focus on them and bring them up.

So, your overall level increases and you become a more confident and better English speaker.

[00:00:31] So today I'm going to show you how to find a good English teacher online because there are tens of thousands of them. Some of them better than others, and I want you to have the best quality education you can.

[00:00:47] Okay, so I'm going to use the website Preply. This is the biggest online tutoring website I know of.

There are others and you can probably apply the same rules that I'm going to show you today to different websites like italki, for example, but I teach on Preply, and I have for a while.

[00:01:08] I've stopped doing it as much because I'm focusing on my online community at the moment, but I'm very familiar with Preply. So, this is the website I'm going to show you.

And I think there are some great tutors on here. So, if you go over to the Preply website, you will be able to “unlock your potential with the best language tutors.”

[00:01:29] Let's have a look. So, you can actually get Preply to use the algorithm to find you some tutors, but I think we can do it ourselves.

So, you will be able to kind of… get started here and go through some of your goals and things. But I like to just choose from the 23,000 available. So, let's have a look.

[00:01:49] Make sure you select the language that you want to learn. So, for example, English. Second of all, you have your price per lesson. There's no point looking through tutors that you can't afford.

English lessons can be expensive. They can also be very cheap. You will find some teachers charging £2 per lesson.

[00:02:09] And there will be some tutors who charge £100 per lesson. So, there is a wide range of prices available. Let's imagine that you have a budget of £26 per lesson.

The third filter you can choose from is country of birth. Now you have a wide range of different countries here you can choose from.

[00:02:30] You can choose people from Argentina. If you want to speak to an Argentinian, but a lot of people choose countries that are natively English and mostly if they kind of work with a specific nationality.

So, one of my students works with a lot of British people, so he wanted a British tutor. Some people are moving to California, so it's probably better if they learn from someone from the United States of America.

[00:02:59] But there are great tutors from many different countries, even non-native speakers. Some non-native speakers know the English language a lot better than native speakers, especially grammar.

So don't be put off just because someone is not originally from the United Kingdom, or the United States, or any other English native speaking country.

[00:03:20] But for this example, I'm going to press the United Kingdom. You can also look at the times available as well.

So, if you know that you can only take lessons in the evening, you may as well put evening and put the time slots. So, between six and nine, there's no point looking at tutors if they're not available during the times that you're available.

[00:03:42] So with these four filters, we can narrow it down. So, I want to learn English. Less than £26 per lesson from the United Kingdom available in the evening. That 23,000 tutors has now gone down to 1,271.

So, let's see who we can find. What is the next step? The next step for me is by sorting.

Instead of choosing our top pick Preply has an algorithm that no one quite understands, and they choose some tutors to go up the top of this algorithm and they punish other ones due to many things.

[00:04:19] What do I think you should go by? I think you should go by years of experience and reviews.

You will probably find some tutors that are cheaper if they are newer to teaching and they might be more hard working, they might be more passionate, they might actually be naturally better tutors.

But with everything usually experience pays and they’ll be able to provide more value to you and they’ll be able to identify those weaknesses better.

[00:04:42] So what you can do on Preply is sort by number of reviews. I think reviews is the best way to see that someone is a good tutor.

This guy, Ali A., 234 reviews with an average 4.9. This guy looks like a great tutor. He's got years of experience, 12 years experience. The reviews speak for themselves. I don't know this person, by the way, it's just an example.

[00:05:07] If we go back there… you'll be able to find so many different tutors with excellent reviews and these people you can trust because the reviews are there. There are a few other different filters that you can do.

So, if you want to focus on British English, or if you have an IELTS test coming up, if you want to focus on business English or conversational English, you'll be able to find some people who specialize in specific things.

[00:05:32] I'm just going to put conversational English, British English. If you want someone who speaks the same native language as you, or has another language apart from English, then you can press Spanish, and see which English teachers also speak Spanish.

This guy, John B., he's got 162 reviews, 4.5 on average, and he also speaks Spanish and intermediate level.

[00:05:54] You can choose a native speaker or not. The next one is tutor categories. So, there is a thing on Preply called a super tutor.

This doesn't really mean that they're a better tutor. It just means they're more consistent on the platform, and it's just a way of the algorithm kind of rewarding specific tutors.

[00:06:11] But yeah, if you want to choose a super tutor, that's fine. For example, Ryan C. is a super tutor. This guy looks like a good tutor as well.

He's got 53 reviews, 5 of them five star, almost had 3,000 lessons on the platform, and he's only £12 per hour? He speaks Arabic at B2, Italian A1, German A1, Spanish A1, okay.

[00:06:34] And has five years teaching IELTS and general English… for £12 an hour?

Like having a month worth of lessons with him or two months of lessons with him could really just find those weaknesses and then you don't have to continue learning with these tutors.

You can just say, thank you. You've taught me for a month.

[00:06:52] I find… I found the things that I can focus on by myself now. You don't need to pay any more money and there you go. That can really just improve your English just by having a few lessons with a few great tutors.

They will be able to help you. They'll be able to redirect you in… in a way that would be really beneficial.

Should the Government Give Everyone Free Money?

Introduction:

[00:00:43]

Welcome back everybody for another lesson. This lesson today, we're gonna have a look at a very interesting political and economic policy, which is called Universal Basic Income sometimes called UBI for short.

And this idea became quite popular over the last few years as there was a candidate in the American presidential election called Andrew Yang, and he had the idea of giving everyone in America a universal basic income.

[00:01:17]

A universal basic income is what you'll see on either the thumbnail or the kind of description, the title of this video, where the government gives everybody, including rich people, including the richest people, free money.

And the money is supposed to be given to these people to cover the basic needs of living.

[00:01:39]

So, the idea is to give people enough money so they can afford food, shelter, water, heating, electricity, transport - I guess. And the idea of this is to reduce and eliminate poverty once and for all.

So, even though the United States and the United Kingdom are incredibly rich countries, relative to other countries.

And there are people in those countries who are really rich and have lots of money; there are still lots of people who live in poverty.

[00:02:12]

For example, in the United Kingdom, we have 4.3 million children who are classified as living in poverty.

So, people think people… supporters of universal basic income think that if we give every single person some money, essentially, then they can spend that money. So, it goes back into the system.

[00:02:35]

It's not like they're just keeping it and the money gets taxed from people. And then it just sits in people's bank accounts, but people will spend that in the economy and the money will still continue to circulate.

So, people think that if we give everyone enough money to afford the basic things then we will completely eliminate poverty and it's quite an interesting idea.

[00:03:00]

I think it's quite a radical idea. It's not particularly a new idea because I think people were talking about this in the 1800s! Believe it or not.

But yes, universal basic income is an idea that people on the left of the political spectrum have thought about. When I have thought about this idea and when I have brought this idea up to people.

[00:03:25]

Often people just think it's really stupid and think, “why would we just give everyone free money? Why don't people just go to work and get jobs and pay for food and housing that way?”

And it's a pretty good argument against it. So, let's jump into the debate.

I'm gonna give three reasons why I think universal basic income is a good idea, and three reasons why I don't think it's a good idea.

For # 1 – Eliminate poverty

[00:03:49]

The first reason why I think universal basic income is a good idea is that it can eliminate poverty. So, I think poverty is an absolute scourge on society.

Key Vocabulary

Policy (n). Meaning: a plan of action agreed or chosen by a political party, a business, etc. For example, the company has adopted a firm policy against shoplifting.

Universal Basic Income (n). Meaning: is a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of unconditional transfer payment. For example, the idea of universal basic income has gained newfound popularity in recent years.

Afford (v). Meaning: to have enough money to be able to buy or do something. For example, none of them could afford £50 for a ticket.

Relative (adj). Meaning: considered and judged by being compared with something else. For example, you must consider the relative merits of the two plans.

Circulate (v). Meaning: to send goods or information to all people in a group. For example, the book was circulated widely in Rusia.

Radical (adj). Meaning: new, different and likely to have a great effect. For example, a truly radical concept.

Scourge (n). Meaning: a person or thing that causes trouble, difficulty or mental pain. For example, the scourge of war/disease/poverty.

Fulfilling (adj). Meaning: causing somebody to feel satisfied and useful. For example, a fulfilling experience.

Dignity (n). Meaning: the fact of being given honour and respect by people. For example, the dignity of work.

Disgust (n). Meaning: a strong feeling of dislike for somebody/something that you feel is unacceptable, or for something that looks, smells, etc. Unpleasant. For example, the idea fills me with disgust.

Billionaire (n). Meaning: an extremely rich person, who has at least a thousand million pounds, dollars, etc. in money or property. For example, a Texas billionaire.

Unequal (adj). Meaning: in which people are treated in different ways or have different advantages in a way that seems unfair. For example, an unequal distribution of wealth.

Resource (n). Meaning: a supply of something that a country, an organization or a person has and can use, especially to increase their wealth. For example, the exploitation of minerals and other natural resources.

Taxation (n). Meaning: the system of collecting money by taxes. For example, changes in the taxation structure.

Provide (v). Meaning: to give something to somebody or make it available for them to use. For example, please provide the information.

Prevalent (adj). Meaning: that exists or is very common at a particular time or in a particular place. For example, the disease is more prevalent in Latin America.

Slide into (v). Meaning: to move gradually into a worse situation. For example, the industry is sliding into decline.

Safety net (n). Meaning: an arrangement that helps prevent disaster if something goes wrong. For example, a financial safety net.

I don't think people in the… I don't think… I don't want anyone anywhere living in poverty. I want everyone around the world to have a good housing.

[00:04:09]

I want them to be able to afford good food, clean water, never to be cold in their own houses, and to live fulfilling lives.

Some people probably don't want that for everyone, and they're evil, but not me.

I think that everyone should be able to live with dignity, and I think it's disgusting that people in economies like the UK or America live in poverty.

When there is so much wealth available and kind of… that exists within these countries and in certain people's bank accounts.

Then I think it's… it's so bad that we have billionaires while we also have people sleeping on the streets.

[00:04:48]

I just think that just shows an unequal society.

So, to eliminate poverty and to give everybody the resources to be able to live with dignity would… a simple way to do that is to give every single person enough money to live essentially.

The government can get this money through taxation and then they can give it to the people.

We know that even though some people do have jobs, that sometimes these jobs don't pay well enough for people to provide for themselves and also their families.

[00:05:21]

If there is a single parent and they have three children, then it's gonna be very difficult for that person to balance family life, looking after their children, while also working enough in a high skilled job to pay the money.

And, in the future when robots and artificial intelligence become more prevalent within society, they're gonna start taking people's jobs.

[00:05:43]

And what are we gonna do when more and more people become unemployed? I don't know. But unless new jobs are created, then more and more people may be sliding into poverty, which we don't want.

So, to give every single person a certain amount of money to provide them a safety net, so they'll never live in poverty, sounds like a good idea.

Against # 1 – Waste of Money

[00:06:05]

One reason why universal basic income is a bad idea is that it's stupidly wasteful. Why would we give money to people that don't need money?

Key Vocabulary

Wasteful (adj). Meaning: using more of something than is necessary; not saving or keeping something that could be used. For example, the whole process is wasteful and inefficient.}

Regardless (adv). Meaning: paying no attention, even if the situation is bad or there are difficulties. For example, the weather was terrible, but we carried on regardless.

Silly (adj). Meaning: showing a lack of thought, understanding, or judgment. For example, her work is full of silly mistakes.

If we had universal basic income in the United States, that means that every single person regardless of how much they earn gets given a certain amount of money from the government. Let's just say it's $1000.

[00:06:31]

Just for example.

Why would we give $1,000 to Elon Musk? Why would we give $1,000 to Mark Zuckerberg? Why would we waste government money by giving the richest people in society money?

While there are people that actually need it? It's completely wasteful.

So instead of… I would say the majority of Americans don't need an extra $1,000 into their bank accounts because they're not living in poverty.

[00:07:00]

Surely a better way of spending taxation or the money that you would… the money that you would need to gather to give to every single American or even anyone in any country.

Unless it's like Iceland where they don't have that many people. Not a dick, but yeah, it'd be easier to do it there. That's what I'm saying.

[00:07:21]

To raise that money in the United States, you're gonna have to give to everyone… you're gonna have to get a lot of money and to give that to every single citizen is just wasteful.

Most people don't need that money. So, isn't it better just to kind of gather less money through less taxation and then just give support to people that really need it? I just think it's a silly… it's just a silly idea.

For # 2 – A Safety Net

The second reason why I think universal basic income is a good idea is that it will provide a mental safety net to people. So, everyone knows that money can be a huge source of stress for a lot of people.

Key Vocabulary

Source (n). Meaning: a place, person or thing that you get something from. For example, your library would be a useful source of information.

Breakdown (n). Meaning: a period of serious mental illness in which somebody is unable to deal with normal life. For example, it became too much, and he had a breakdown.

Head start (n). Meaning: an advantage that somebody already has before they start doing something. For example, being able to speak French gave him a head start over other candidates.

[00:08:03]

Some people go through mental breakdowns because of financial situations. A lot of marriages end because of financial situations.

So, I think if there was a safety nets in place… so imagine everyone in society, knowing that regardless of how bad their life got.

If they… if they get fired from this job, if the company ends, if the company's profit stops and a business owner has to quit the business, then they'll never live on the streets.

That they'll always have enough money and support from the government that they will never live in poverty, that they'll always be given enough money to provide for themselves.

Even if it's a very basic level of living, just kind of having a house and enough food and water. Even if it's just that that will be a guarantee to people that however bad things can get it's not gonna be that bad.

[00:08:56]

And I think to have that kind of a safety net of like… a couple having an extra $2,000 a month would just be incredibly beneficial from like just a mental point of view.

Like money can be such a huge problem for people. If we just give people this head start, then it's gonna make people feel a lot more secure and happier.

[00:09:18]

And then… Why wouldn't we want a more secure, happy, and less poverty in society? Very simple way to do it. Give everyone free money.

Against # 2 – Increase in prices

The second reason why I think universal basic income is a bad idea is that businesses and landowners will just raise their prices.

Key Vocabulary

Inflation (n). Meaning: a fall in the value of money and a general increase in prices; the rate at which this happens. For example, an inflation rate of 3%.

Subsection (n). Meaning: a part of a section, especially of a legal document. For example, the case is described in subsection six below.

Restrict (v). Meaning: to limit the size, amount or range of something. For example, speed is restricted to 30 mph in towns.

Capitalist (adj). Meaning: based on the principle of capitalism. For example, a capitalist society.

Enterprise (n). Meaning: a company or business. For example, he’s in charge of an enterprise with a turnover of $26 million.

Random (adj). Meaning: done, chosen, etc. without somebody deciding in advance what is going to happen, or without any regular pattern. For example, the information is processed in a random order.

Drastic (adj). Meaning: extreme in a way that has sudden, serious or violent effect on something. For example, the government takes drastic measures.

Outgoings (n). Meaning: the amount of money that a person or a business has to spend regularly. For example, write down your incomings and outgoings.

So, imagine living in your country and the government say, “okay, we're gonna give you, you know, a €1000 a month, a £1000 a month, a $1000, whatever it is.

[00:10:50]

And then, there are no regulations or controls to make sure that landlords - people that own houses and they rent them out to people - don't…

If they're not measures to make sure that they don't increase them too much, they're just gonna think, “hmm, well, everyone in society has an extra £1,000, €1,000 in their bank accounts. Why don't we just raise the prices of our rent? Because they will be able to afford it.”

[00:11:15]

The same with businesses. Recently we've had high inflation in the United Kingdom relative to history, around 15%.

If you calculate all the different industries and subsections and one of the areas that we've had a lot of inflation is food.

[00:11:34]

And that's probably been the thing that I've noticed going up the most. So, when I go food shopping. I look what I'm buying. I look at the basket and I look how much it costs.

I think, “wow, I'm buying three items and it's £20? This is kind of crazy. Olive oil? I have to save for olive oil now!” I'm joking, but olive oil is expensive.

[00:11:55]

So, I think that recently some businesses like supermarkets have put up prices because everyone else is putting up prices.

Maybe the cost of the… the production of apples. We grow apples in the UK, or pears.

Maybe this hasn't increased, maybe it's actually the same amount to producing apples... produce apples, but everything else in the supermarket is going up, and also their competitors are putting up prices, so why don't they put up prices of apples?

[00:12:30]

I don't trust businesses. I don't trust landlords to keep prices low when they know that everyone has got an extra bit of money in their bank accounts.

Because the idea of a business is to create profit. I've got no problem with that.

But if they know that their customers and clients can pay more money for their services, especially services that they need, like food, like housing, then they will probably increase prices.

[00:13:00]

And most governments don't want to kind of restrict business. We live in a capitalist society. The whole idea is free enterprise, free markets.

People get to decide the prices. If customers think that's a good price, then they buy it. Government try not to get in the way. And why would they get in the way here?

[00:13:18]

Why would they just randomly decide to do it? Maybe because universal basic income is a huge policy, and it would change kind of society drastically. So maybe they would be forced to?

But yeah, I don't trust businesses not to raise prices. So, imagine everything… imagine the government gives you an extra $1,000 per month.

[00:13:41]

Let's just say euros. Cause I'm guessing most people are not gonna be American watching this. Imagine the government gives you an extra €1000 per month, and then your monthly outgoings increase by €600.

Because… these things that you need to buy: transport, taxis, housing, rent, food. They just up the prices and you just end up spending that money anyway and you don't get anything more.

[00:14:07]

It doesn't provide you with a safety net, you're just in exactly the same place, but the government gives you an extra €1,000 and you're spending that extra €1000 doing the same things that you were spending, buying the same things that you were buying before.

If anything, this is just, people getting taxed to pay for this really expensive system and then giving it to the people and then them spending more money on the people that got taxed… business… businesses.

[00:14:36] It's silly.

For # 3 – Pursuit of Passions

The third reason why I think universal basic income is a good idea is… because once the robots do take over our jobs, people will have to rethink how they spend that time and one way we can spend that time is by creating art, creating businesses.

And I think if we did have a universal basic income system, then I think people would take more risks and more gambles when it comes to their passions.

Key Vocabulary

Rethink (v). Meaning: to think again about an idea, a course of action, etc., especially in order to change it. For example, to rethink a plan.

Gamble (v). Meaning: to risk losing something in the hope of being successful. For example, he’s gambling his reputation on this deal.

Pursue (v). Meaning: to do something or try to achieve something over a period of time. For example, to pursue a goal.

Genuine (adj). Meaning: sincere and honest; that can be trusted. For example, she always showed a genuine concern for others.

Automation (n). Meaning: the use of machines and computers to do work that was previously done by people. For example, automation meant the loss of many factory jobs.

Take over (pv). Meaning: to begin to have control of or responsibility for something, especially in place of somebody else. For example, Paul’s daughter took over the job.

[00:15:06]

I think a lot of people work jobs that they don't really love. They may like it a little bit. They may like Friday afternoons. They may like the people they work with.

But the job that they actually do, they don't really like, they never really wanted it. It's not their passion. They have other interests that they care way more about.

And I think if people were given a safety net; a real safety net of… a guarantee that they can live with dignity regardless if they have a job or not. Then I think people would pursue their passions more.

[00:15:39]

They would be artists. They would dedicate their lives to sports, perhaps. Maybe they might not become a sports person, but maybe they'll just spend more time doing things that they actually love.

And I think this would be better for society, genuinely. Imagine, you know, without art, without films, without TV, without music, without paintings or our books.

[00:16:01]

Life would be pretty boring and if work is… if kind of the demand for work goes down in the next 50 to 100 years because of artificial intelligence, because of automation, because of robots, then maybe people will get… be given more free time to do the things that they love.

And they would be able to take risks with that and concentrate on that more if there was a guarantee and a safety net of a basic income.

Against # 3 – Work Motivation

[00:16:31]

The third reason why I think universal basic income is a bad idea is because it will disincentivize people to go to work.

Key Vocabulary

Disincentivize (v). Meaning: to remove the advantages of doing something, so people no longer want to do it. For example, the aim is to disincentivize illegal immigration.

Can’t stand (v). Meaning: use especially in negative sentences and questions to emphasize that you do not like somebody/something. For example, I can’t stand to watch him suffer anymore.

Stand (v). Meaning: to be in a particular condition or situation. For example, you never know where you stand with her.

Inclined (adj). Meaning: tending to do something; likely to do something. For example, they’ll be more inclined to listen if you don’t shout.

Imagine the government is paying you a certain amount of money for doing absolutely nothing. Regardless if you have a job or not, then why would you be motivated to go to work? Like I just said in my previous point, most people don't love their jobs.

[00:16:56]

So, if you don't love your job, and you think, “hold on a minute… I hate my boss, I hate my job, I'm unhappy, makes me stressed, I can’t stand speaking with customers, and I know that the government are gonna give me a €1,000 per month for doing nothing. I could be playing video games all day.

[00:17:16]

I could be watching YouTube. I could be sitting with my dog all day. Why won't I just do that?” And it makes sense. People go to work because they need to earn money because they need to live.

And if they get… given money from the government. Just for doing nothing. I don't think many people would probably go to work.

[00:17:39]

I think… Genuinely I think people will still go to work because they want extra money cause it buys some freedom.

However, due to this point people will be less inclined to do jobs that are important, especially like service work and also, I think people would work less.

They'd work part time like if… they would cut their hours in half. They would just work 20 hours a week for example and just get that extra €1,000 from the government. Sounds pretty good to me.

So yeah, I think people still need to go to work because people need to create products and services for us to buy.

[00:18:17]

Maybe not at the level that we're buying them, but still important that people go to work. Very necessary at this moment in time. The robots have not taken over yet.

So yeah, that's why, that's the third reason. People will stop going to work, or people will go to work less if the government just give the money for doing nothing.

[00:18:39]

Okay, that's the debate. The idea of universal basic income is an interesting one. I don't particularly know where I stand on this. I kind of can see the good and bad things about it.

So, I'm really curious about what you think. So, if you enjoyed it and you have some opinions on this topic, let me know in the comments.

[00:19:02]

I'm going to link down quite a few… kind of resources in the description because there is a lot of material on this online and loads of cool YouTube videos of people explaining the pros and cons of it.

So, I'll link it away. So, thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.

Become Fluent Faster: An Expert's Guide to Language Immersion

[00:00:00]

Sam: Hi everyone, I've just recorded a great interview with a French polyglot named Keith Parum. He's got some great language learning advice that can be applied to anyone regardless of where they are in their language learning journey.

It's great advice if you're learning English and he rejects many of the traditional methods of learning language.

So, he's not a big fan of doing drills or exercises or focusing too much on grammar and he really focuses on making language learning fun.

So, if you're a little bit bored or stuck with your English journey, then I think this interview will definitely give you some motivation and some new ideas to take you to that next level and for you to achieve your goals and the fluency level that you want.

Hi, Keith.

Keith: Hi, Sam.

Sam: How are you?

Keith: I'm doing great, thank you. How about you?

Sam: I'm very well, thank you. So, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your language learning experience?

[00:01:02]

Keith: Yeah, all right. So, I'm Keith, Keith Parum on social media. I'm an English teacher. I teach online mainly nowadays. I've been learning languages forever since I can remember.

And my first language was English. I fell in love with it when I was little… after that, I fell in love with, Asian countries and cultures.

So, I've started learning Japanese, Korean, and Chinese as well over time.

Sam: Okay, great. But you're not English. Where are you from?

Keith: Aha! So that's… that's a convoluted answer, but I'm French, I'm born and I grew up in France, but I'm from Algerian descent.

Sam: Okay.

Keith: So, yeah, so I speak, Arabic from Algeria. So, it's a dialect, it's not really Arabic.

Sam: I see.

[00:02:00]

Keith: And, I've had to, to actually learn French, at six years old when I had to start a school, right. And I didn't know French by then.

Sam: Wow.

Keith: That was my first real experience with language learning, but I forgot about that, to be honest. And what I mostly remember is, learning English.

Sam: So, you've told me that you're a big fan of the immersion technique of learning a language. Can you tell me what that is?

Keith: Yeah. So, immersion is, so, so basically, the, the old way of thinking about immersion was to go in the country, maybe do a one to three years of language school in the country, right?

[00:02:49]

And be in that environment… immersed in the environment. Right. But nowadays, because we have, internet and access to so many media, and to so many people in so many languages, and etc.

You can do that from home and that's mostly what I do nowadays. I just immerse from home watching, things, made for native by natives, right?

So, shows, targeted to natives. I read books, I play video games in, languages I'm learning, etc. So that's really trying to change as much as you can from your environment to the target language that you want to acquire.

Sam: Great. So previously people used to think that you had to actually travel to a different country, but now because of the internet and accessibility to so many different materials and also content, you're able to immerse yourself in different languages from the safety of your home.

Keith: Yes. So that's great for introverts.

Sam: Yeah, exactly. Okay. And is, does this work with beginners?

[00:04:00]

Keith: So, it works for everybody at any stage, but, it's, more difficult for beginners because, they either don't have experience learning a language on their own, so they might need guidance the most, out of everybody, and they might be the less susceptible to have what we call comprehensible input because, they will try to immerse with native content made for adults, even content made for children in certain language is not appropriate for beginners.

Because for example, if you start with fairytales. The language is older than the modern language, so you have to learn old patterns of the language that might not be relevant to your daily life.

And if your goal is, for example, just to travel in the country for maybe a few weeks and to just learn the gist of the language to get by, it's not recommended to go through immersion.

[00:05:02]

Right, it's…. It’s better to go through the classic way of having a tutor or, using a method dedicated to traveling, for example.

Sam: So, what level would you recommend starting to try and immerse yourself more, or should you be trying to do this as much as possible? Does it matter if you even understand everything?

So, is it harmful for a beginner to be listening and watching TV in a, in a second language, even if they don't understand anything, or is that beneficial as well?

Keith: Absolutely not bad to do it in any way. The worst that can happen is you not understanding the message, but accidentally becoming good at differentiating the syllable in the language.

So, beginning to be good at picking up sound in the language. Right. And this will translate much later, granted, but it will translate absolutely to a better fluency and pronunciation because you will be able to catch up your own mistakes. Right?

[00:06:14]

Because you have that… I call it the spider sense of language. Right. It's the instinct that natives have. And you can only have that instinct that spider sense. If you've, you've been exposed to enough language.

So, it doesn't matter if it's comprehensible or not. What matters is, are you interested in it? Do you like it? And, what, what can you do to pay more attention to the idiosyncrasies of the language compared to yours?

If you can do these three things. Even if you think in your own language, you will start to pick up stuff here and there. And the cradle of learning for beginners that go pure immersion.

I don't recommend it, but some people do it anyway. So, what they do is they start to pick up from context, like babies, right?

[00:07:12]

Like, kids, sorry. from context cues and, things that you say automatically, like hello, thank you. like small words. And this becomes their base of the language.

But the good thing is that from the get-go they have better pronunciation in general.

Yeah, that's a main difference between someone who starts alone with the traditional methods and someone who just dives deep, in, into the immersion method.

Sam: Yeah. Sure. Great. Are there different kinds of types of materials which are easier for people to immerse themselves in?

Because listening to a podcast, for example, with no… if you're just listening to it, sometimes I'm listening to a podcast and I'm doing something else like cleaning the dishes or in the gym.

[00:08:02]

And if I stop focusing for 30 seconds, I get lost in the conversation. So that's gonna be even more difficult in a second language. So are there different types of materials or things that you can engage with, which are easier to start with?

Keith: So, for most of the main language, those that are very popular, like Japanese, English, French, Spanish, for example, even Russian, you're gonna find everything.

All levels for everyone, and every, everything you're gonna also find in, different age group for different age group.

So, for example, in English, you can find, Disney movies, Disney books, and the books can be targeted to six years old, 12-year-olds, adults, and it's gonna come, as a novel, for example, for adults, while it's gonna be like a picture book for children.

[00:08:59]

Right? So yeah, you can find anything in most of the languages for any level.

Sam: Okay, great, and what about TV? Is that, does that count as learning a language if you're just sitting on your sofa and watching TV?

Keith: Yeah, so… so depending on the… the method that you're following, some people will say it's only passive learning.

So, it's not really counting toward language acquisition, but it's counting toward listening comprehension, let's say.

Sam: Hmm.

Keith: And some other people would say, no, it absolutely counts because you need to be immersed anyway. And most of what you hear every day, you're gonna forget. So, it's part of the process.

So, I'm part of that movement, like anything you do will be beneficial at some point. It's just not beneficial right now. And because it's a subconscious process.

The more you immerse any way you can, the more it's gonna give you back over a long period of time. So, you might not reap the reward right now, but it's gonna come at some point.

[00:10:11]

Sam: And some people, they may… let's imagine someone is learning English and they may watch the… like the audio would be in English, but they might use the subtitles in their native language.

Do you recommend that? Or do you think the subtitles should be matched to the audio as well?

Keith: So, it depends on your apprehension of the language, right?

So, some people have that, scarcity mindset. No, that's not it. The… they're scared of the language, right? But it's something to learn from school because they had bad grades, etc.

But actually, everybody is good at learning language. You just forgot that you were good at it, right?

[00:10:54]

Because you, you didn't have that feedback, right, from school. You had the opposite feedback. So, the idea is that if you're still scared, that's fine to use your own native language at first.

And you're gonna start, like I said, picking up smaller words. If you start by using native subtitles, then in that case, it's gonna go faster, but you also will, if you're a beginner, you'll have a bit of a more painful time at the beginning?

But unfortunately, that's a discomfort you have to go through in order to achieve greatness, like in any sport, for example, you have to go through that… that first hurdle.

Sam: And can you explain to me the idea of comprehensible inputs and what kind of… as a percentage, how much should you be understanding of the language that you engage with?

[00:11:50]

Because if I'm learning Spanish, for example, and I… I only understand 5 percent of it, that obviously that it's not harmful, like you said, but I don't know how efficient that is in my language learning kind of type… like productivity, the time spent towards that.

So, is there like a golden zone of a percentage of how much you should be understanding?

Keith: So, the science says that ideally you should have, one element in a sentence that you don't understand, and you should understand the rest of the sentence so that the sentence can… you can infer the meaning of the word through, context, right? Context is what, give you the true meaning of the word.

Words have a range of meanings in general, not just one meaning, but several. And depending on the context, it's gonna change. So, what you want to be good at is picking up that context. Right?

So, if you… you want to follow the “Golden Rule,” then you would pick up a book or a… a TV show that's, let's say a, a graded reader type like of show, right?

[00:13:05]

And, it would be right at your level, but you won't make as fast as progress you could, if you were immersed in with the native content. That's not really aimed at your level. Why? Because in a native content, you have more content… context. And because you're bombarded by specific context made for native.

You're gonna pick up cues rather than vocabulary at first. Right. And those cues will slowly start to, like, un-fog, like… it's like a fog language, right? So, un-fog the meaning of the words in said context.

And that's a much better way to approach learning vocabulary, for example, because if you learn vocabulary in isolation, like flashcard system, they're good, but only if you have sentences with a lot of contexts, right?

[00:14:05]

If you don't have that context, you're trying to brute force the word from consciousness to subconsciousness, right? But if you start with the cues, you start with something fun, maybe that you enjoy, like some people like watching anime. Right?

They enjoy anime, even if they don't understand it, because they see the characters moving and it's funny, etc.

Like kids do with movies, they like to repeat them, etc. So, if you do that, you pick up the cues, and the cues become what you attach the situation and the context, therefore the meaning to, right?

And it becomes easier to pick up the meaning later, when you… you know the story of the red car? So, it's a phenomenon where you are not aware when you walk in the street of the red cars, right?

[00:14:57]

You, you never see them, you don't pay attention to them. But if you're talking to your friend and he's talking about a red car all day or all week, you're gonna start noticing the red cars, right?

That's the same phenomenon. You're gonna start to pick up cues and then words and what they really mean over time.

Right? And the best way to… to do that fast is to engage with real, like, “real content,” right?

So not… so Bruce Lee has a saying about martial arts in movies. So, to make a good fight scene. You have to not make it natural, but… or unnatural, but make it unnaturally natural or naturally unnatural, right?

And what he's talking about is when you go to a gym to learn martial arts, like, let's say boxing, some people will practice drilling a lot. Some people will only want to fight in the ring.

So, what they're doing, just like us are learning a language, is practicing with drilling grammar on one side or vocabulary, right?

[00:16:08]

So, building the portfolio, like I call it. And on the other side, building the instincts. So over time, they both have their own greatness, their own strength, right?

But the ideal is to combine the two. So, for language, it's a bit specific, a bit… a special case because it's better to start with, instinct.

So, you build up that natural native instinct in the language of that spider sense so that when you come back to the other side, you have an easy time attaching the information to the context… to the right context. Right?

And you don't make as… from my student perspective, what I've noticed is that people who start with immersion, make less mistakes overall, and they have an easier time, and they ditch me faster, but I'm happy for them.

[00:17:08]

They understand the game of learning languages, so they don't need me, so I'm happy for them.

Even at intermediate stages, they don't need me. They know what to do. Right? But those who have been, beat down with the traditional method, they need their parents, they need someone to hold on to, and that's why I… I call what I do, guided immersion, right?

Because most of my job is more like coaching. I have a few students, sometimes they're really old, sometimes they're really young.

And the thing is, I spend more time coaching them, telling them that they're good, they're actually good, that their mistake is not a bad thing.

[00:17:54]

There's a saying in Japanese, falling seven times, but getting up eight times.

Sam: Yeah.

Keith: Yeah, so every improvement you can make counts more than every mistake you're making.

Sam: Absolutely. Just to go back a little bit, you mentioned these cues. What is an example of a cue when you are engaging with content like television, for example, is it like a, a facial expression?

So, you may not know a specific word in the sentence.

But you can see a facial expression of one of the characters and you could see that he's sad and you might just… you don't know what exactly that word means, but you understand that he's sad.

So, the content… the context is something to do with sadness.

Keith: Yes. That's exactly right that… you nailed it.

That is… for example, when someone say hello, it's a universal sign now to just gesture your hand like that, right?

So, what's funny, for example, if you show a Star Wars movie to someone who doesn't speak English, right? And the guy says something.

[00:19:04]

Like that to hypnotize the other person, right? They think they're saying hello.

Sam: Oh, okay.

Keith: Right? So, if they don't know that. But that's still a way to pick up a cue. They've picked up that cue. He moved his hand so therefore he might be saying hello.

So now you have to pay attention to the rest of the scene to know if it's true or not, right? but they pick up this kind of thing pretty fast.

And, yeah, cues are just hints to what the meaning is in that situation. And the easiest words that you can pick up generally are yes and no in any language.

So, people tend to really exaggerate these two in most scenes. Right. And it's super easy to pick up. So that's a good illustration for that way, I think.

Sam: And how often should we be looking up words?

[00:19:59]

Keith: Depends. So, the power of kids is that they don't care.

Sam: Yeah.

Keith: Adults would care too much, right? So, that's one of the toughest things to teach someone, especially an adult, to not care as much. Why? Because you want to infer the meaning as much as possible. Right?

But it's really uncomfortable, we used to comfort, and we used to having everything instantaneously, right?

So even with apps now and TikTok, etc. Right? So, everything comes to us in one click, etc. And we know we can just look up the word, right?

But if you stop looking up the word for maybe five minutes per day, just put it in your mind that for five minutes, you're not gonna look up anything and try to understand the scene.

[00:20:49]

Even if you don't understand the language pronounced and uttered, try to understand the gesture, the situation, something like that.

And you're gonna see that if you truly do spend five minutes, five whole minutes, you're gonna pick at least five to ten words, just like that.

So, it's a good test. To know if it's real or not, right?

Yeah.

Sam: Yeah. Okay. Great. And… obviously, when you're in a foreign country, you are automatically immersed.

But when we're at home, what type of things can we actually do? So, we talked about podcasts and television. What else can we do?

Keith: So, my advice is always do something that you like. Don't try to do, to pick up something that you are not really interested in.

And even for the content, try something that you either already know in your native language that you've liked before and want to review in that language or have… how should I put that?

Have unstoppable curiosity for, so for example, I can't stop reading thrillers and science fiction type mangas, right?

[00:22:10]

So that's how I, tricked myself into reading Japanese, right? I know if I see a good thriller or story about sci fi, I'm gonna pick up the book and start reading and forget that I'm doing it in another language.

But if I had to force myself to read a book, that's gonna be a chore. And it… it's the last thing you should do.

If you feel that it's a chore, stop right now, go seek some help.

Sam: Yeah.

Keith: Yeah.

Sam: So, engage with stuff you, you like, it could be, you have a favorite film, you've seen it 20 times in your native language. That would be a good place to start with. Watching it in a foreign language.

Keith: Absolutely, because you already know all the situation. You have the cues, right?

Sam: Yeah.

Keith: Now all you have to do is transfer new vocabulary to these cues, right?

[00:22:58]

So, you're gonna pick up a lot of things from a movie you've already seen a lot of time, especially if you know it well.

For things that you don't know, you're new to them. It's gonna be a bit tougher depending on the range of difficulty of the material.

So that's why I advocate for doing something that you like.

So, if you want to play games, play games in the language. If you want to talk to people, talk to people. Talking is not a bad thing because you're gonna receive a lot of feedback from your talking and that feedback is your input, right?

So even if you're not focusing on that. When you talk, when you speak, and even if you have anxiety speaking and, you can't utter the word correctly, etcetera, or get corrected, all that doesn't matter in the long scheme of things, right?

What matters is that the feedback that you're receiving in the language is what's gonna make you better over time.

So, yeah, if you want to talk to people, go talk to people, that's not a problem.

[00:24:07]

Sam: Some… I've heard some people say that they changed their phone into the language that they're trying to learn.

And maybe they're, kind of… their settings on their computer. Are you an advocate of that?

Keith: Yes and no. So, I'm advocating more for being in between, right? So do what's the most efficient for your situation, and the most logical.

So, for someone who's working all day, that's not gonna be efficient because you're working in your native language.

You need your computer and phone for tasks that are important in your native language. If you switch to, let's say Chinese and you can't read anything yet, right?

Even if you know most of the apps and where the buttons are placed and settings, etc. When you have an emergency at work, you're gonna start panicking, right?

Sam: Yeah.

[00:25:04]

Keith: How do I put it back in French or English or whatever, right? So don't do that if you're working. I would much rather have a second phone and I would only put easy things on there.

So, my journey started with listening to music in English. That's what enticed me, back then because I couldn't understand a few words and the rest was melodies, and happy things, right?

Things interesting to me at the time. So, I've like rolled up, a lot of, vocabulary this way.

And the sentences, even if people tell you that music is mostly poems and proses, right, it doesn't work in real life when you can rizz somebody with a few love songs, so… it's efficient, efficient enough, let's say.

[00:26:04]

Sam: Absolutely. Okay. And immersion is mostly… It seems like it's mostly about input, like you're just inputting a lot more of the language that you are learning. Do we have to practice it? Is there output? Are we kind of writing and speaking?

Keith: So yes, there's always output and it's… it depends on who you are, like extroverts are gonna want to talk to people.

Even if it's just in chats because they don't have access to tourists or, people from that, other country, right? And it's fine. You can start early.

But what we think is that… it's not that speaking hurts you. That's not the problem. It's that if you want to speak fluently, you need, a lot of input because it's like having… it's a bad example, but that's the one I have right now.

[00:27:06]

Imagine you have a gun or a cannon, right?

Sam: Okay.

Keith: To be able to use the cannon, you need fodder, right? And if you don't have fodder, if you don't know any words, how are you gonna speak correctly?

How are you gonna learn to aim correctly something if you don't have a ball to put in the cannon and aim it with, right?

So input is that… is giving you the spider sense and the language and the passive knowledge of how the language fits together… elements fit together.

So that… when you want to express yourself.

A.- At some point it's gonna be automatic anyway, because you have… it's like… it's like a cup, right?

You fill it with water, water, water, water. And at some point, it's gonna go over and spill over, right? So, you have to… to say something at some point and you will have automatism as well.

From seeing situation repeating, you're gonna automatically want to say those things in the same situation. So, if you speak a lot and learn a lot of vocabulary.

[00:28:17]

In a class even in a class, right? Where you, let's say, exchange a lot of material at some point, even at the bakery, instead of saying merci, you're gonna say thank you. And realize, “oh, wait, I was speaking English right now.” Yeah, right?

So, that's what input does over a long time. It allows you to speak more fluently, more smoothly, but it's not a bad thing to start speaking early.

Sam: Great. And do you have a specific amount of hours that… like you or maybe a student should aim for in terms of input and output? Is that a good way to think about things?

Like setting a goal? Like I want to have five hours of input per week or 10 hours and then maybe practice output for two hours. Is that a good way to think about it?

Or do you have a better system?

[00:29:11]

Keith: It depends on your temperament, really. So, some people want to learn, with goals specific in mind. Then if that's your case, then do that by all means. If that's not you. Like, that's not me at all. I hate that. I hate any type of pressure.

Sam: Okay.

Keith: Right? And I've noticed that the more pressure I put on myself, the less I fulfill those, “pressures.” Right?

And I like to “sabotage” everything, right?

Sam: Yeah.

Keith: Especially myself. Anyway. So, the better thing for this type of people is to enjoy themselves.

Find something that you enjoy, and you're not gonna be able to realize that you're doing it, and for how many hours, and it's gonna stack up really fast.

[00:30:07]

Like I said for mangas, if I start reading a thriller, at the end of the day I might have read like three or four.

And it took me all day because I'm slow, I'm a slow reader in Japanese, but that's more time spent with the language than if I had to force myself to read a book that I don't like.

Like, I'm gonna pick up the book. I'm gonna try to go through it and I'm gonna say something along the line of, “okay, I've read five pages of the first chapter. That's enough for today. I'm… I'm wiped.” Right?

So, I need to move on to something else. So ultimately it depends on you, your, your type of… how you work with things. If you, if you need that stress, then do it.

If you don't like this type of stress, don't do it.

Sam: That makes sense. Have you got any advice for people that don't enjoy language learning though, but they need to for maybe work purposes?

[00:31:01]

Keith: So, like I like to say to my students, there's two types of students. There's the ninja and there's the samurai type, right?

Sam: Okay.

Keith: The samurai is on a long journey, right? He's here for himself, he's not here for anybody else. He wants it for… he has a big why, right?

And generally, adults, after, they stop working, retire, and want to travel the world, for example, they want to learn a language for the rest of their life and use it when they travel, for example.

But teenagers… they tend to be forced to learn a language to pass an exam, right? So, in that case, I put you in the ninja category.

You have to do one mission. An assassination, or maybe send a message to someone or something. Right. So, in that case, it depends on how far away is the mission goal. Right?

[00:32:01]

So, if it's too close. It's not good to do immersion, it's better to review the old-fashioned way, because you're gonna be able to have the logic of it, right?

To think about things logically during the exam. And that's gonna be faster. You also have mnemonics and all these tricks that ninja uses. Shurikens and whatever.

So that's the better for a short-term goal, let's say. But if you have one year or two years, like people do in high school, like freshman year, they have like two or three years to pass the TOEFL or TOEIC, right?

In that case, you should do both because on one side you have to have good grades, and the problem with immersion is it’s not gonna give you good grades at the beginning.

[00:32:58]

It's like starting a race, and you have immersion here and you have, the traditional method here.

Traditional method will go faster at the beginning, like the turtle and the, what's it called? The… the hare, right? the hare and the turtle, right? The hare starts faster, but you start getting lazy at the intermediate stage.

Sam: And bored.

Keith: Yeah, bored and rest on your laurels, and etc. So, what you should do then is really double down on immersion, right? If you're the hare, obviously.

But for most people that have that amount of time, do both. And it's gonna help you because like I said with Bruce Lee saying, right?

You have to be as much instinctive as you have to be logical in the language.

And by combining those two, you're gonna go faster. If you have that opportunity and, need or want, right. Because I'm lazy. I don't like grammar, for example, and I don't have to learn grammar to pass the test. Right?

[00:34:00]

So, I'm much rather… I would much rather just pick up a book. I would read and enjoy my time like this or play a video game.

Sam: Sure.

Keith: But for someone who has a goal like that, yeah, do both and you're gonna go way faster.

Sam: Excellent. I love that analogy, Keith. The samurai and the ninja. I'm definitely gonna steal that. If I say it, I will refer to you, don't worry.

Keith: By all means! Thank you.

Sam: But yeah, that was really helpful. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you want to add before we end this?

Keith: Yeah, if I can shameless plug here.

Sam: Absolutely! Go for it. Go for it. You deserve that.

Keith: Keith Parum 101 on YouTube, keithparum on TikTok. I just started on TikTok. I was on hiatus on YouTube, but now I'm back and I'm making… I have a few videos in the making, so they should be out by the middle of August.

[00:35:05]

So, if you don't see any video yet, that's normal. Don't panic. Okay.

Sam: And if people want to learn English with you, where can they find you?

Keith: So, they can have a class with me on class gap, but I'm gonna slowly go away from that.

And now they can find me through YouTube on my Patreon and they can have also… either one on one with me, or they can be part of the community for about the price of a coffee for $3, and they'll have access to all my resources.

That's where you can find me. Keith Parum 101

Sam: Great. Do you teach French as well? Or other languages? Or is it just English?

Keith: Yes. I teach anything that I learn.

Sam: Okay, excellent.

Keith: Yeah, so if you want, especially resources, and advice on how to approach things depending on your level, I'm your guy. If you want a class one on one, I can do that, but let me tell you, I'm not gonna teach you the language.

[00:36:09]

I'm gonna do guided immersion so you can teach yourself the language. My goal is not to take your money. My goal is to teach you… to teach you and ditch you as, as fast as possible!

Sam: Great. Excellent. Thank you so much, Keith.

Keith: Thanks to you, Sam, for having me today.

[00:00:00] A lot of people can get to an intermediate level in a foreign or second language, but then find it really difficult to make that jump from intermediate to advanced or upper intermediate to advanced. So today I'm going through three tips on how to make that jump. Hopefully, you enjoy and find it useful.

[00:00:19] The first tip that I will give - is increasing your input. Now input means the inputting language. Now, you can do that in a few ways. The best way to do that is what is called the immersion technique or total immersion. Now, this is when you immerse yourself in the language. So it's like you're underwater. The word immersed means that you are completely underwater.

[00:00:44] In this sense, is you are completely covered in a language, almost. So imagine I want to learn Spanish. Well, living in Manchester, you don't hear too many people speak Spanish. You don't engage with Spanish that much. Everyone is speaking English. All the menus are in English. People greet you in English.

[00:01:02] You don't really engage with that much Spanish. And if I want to learn Spanish, I will have to purposefully go out my way to engage with Spanish. So I'll have to meet up with some Spanish people or people that speak Spanish; or have to watch some TV shows, or listen to some podcasts. Read some books. You get the idea.

[00:01:21] But, if I moved to Madrid, then I would hear a lot more Spanish. Menus would be in Spanish. This is probably the best way to increase your language, is just being surrounded by that language. Now, moving to a different country just to learn a language is quite difficult, so you can do this at home. Watch more TV.

[00:01:42] I'm sure everyone watching this watches TV series and watches films. Well, a lot of those TV series you watch are in English. So, why not make that switch? Stop watching it subbed. Stop watching with subtitles in your native language. Watch it in English audio with English subtitles. It might not be as relaxing as watching TV in your native language.

[00:02:05] But make the switch, and increasing your input like that will have a big effect on your language skills. There are other things - I think podcasts are great. Even if you don't understand everything, you can do other things while listening to podcasts. You can go for a walk. You can clean the dishes. You can exercise, and just having a lot more English go into your brain; I think you will benefit from it.

[00:02:27] Even if you don't understand everything you don't need to pause and search up every single word. It can be useful to do that, but it's not completely necessary. Just make sure that you choose some material that's a little bit more difficult than what you understand. So if you're listening to stuff, which is just really, really easy and you understand absolutely everything, you're not gonna get that much better just from increasing your inputs.

[00:02:55] But if you choose a podcast and you understand 80 percent of it, that's perfect. Around those numbers. That's not a science, but I think those numbers work out. So yeah, increase your input, read more books, read more articles, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, and watch TV. Speak to more people in that language.

[00:03:16] You know, find a conversation partner, just do more of it. And the thing with input is it can be quite passive. You don't need to be… actually like sat there speaking to someone. You don't need to write something. You literally can just be lying on a sofa, listening to a podcast. And that will, if you just do this more, your language skills will increase.

[00:03:36] Atop this is... listen, read, and watch things that you actually enjoy. Don't make learning language boring or a chore. There's no need. If you find… I'm sure you know what your hobbies and interests are. If you really like running or cycling or weightlifting or self-improvement or psychology. Read about those things, listen to those things, watch videos about those things, in English.

[00:04:01] Go on YouTube, there's so much stuff about so many different things. If you're learning English, it's probably the easiest language to learn in terms of accessible content and material, just because a lot of songs and films and TV series and books are written in English originally. So, yeah. Go out there, find something you enjoy, and make sure it's in English.

[00:05:38] The second way to increase your language skills is by finding out your weaknesses. So, I've had so many students over the years come to me with different weaknesses. I'll have an intermediate student who lacks vocabulary but their pronunciation is fine. I do exercises with them. I do reading exercises with them just to try and find more vocabulary and increase their comprehension.

[00:06:03] And we, I never, he hardly ever makes pronunciation mistakes. I usually create a list of different - usually I have like a vocabulary list and a pronunciation mistake list. And I haven't even made one for this student because his pronunciation is excellent. He lacks other things. He's not great at listening and he lacks vocabulary.

[00:06:25] These are his weaknesses. So together we focus on these weaknesses and we bring up his overall level. Usually a student at an intermediate/up intermediate level has one or two weaknesses. Sometimes it's grammar. They can't produce sentences soundly. A lot of the time it is pronunciation and accent because they're speaking English in their native In the way that they pronounce words in their native language, and sometimes that doesn't work too well. And yeah, so find out what your weakness. If it's pronunciation focus on pronunciation. If it's listening focus on listening more because there will be that one skill of writing, reading, listening, speaking, pronunciation, accent, confidence.

[00:07:07] This is a big one as well. Confidence. Find out which one is your weak point, or your weak points and bring them up. I'm sure you probably have a good idea of where your weak points are, but one way you can do this is working with a tutor. I'm not trying to say work with me. You don't need to work with me.

[00:07:25] There are tens of thousands of English tutors that you can find online. And they will be, if you just ask them, just have a conversation with them maybe have a few lessons with them, and ask them that you want a needs analysis that you kind of want someone to, you want them to identify your mistakes and your weaknesses, ask them to create a program around those weaknesses.

[00:07:48] So if you want to improve your pronunciation, make sure that at least half of the lesson is pronunciation work and try and bring out that weak point. The third tip is increasing your vocabulary. This is a basic and boring and pretty simple answer, but language is all about vocabulary. It's not in the sense that you need a big vocabulary to be an effective speaker.

[00:08:11] I hate it when people use overly complicated words just to try and show that they're smart. But sometimes there are words which are more suitable than other words. And you don't want to be, I have so many students that come to me and they, and they have this problem of, they can describe general things.

[00:08:29] They can communicate basic ideas. They can't be as precise as they are in their native language, understandably, because they lack those very specific words. So, imagine you said you went for a walk in the park, but you didn't want to just say “a walk.” Imagine you had a slow, leisurely walk, that you kind of weren't particularly in a hurry.

[00:08:51] You were just enjoying yourself. You could say, I went for a stroll in the park. Now you could just say a walk in the park and the person you're speaking to get to the idea, but maybe you want to be a bit more precise. So increasing your vocabulary is a better way to be more precise with… kind of putting your thoughts and feelings into actual language to communicate.

[00:09:15] Obviously an increased vocabulary helps with listening as well, because we all hate it when someone speaks to you in a, in a foreign language and you don't understand a word in there or two words in there. And that means you don't understand the sentence at all. So improving your vocabulary really helps with listening.

[00:09:33] And if you're like me, when I was living in Spain and learning Spanish, then once that you kind of lose track of the conversation - like - you get stuck in a conversation, jit's really hard to continue the conversation because you're kind of like thinking about that word and trying to work it out. And because you were thinking about it, you missed the next few words and that's it.

[00:09:53] You've zoned out. You start thinking, then you get anxious and you think you're a bad Spanish speaker or whatever, and then your confidence gets affected. And then the next conversation you have is bad as well. So confidence is a big one and not beating yourself up about mistakes is also an extra tip as well.

[00:10:10] But those are my three tips on how to improve your language skills, especially from an intermediate to an upper intermediate or advanced.

[00:00:00] Hi everyone. Long time no see. I haven't uploaded a video in a long time for a few reasons really. I've been on holiday. I didn't really know the direction that I wanted to go with with my channel and my English teaching business. I've had COVID. Other things have just got in the way but from now on I hope to be consistent with uploading.

[00:00:22] I'm sure every YouTuber or person who makes videos or content has said that once in their life. life. So hopefully after this video I get a little bit more consistent. We'll see. Since my last upload we have had an election in the United Kingdom and lots of my students ask me about politics in the UK and politics in England and they want to know more especially since the election and because of the election we have a new government.

[00:00:49] A new party is in power for the first time in 14 years in the UK. So I'm pretty happy about it. Most people in the country are pretty happy about it. I thought I'd use this video to explain what's happened. Let's have a look at some data. Let's have a look at what basically happened earlier this month.

[00:01:10] Okay, so let's have a look at this website to begin with. UK general election results in full. Labour wins in landslide. So Labour is a party. Maybe if we go down we might be able to have a look here. So the main two parties in the United Kingdom, uh, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Uh, the leaders of these parties is a man called Keir Starmer is the new prime minister and the leader of the Labour Party and the leader he has resigned after the election defeat of the Conservative Party and the old prime minister of the UK is a man called Rishi Sunak.

[00:01:50] So I think it was on the 5th of July. We had an election in the UK and. The government of the last 14 years lost big time. We have 650 seats in Parliament in the UK and we have 650 constituencies, which means areas or regions in the United Kingdom. And in each constituency or region, we have one person who is elected as the member of Parliament or sometimes called the MP.

[00:02:23] We have 650 people representing the entirety of the United Kingdom. To become a government, you need to have a majority of seats within parliament. If there are 650 seats, you need 326 seats for a majority. And the Labour Party won big time. They won 412 seats. So they have a big majority. Any new laws or bills they want to introduce into Parliament and change the law in the United Kingdom.

[00:02:52] They just need the majority or Parliament to say yes. And because they have a big majority, it's. It gives them a lot of power to do whatever they want. It's not like in the United States where it's very difficult to make laws and make changes because of the different, uh, like people in power or the groups of power or the division of power.

[00:03:14] Because sometimes there is like a Republican house and a Democrat Senate, and they just block each other. And people can't really do what they want to do when they're, when they're present. In the UK, you have a lot of power. If you become, uh, The government, and you have a big majority, so the Labor Party and Kier has a big majority, and they can do whatever the hell they want to do.

[00:04:31] As you can see, they won 214 more seats than they did last in the last election in 2019. And the conservatives basically lost 252 seats. So they lost big time. Labor one big, the conservatives lost a pretty big as well.

[00:04:56] I'm going to switch over to this website here, and we can have a look at this data because it's very interesting. If we have a look. What we've just been looking at is seat share. So these are the different parties within the UK, and maybe we'll have a look at vote share, actually. So the biggest parties in terms of the amount of people that voted for them as a percentage are the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, Reform UK, Liberal Democrats, Green Party, the Scottish National Party, and some other smaller parties like the DUP, Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Féin.

[00:05:34] Some of these parties here, you can't actually vote for some of these parties in England, including the Scottish National Party, because these are, uh, parties that represent people in Northern Ireland, or Scotland, or Wales, for example, and they usually are wanting independence from the United Kingdom. So the labor party is the biggest party by 34%.

[00:05:55] So as you can see, no one won a majority in terms of the actual vote share. Uh, labor won 34 percent of the votes, which is not a majority of people. So even though they won 63 percent of the seats in parliament, they only won 34 percent of the actual votes. So this is a very undemocratic system. It's very unrepresentative.

[00:06:22] The conservative party is actually quite close 24 and 19. But what is interesting is Reform UK and the green party. So Reform UK is a very right wing party and they stole a lot. Well, they didn't steal. They took a lot of conservative votes because those people. We're very interested in immigration and some other policies, but mostly immigration.

[00:06:45] And they thought the conservative party has done a bad job in immigration. Immigration levels are too high. They think so. They voted for Reform UK and the leader of Reform UK is a man called Nigel Farage, and he basically made Brexit happen. But how did they win 14 percent of the votes, but only receive 1 percent of the seats?

[00:07:06] They got five seats in total. I will show you. So the, this is the vote for my constituency that I voted in the Shrewsbury constituency. This is a town in England and this is where my family live. And this is basically the results in the 2024 election for Shrewsbury. Uh, the Labour Party got 44 percent of the votes.

[00:07:30] The Conservatives got 22, 000. Reform UK, 14 percent of the votes. Same as the UK average actually, uh, Liberal Democrats got 13%, Greens got 4. 6%, English Democrats 0. 5%, and an independent candidate, James Gollins, got 0. 3%. Julia Buckley, who is is in the labor party who got 44 percent of the vote becomes the MP.

[00:07:56] And she represents everybody in Shrewsbury. Now, everyone that voted for the conservative party, 22%, everybody that voted for Reform party and every other party, their votes just gets. Basically, it's worth nothing. Forget about the people that don't, didn't vote in, in Shrewsbury, or in the entirety of the UK, but most of the Shrewsbury population is not represented fairly, because only 44.5 percent of people voted for this lady to represent us. However, that's not even a majority of people. So all the people that voted for different parties are Are not being represented in Parliament by their representative. That can explain why Reform UK had so much of the vote share, 14%, but hardly won any seats, only five.

[00:08:45] Because they're not a mainstream party, they represent the very political and far right in the United Kingdom. They won second and third place in most constituents. They only came first in five. Let's say a political party in the UK. comes in second place in every single constituency in the UK. Well, if that was the case and they didn't win any of them, they weren't first place in any of them.

[00:09:10] They wouldn't have a single seat in parliament, which is crazy. So it really rewards the winners and is called first past the post, like a race. It's the first one to pass the finishing line gets the seat. And that's why the Conservative Party and the Labour Party do so well because it's a two party system.

[00:09:30] These parties, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party are the biggest parties in the UK, and it usually rewards them pretty well. The voting system is unlikely to change in the UK anytime soon because this system benefits these two parties. And these two parties are the only two parties that are That are in power.

[00:09:50] So why would they change it? Let's have a look at a little bit more data now, um, and see how Britain voted in the 2024 general election. We'll first look at age and which age groups voted for particular parties. I think it's pretty obvious to see that the Labour Party is popular. Basically, we're the younger people over older people, and it's peaking in the 30 to 39 age group.

[00:10:16] And as you can see, the Conservative Party is more popular with older people. So, generally, the younger you are, the more likely you are to vote Labour or the Green Party. The older you are, the more likely you are to vote the Conservative Party or Reform UK. However, this is pretty much 9 15%, 9 19 percent actually, not too big.

[00:10:41] If you look at the Green Party though, they are very popular amongst 18 24 year olds, that's no surprise. How do men and women vote? Any difference between these? Uh, not really with Labour, pretty equal. Lib Dems, pretty equal. Green Party, pretty equal. Reform UK, men are way better. A little bit more likely to vote Reform than women and conservative, pretty equal as well.

[00:11:05] So no huge differences between men and women. The education level, this could be interesting. Um, G low education, medium education, or high education. If you Labour voters, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote labor Lib Dem. Let's have a look. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Lib Dem.

[00:11:24] Green, the same. Reform, people with less educational qualifications are more likely to vote Reform. Conservative, the same, but not as drastic as Reform UK.

For #1 - Bad for mental health

Highlight reel. Meaning: a short video or photo that is designed for entertainment, often showing the highlights (= the most interesting or exciting parts) of something. For example, highlight reels of your friends' holidays often give a misleading impression of what they were really like.

Entirety. Meaning: the whole of something. For example, the poem is too long to quote in its entirety.

Subconsciously. Meaning: as a result of feelings that influence your behaviour even though you are not aware of them. For example, subconsciously, she was looking for the father she had never known.

Detrimental. Meaning: harmful. For example, the policy will be detrimental to the peace process.

Perpetuate. Meaning: to make something such as a bad situation, a belief, etc. continue for a long time. For example, he perpetuated the lie by speaking about it on a podcast.

Against #1 - Keep connected with friends

Stay in touch. Meaning: to communicate or continue to communicate with someone by using a phone or writing to them. For example, Are you still in touch with any of your old school friends?

Acquaintance. Meaning: a person that you know but who is not a close friend. For example, Claire has a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.

Up to. Meaning: to be doing something. For example, what are you up to tomorrow?

Grow apart. Meaning: to stop having a close relationship with somebody over a period of time. For example, as we got older we just grew apart.

Stranger. Meaning: a person that you do not know. For example, there was a complete stranger sitting at my desk.

For #2 - Waste of time

Validation. Meaning: the feeling that others recognise that you are right or good enough. For example, we seek validation from our peers.

Consciously. Meaning: in a way that is deliberate or careful. For example, consciously or unconsciously, you made a choice.

Surface level. Meaning: shallow, lacking depth. For example, if my friendship with someone isn't very deep or involved, I might say we have a surface level relationship.

Deliberate. Meaning:done on purpose rather than by accident. For example, the speech was a deliberate attempt to embarrass the government.

Nonsense. Meaning: ideas, statements or beliefs that you think are silly or not true. For example, you're talking nonsense!

Against #2 - Keep up to date with cultural events

Externally. Meaning: in a way that happens or comes from outside a place, an organisation, a particular situation, etc. For example, the university has many externally funded research projects.

Contemporary. Meaning: belonging to the present time. For example, the film paints a depressing picture of life in contemporary Britain.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Debates in English, a weekly English lesson for upper intermediate and advanced English learners interested in political and societal subjects. I'm your host Sam, an experienced English teacher who has spent thousands of hours in the classroom helping hundreds of students improve their fluency.

[00:00:21] This lesson series combines my expertise gained from my master's degree in politics with my passion for teaching English. Each week you will expand your vocabulary at the B2 C1 level and improve your listening skills by exploring the pros and cons of a controversial topic. I recommend downloading the free document in the description, which has a transcript of the lesson with all the key vocabulary highlighted and further reading materials.

[00:00:52] So usually I script these episodes and I write down everything that I'm going to say, but this week I've been a little bit lazy and I haven't done that. So today I'm going to have to record an episode without too much planning. And without a script. So, we'll see what happens. So the first reason why I think you should delete social media is because it can be bad for your mental health.

[00:01:15] The key vocabulary to listen out for is highlights reel, meaning a short video or photo. That is designed for entertainment, often showing the highlights, the most interesting or exciting parts of something. For example, highlight reels of your friend's holidays often give a misleading impression of what they were really like.

[00:01:39] Entirety. Meaning, the whole of something. For example, the poem is too long to quote in its entirety. Subconsciously. Meaning, as a result of feelings that influence your behaviour even though you are not aware of them. For example, subconsciously, she was looking for the father she had never known.

[00:02:04] Detrimental. Meaning, harmful. For example, the policy will be detrimental to the peace process. Perpetuate, meaning to make something such as a bad situation, a belief, etc. continue for a long time. For example, he perpetuated the lie by speaking about it on a podcast. So when we're using social media apps like Instagram, for example, we get to see the of everyone else's life.

[00:02:37] These photos are very small pieces of people's lives, and they don't, do not show the entire thing. You, now, when you're using Instagram, have to compare that small, percentage of someone's life to the entirety of your life. So you know 100 percent of the things about yourself. You know, all your bad moments, you know, all your good moments, you know, all your lazy moments, you know, all your pathetic moments.

[00:03:08] And that's okay. You know, we're human. We're not all perfect. But you don't see that about everyone else's life. But on social media, especially Instagram, for example, you get to see a tiny bit of their life. And it's always the best moments. People don't upload, well, people usually don't upload pictures or videos of their bad moments.

[00:03:33] Or, you know, anything that isn't their best moments, really. It's usually celebratory posts. They're celebrating something. Maybe they've gone to a wedding. Maybe they've got a promotion at work. Maybe they've got a new car or a new house, something like this. So you are, you are subconsciously comparing your life to a highlight reel of other people's.

[00:03:58] And I think even if you know this to be the case, so even if you know This is happening. I think it happens anyway. It happens subconsciously. It's happening automatically. And while this can happen for people's lives, so you can compare your life to other people's life, I think this can be really detrimental for people when we do it about our appearance and our looks.

[00:04:24] So if you, the same with, you know, your life, you get to see yourself in the mirror up close in your really ugly moments. You get to see what you wake up, what you look like first thing when you wake up when you know you're ill or something like this. And you look in the mirror and you're like, Oh God, I look bad today.

[00:04:44] And then you go on social media apps like Instagram, and you are able to see models, you know, actresses, actors, musicians even normal people, but these are their best photos. They're probably, there's probably like 30 photos taken of this specific event, and they've chosen the best one. And maybe they're edited, maybe the girls are wearing makeup, maybe the boys are wearing makeup, who knows?

[00:05:12] And sometimes people use filters and a lot of the time it can happen where a lot of the time people compare what they look like on a day to day basis. With these unrealistic beauty standards, which are perpetuated through the use of filters and editing. And we're not supposed to see good looking people all the time.

[00:05:34] If we went back before the internet and people lived in towns, you would just see the people that you saw every day. And that's what your kind of basis of what normal looks like. But when we have access to all these beautiful people on the internet, You start to think that's what normal looks like. And that's what it's what you're expected to look like.

[00:05:56] And I think the same comparison thing can happen here. So people compare themselves with other people subconsciously, even if they know this is unrealistic. This is not natural. This is not normal. I think it happens subconsciously and this can have negative effects on people and it can lower your self esteem.

[00:06:14] So that's a reason why I think you could delete social media. One reason why you shouldn't delete social media. is, it's a good way to stay in touch with your friends. The key vocabulary to listen out for is stay in touch, meaning to communicate or continue to communicate with someone by using a phone or writing to them.

[00:06:35] For example, are you still in touch with any of your old school friends? Acquaintance, meaning a person that you know who is not a close friend. For example, Claire has a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Up to, meaning to be doing something. For example, what are you up to tomorrow? Grow apart.

[00:06:59] Meaning, to stop having a close relationship with somebody over a period of time. For example, as we got older, we just grew apart. Stranger, meaning a person that you do not know, for example, there was a complete stranger sitting at my desk. I don't text that many people a lot of the time. I have a few group chats that I I'm in, that I, that, you know, I speak to people every day, speak to my family quite often.

[00:07:28] I see my girlfriend every day because I live with her, but some people who I'm friends with, I don't really communicate with them that often, maybe because they live in a different city than me, maybe they live in a different country than me, but I don't text them that regularly. Maybe we have a phone call once every few months, for example, but I'm still interested about them and their lives.

[00:07:52] And because we don't communicate that often, connecting to people on social media is a really good way to stay in touch and just to have general updates about what's going on. People's lives that you care about. Maybe it's not the best thing to have updates about people you don't really care about, or maybe celebrities.

[00:08:12] Do you need daily updates of what they're doing? Maybe not, unless you're a real big fan, but with people who are acquaintances or friends that aren't that close, but you're, you still like, and you still care about, then it's a good way to see what they're up to. And sometimes if they post something, you can reply to that and you can have a quick conversation.

[00:08:34] And you're still building that relationship when you, when you don't have social media, sometimes you don't see people or you don't speak to people for months, like they care about due to location. Most of the time, if they lived in where you live. Maybe a little bit different, but not all of us live in the same place as all of our friends and the people who care about.

[00:08:57] So it's easy to kind of lose touch and to grow apart from people just because you don't have that frequent interaction. So I think social media, even though it can have some negatives, is a real simple way of just staying in touch with people. You don't even need to post that often. You can just wait until other people post, and then maybe you see something that you can apply to.

[00:09:21] You don't even need to post that much yourself. So it's very simple way just to keep in touch with people that you care about. I deleted Instagram for a very long time. Well, I actually deactivated it rather than deleted it. And I felt like I did grow apart from a lot of people who I didn't see on a regular basis, and I didn't know what they were up to, which was a shame really, because I like those people.

[00:09:47] And I care about them and it, it meant that when I did see them, I, maybe there was more to talk about, but I felt like I had lost that kind of connection because there wasn't really, it just felt like we became strangers almost, that this was a person from the past. Rather than the person from the present because they're not in my life on a, you know, weekly basis, monthly basis.

[00:10:14] And I don't maybe think about this person that much, but you know, it's so nice to get updates from them. And this is the modern web, you know, people used to write letters to each other. Now people don't do that. They just upload tweets or photographs or stories or something like this. So it's the modern way of keeping in touch and you can build a network of great people, friends, people that you care about, and you can have that kind of network All over the world.

[00:10:41] And it's a good way for you to also update other people because it's, it will take a very long time that the process of writing to every single person or sending a photo to every single person you care about with that you think would care about your life updates would take ages. So why not just upload a picture to Instagram, write a tweet, and then everyone can see what you're up to that you care about.

[00:11:05] You could have a private account. You could, you know, block random people from seeing your stuff, but it's a great way to show people what you're up to and also see what other people are up to. What's not to like? The second reason why you should delete social media is it's a huge waste of time. The key vocabulary to listen out for is validation, meaning the feeling that others recognize that you are right or good enough.

[00:11:30] For example, we seek validation from our peers consciously, meaning in a way that is deliberate or careful. For example, Consciously or unconsciously, you made a choice. Surface level, meaning shallow, lacking depth. For example, if my friendship with someone isn't very deep or involved, I might say we have a surface level relationship.

[00:11:56] Deliberate, meaning done on purpose rather than by accident. For example, the speech was a deliberate attempt to embarrass the government. Nonsense, meaning ideas, statements, or beliefs that you think are silly or not true. For example, you are talking nonsense. I think it can be beneficial to stay up to date with people's lives, but how often really are people uploading things on social media that actually matter?

[00:12:30] You know, if it was really that important, they would text you or you'd see them in person and they would say something like, I got a new job, something like this, most of the time on social media. It's stupid pictures. It's someone, you know, uploading the meal that they ate at a restaurant. I don't really care about that unless it looks, you know, ridiculously delicious and it's somewhere I can go to myself.

[00:12:54] If it's like a, if it's a restaurant in Greece and I'm in Manchester, it's no good for me. I get to see a picture of a pizza or whatever and I'm like, okay, that looks like a nice pizza. That information has done, you know, nothing for me apart from it might make me hungry, but who knows? But yeah, a lot of the time the posts on social media are, I'm thinking Instagram mostly, are just stupid and pointless.

[00:13:21] They don't add anything. Their people, most of the time, just looking for validation. They, you know, they want to upload a picture of themselves, so people can You know, show interest. Oh, you look good in this photo because it makes them feel better. I've done it. Everyone does it. They don't do it consciously.

[00:13:39] It probably happens because they feel bad about themselves sometimes. Sometimes it's fun. You know, I'm not saying every post is looking for validation. Sometimes it's harmless and it's fun and it's not as serious as that. But a lot of the time the stuff on social media It's just surface level rubbish.

[00:14:01] It's, it's nothing you could quite easily go 24 hours a week, a month without seeing anything on social media. And, you know, if you asked someone, okay, tell me three posts or pictures that you saw on social media in the last week that added value to your life. Most people probably wouldn't be able to say anything apart from, I saw a reel or a TikTok and it was pretty funny.

[00:14:27] That's nice. I enjoy funny things. I, enjoy Twitter or X because of the funny things on there. I enjoy some reels or TikTok because I don't use TikTok. I feel like I'm too old, but Instagram reels because yeah, they're funny. They relate to me, but most of the time it's a waste of time. And if you don't, if you're not in a position in your life that you're not happy with.

[00:14:49] And maybe you can do something more productive or something more valuable or just kind of deeper. Like reading a book is so much better use of time and relaxing than scrolling on social media. And it also kills your attention span if you're just on TikTok all day. Your attention span is going to be zero.

[00:15:09] If you're reading books, you can concentrate for a long time. So I just feel like if you can use Instagram or social media in a very limited and purposeful and deliberate way. So you're, you're literally going, okay, I'm going on my Instagram app for 10 minutes just today. And I'll just see the photos from my friends.

[00:15:34] That's fair enough. But a lot of people, they spend way too many hours each day on it, and it doesn't really give them anything positive. So, I just feel like, of all the things you could be doing in the world, Literally anything taking a walk, I think even playing video games is a better use of time.

[00:15:51] Painting, exercising, creating something, seeing your friends, socialising, hugging your mum. Literally anything is better than just wasting your time just scrolling on your phone. It's so boring, but it's useful because when you get back from work or school or university and you're tired, you You need something that stimulates your brain, but also relaxes your body.

[00:16:17] Like you're not using too much physical energy, but your brain is stimulated, which you can do through a book or watching TV, which I think is definitely better than social media, unless you're doing something really interesting or seeing, you know, cool photos or reading some interesting tweets, but most of the time, it's nonsense.

[00:16:35] The second reason why you shouldn't delete social media is it's a good way to stay up to date with cultural things happening. The key vocabulary to listen out for is externally, meaning in a way that happens or comes from outside a place, an organisation, a particular situation, etc. For example, the university has many externally funded research projects.

[00:17:00] Contemporary, meaning belonging to the present time. For example, the film paints a depressing picture of life in contemporary Britain. So if you are on TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, you literally get updates about things that are happening with the interests that you like. So you might, if you're into running, you may see this, you make it advertised, or you may see this kind of event that's happening in your local area that you wouldn't see if you weren't interested.

[00:17:29] If you weren't on social media, if you are on Twitter, you might receive your news from that, or even Instagram and you might get your news from certain social media outlets. So you're staying up to date, not only with your friends, what's happening around the world. This is literally like, imagine social media is like an online social events.

[00:17:51] That's why it's called social media because it involves people and people are being sociable. So when you're home and you're alone and you're reading a book and, or you're watching TV or you're not using social media, what social media whatsoever, you are a little bit disconnected with what's happening externally.

[00:18:14] And you may still see your friends. You may text them. But you're kind of relying on them to give you information that you can only get from limited sources. So, especially with like current contemporary things. Sure, you can read some great Penguin classic books and you might be spending your time in a better way because you're kind of delving into a deep novel.

[00:18:43] Sure. That's great. But how are you going to find out about a festival happening, you know, next week where you're living if you're not using the internet for in these social realms of activity? So it's like a big party, essentially, if you can look at it. It's just like, a marketplace or a party or some place where people physically gather and everyone's there posting things that you may like.

[00:19:12] And because of the algorithm love it or hate it, it learns more about you and what you like. So my, Social media pages will be very different from yours because we are different people and we have different interests. So, it's a good way just to stay up to date with news, what's happening locally kind of things that you're interested in.

[00:19:35] Where else are you really going to get that information apart from relying on other people? You can't you're not gonna, I can't actually think of another way. Yeah, you have to keep social media if you want to keep up to date with trends and what's happening. Finished. That's it. So that was a little bit of a different format than usual.

[00:19:58] If you prefer this format where I'm speaking a little bit more freely and naturally. Let me know in the comments. If not, I will return back to my scripted videos because I think it's a better way to introduce deliberate vocabulary, but this way also has its advantages because this is how people actually speak.

[00:20:19] The previous videos that you may have seen are deliberately scripted. People aren't that accurate and precise with their language when they're speaking English or any language unless you're an incredibly eloquent speaker. But, this is how I speak, this is how people normally speak, and if you're trying to learn English or any language, Then it may be better just to listen to natural conversations rather than scripted conversations.

[00:20:51] Who knows, but yeah, let me know what you think. That is the debate everyone. Let me know in the comments what your opinion is on this subject. Which argument do you think is the strongest? Thanks for watching and see you next week for the next debate.

British factory workers in the United Kingdom used to work about 14-16 hours per day for 6 days a week. Can you imagine that! Now, full time work is 7-8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Over time there is a trend of full time work being reduced, and now there are calls for a 4-day working week to be introduced.

I’m going to read you some background information from the Wikipedia page:

“A four-day workweek is an arrangement where a workplace or place of education has its employees or students work or attend school, college or university over the course of four days per week rather than the more customary five.This arrangement can be a part of flexible working hours, and is sometimes used to cut costs.

The four-day week movement has grown considerably in recent years, with increasing numbers of businesses and organisations around the world trialling and moving permanently to a four-day working week of around 32 hours, with no less pay for workers. Most of these businesses and organisations have involved white collar work, and found that a four-day week is a win-win for employees and employers, as trials have indicated that it leads to a better work-life balance, lower stress-levels, and increased productivity, mainly by eliminating wasted work time. An overwhelming majority of studies report that a four-day week leads to increased productivity and decreased stress, though experts question whether this arrangement is possible in blue collar work, where there may be little wasted time, or workers would be required to work faster to maintain the same productivity, potentially increasing stress levels and decreasing safety.”

In the description, I will provide a link to a trial study that was done with 61 British companies changing to a 4-day workweek. The results are very interesting.

Let’s jump into the pros and cons of transitioning to a 4-day working week!

Yes #1 - Improved Work-Life Balance

The first reason why we should have a 4 day workweek is: improved work-life balance.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Pursue. Meaning: to do something or try to achieve something over a period of time. For example, I wasn't sure I wanted to pursue dance as a career.

Tackle. Meaning: to make a determined effort to deal with a difficult problem or situation. For example, I think I'll tackle the repairs next weekend.

Hectic. Meaning: very busy; full of activity. For example, the job gets a bit hectic at times.

Enhance. Meaning: to increase or further improve the good quality, value or status of somebody/something. For example, this is an opportunity to enhance the reputation of the company.

Accomplish. Meaning: to succeed in doing or completing something. For example, I don't feel I've accomplished very much today.

One of the biggest benefits of a four-day workweek is improved work-life balance. Having an extra day off each week gives employees more time to relax, pursue hobbies, and spend time with family and friends. This extra day can help reduce stress and improve overall well-being.

With a longer weekend, employees have more time to recharge. This can lead to better mental health, as people have more opportunities to rest and engage in activities they enjoy. For example, someone might use the extra day to exercise, take a short trip, or simply relax at home. These activities can help people feel more refreshed and ready to tackle the workweek.

Additionally, a four-day workweek can help employees manage their personal responsibilities better. Tasks like grocery shopping, doctor's appointments, and household chores can be done on the extra day off, freeing up the weekend for relaxation and leisure. This can lead to a more balanced and less hectic life.

Moreover, improved work-life balance can also enhance productivity. When employees feel well-rested and less stressed, they are likely to be more focused and efficient at work. They can concentrate better and accomplish tasks more quickly, which benefits both the employees and their employers.

In summary, a four-day workweek offers significant advantages for work-life balance. It provides employees with more time to rest and enjoy their personal lives, which can lead to better mental health, higher productivity, and overall job satisfaction. This improved balance between work and personal life is a strong reason to consider adopting a four-day workweek.

No #1 - Increased Workload

The first reason why we shouldn’t have a 4 day workweek is: increased workload.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Workload. Meaning: the amount of work that has to be done by a particular person or organization. For example, we have taken on extra staff to cope with the increased workload.

Exhausting. Meaning: making you feel very tired. For example, an exhausting day at work.

Thrive. Meaning: to become, and continue to be, successful, strong, healthy, etc./ For example, new businesses thrive in this area.

Overwhelmed. Meaning: to have such a strong emotional effect on somebody that it is difficult for them to resist or know how to react. For example, she was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt.

Overlook. Meaning: to fail to see or notice something. For example, in my hurry to finish the exam I had overlooked part of one of the questions.

One of the main drawbacks of a four-day workweek is the potential for an increased workload. When employees have fewer days to complete the same amount of work, each workday can become more intense and demanding.

In a traditional five-day workweek, tasks are spread out more evenly. With a four-day workweek, employees often have to fit the same tasks into fewer days. This can lead to longer working hours each day, which can be exhausting and stressful. For example, instead of working eight hours a day, employees might need to work ten hours a day to get everything done. This can make the workdays feel very long and tiring.

Additionally, the increased workload can put pressure on employees to work faster and more efficiently. While some people may thrive under this pressure, others may struggle to keep up. This can lead to higher stress levels and burnout. Employees may feel overwhelmed by the need to constantly stay on top of their tasks without enough time to take breaks and rest.

Moreover, an intense workload can affect the quality of work. When employees are rushed, they might make more mistakes or overlook important details. This can be problematic for businesses that rely on high-quality work and attention to detail. In the long run, this can impact the overall productivity and success of the company.

In summary, while a four-day workweek offers many benefits, it can also result in an increased workload for employees. The need to fit the same amount of work into fewer days can lead to longer hours, higher stress levels, and potential burnout. It’s important for companies to carefully consider these challenges and find ways to support their employees if they choose to adopt a four-day workweek.

Yes #2 - Improved Job Satisfaction

The second reason why we should have a 4 day workweek is: improved job satisfaction.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Morale. Meaning: the amount of confidence and enthusiasm, etc. that a person or a group has at a particular time. For example, another win would be good for the team’s morale.

Enthusiasm. Meaning: a strong feeling of excitement and interest in something and a desire to become involved in it. For example, she never lost her enthusiasm for teaching.

Engage. Meaning: (formal) to succeed in attracting and keeping somebody’s attention and interest. For example, it was difficult to engage the students at first.

Collaborative. Meaning: involving, or done by, several people or groups of people working together. For example, collaborative projects/studies/research.

Foster. Meaning: to encourage something to develop. For example, the EU seeks to foster the spirit of European unity.

A four-day workweek can significantly boost job satisfaction for employees. When people feel happier and more valued at their jobs, they tend to perform better and stay longer with their companies.

Firstly, a shorter workweek can lead to higher morale. Knowing that they have an extra day off each week can make employees feel more appreciated by their employers. This sense of appreciation can increase their motivation and enthusiasm for their work. Employees who feel valued are more likely to be committed to their jobs and put in their best effort.

Secondly, the extra day off provides more opportunities for personal growth and development. Employees can use this time to learn new skills, take courses, or engage in professional development activities. This can lead to a greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in their careers. When employees feel they are growing and advancing, they are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs.

Additionally, a four-day workweek can create a more positive workplace culture. When employees are less stressed and happier, they tend to have better relationships with their colleagues. This can lead to a more collaborative and supportive work environment. A positive workplace culture can improve overall job satisfaction and make the workplace more enjoyable.

Moreover, the flexibility of a four-day workweek can allow employees to better manage their time and responsibilities. They can plan their work and personal lives more effectively, leading to a sense of control and balance. This flexibility can make employees feel more satisfied with their jobs and less likely to experience burnout.

In conclusion, a four-day workweek can greatly enhance job satisfaction by boosting morale, providing opportunities for personal growth, fostering a positive workplace culture, and offering greater flexibility. These factors can make employees feel happier and more fulfilled in their careers, benefiting both them and their employers.

No #2 - Not Suitable for All Industries

The second reason why we shouldn’t have a 4 day workweek is: it’s not suitable for all industries.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Encounter. Meaning: to experience something, especially something unpleasant or difficult, while you are trying to do something else. For example, we encountered a number of difficulties in the first week.

Provoke. Meaning: to cause a particular reaction or have a particular effect. For example, the announcement from the president provoked a protest.

Envy. Meaning: the feeling of wanting to be in the same situation as somebody else; the feeling of wanting something that somebody else has. For example, they looked with envy at her latest purchase.

Disparity. Meaning: a difference, especially one connected with unfair treatment. For example, there are growing regional disparities in economic growth.

Diminish. Meaning: to become smaller, weaker, etc.; to make something become smaller, weaker, etc. For example, the world's resources are rapidly diminishing.

One serious drawback of a four-day workweek is that it is not suitable for all industries. While some sectors might benefit from this change, others could encounter serious challenges.

Firstly, industries that require consistent customer service or daily operations may struggle with a four-day workweek. Sectors like healthcare, retail, and emergency services need to be accessible to their clients and patients every day. Reducing the number of workdays could disrupt their ability to provide continuous and reliable service. This disruption could lead to dissatisfaction among customers and even potential risks in critical fields like healthcare.

Secondly, the four-day workweek might provoke feelings of envy among workers in different sectors. Employees in industries that cannot adopt the shorter workweek may feel envious of those who can. This disparity could lead to lower morale and dissatisfaction among workers who must continue with the traditional five-day schedule. The perception of inequality in work conditions could create tension and diminish overall job satisfaction.

Moreover, the four-day workweek presents challenges for hourly employees, such as contract workers. These employees might face a reduction in their total income if they work fewer hours. Unlike salaried employees, who receive a fixed income regardless of hours worked, hourly workers rely on their hours to earn their wages. A shorter workweek could negatively affect their financial stability, making it less appealing for them.

In summary, while a four-day workweek has its advantages, it is not suitable for all industries. Constant service sectors, potential feelings of envy among workers, and financial challenges for hourly employees are significant concerns. It is essential to consider these factors before making such a substantial change to the work schedule.

One of my students recently told me they visited a zoo. I asked how he felt about going to zoos as some people think it’s unethical to keep animals in a confined and artificial environment for entertainment. He told me the conditions that the animals lived in were good and they seemed happy so he was ok with it. However, he told me that when he visited a zoo in Vietnam the animals all seemed sad and we went on to discuss if zoos should be banned or not.

So, I thought this week's episode could be a discussion on that exact topic. Should we ban zoos?

For the Ban #1 - Animal Welfare Concerns

Cramped (adj). Meaning: a cramped room, etc. does not have enough space for the people in it. For example, he lived for six months in a cold, cramped attic room.

Confined (adj). Meaning: (of a space or an area) small and surrounded by walls or sides. For example, it is cruel to keep animals in confined spaces.

Abnormal (adj). Meaning: different from what is usual or expected, especially in a way that worries somebody or is harmful or not wanted. For example, they thought his behaviour was abnormal.

Close-knit (adj). Meaning: of a group of people) having strong relationships with each other and taking a close, friendly interest in each other’s activities and problems. For example, the close-knit community of a small village.

Replicate (v). Meaning: (formal) to copy something exactly. For example, they failed to replicate the findings in the study.

Zoos are often seen as educational and fun places, where visitors can observe animals from around the world. However, significant animal welfare concerns suggest that zoos should be reconsidered or even banned.

Firstly, many animals in zoos are kept in cramped conditions far smaller than their natural habitats. For example, large animals like elephants and tigers, which walk for miles in the wild, are confined to small spaces in zoos. These spaces do not allow them to exhibit natural behaviours such as exploring and hunting. Such restrictions can lead to physical and psychological issues, including stress, obesity, and abnormal behaviours known as zoochosis.

Secondly, zoos often separate animals from their families, disrupting their natural social structures. Many species rely on close-knit family groups and complex social interactions for their well-being. Being isolated or placed with unfamiliar individuals can cause significant distress and anxiety.

Lastly, the artificial environments in zoos can never fully replicate the diversity and complexity of natural habitats. These environments often lack the variety of vegetation and flowers that animals interact with in the wild, which is crucial for their development and overall health. The artificial settings, designed more for human amusement than for animal comfort, can hinder natural behaviours and lead to both physical and mental health issues.

Due to these factors, the banning of zoos based on animal welfare concerns is a topic worthy of serious consideration. Alternatives such as wildlife sanctuaries and conservation programs in natural habitats should be supported to promote true animal welfare.

Against the Ban #1 - Animal Welfare and Conservation

Conservation (n). Meaning: the protection of the natural environment. For example, road development in the area has been limited by conservation programmes.

Endangered (adj). Meaning: (used especially about groups of animals, plants, etc.) at risk of no longer existing. For example, the sea turtle is an endangered species.

Breed (v). Meaning: (of animals) for a male and a female to create a baby. For example, many animals breed only at certain times of the year.

Extinct (adj). Meaning: (of a type of plant, animal, etc.) no longer in existence. For example, the red squirrel is in danger of becoming extinct in England.

Tailored (adj). Meaning: made for a particular person or purpose. For example, these lessons are tailored for upper intermediate and advanced students.

Although there are valid concerns about animal welfare in zoos, it's crucial to recognize that modern zoos play an essential role in conservation and can significantly improve animal welfare when managed properly. Zoos provide a safe environment for many endangered species, allowing them to thrive and reproduce in a controlled setting.

Firstly, zoos contribute actively to conservation through their involvement in breeding programs specifically designed for endangered species. These programs are vital for maintaining genetic diversity, which is essential for the survival and health of these species. Through such efforts, zoos have managed to reintroduce numerous species back into the wild, significantly boosting populations that are at risk of extinction.

Secondly, regarding animal welfare, many zoos now employ enrichment programs that encourage natural behaviours by simulating more natural environments. These programs are tailored to the specific needs of each species and focus on promoting physical and mental health through activities that encourage finding food, climbing, and social interaction. Such initiatives not only reduce stress and improve overall health but also ensure that the animals' lives in zoos are as engaging and natural as possible.

Lastly, the strategic management of animal populations through zoos involves the careful translocation of animals to prevent inbreeding and strengthen genetic health. This management is crucial for developing robust animal populations that are capable of thriving both in captivity and in the wild.

For the Ban #2 - Commercialisation

Compromise (n). Meaning: (between A and B) a solution to a problem in which two or more things cannot exist together as they are, in which each thing is reduced or changed slightly so that they can exist together. For example, It was a fair compromise between the two sides.

Nocturnal (adj). Meaning: (of animals) active at night. For example, owls are nocturnal animals.

Enclosure (n). Meaning: a piece of land that is surrounded by a fence or wall and is used for a particular purpose. For example, a wildlife enclosure for lions.

Inadequate (adj). Meaning: not enough; not good enough. For example, the system is inadequate for the tasks it has to perform.

Undermine (v). Meaning: to make something, especially somebody’s confidence or authority, gradually weaker or less effective. For example, our confidence in the team has been seriously undermined by their recent defeats.

One of the main ethical concerns about zoos is their commercialization, where the welfare of animals is often compromised for profit and human entertainment. This aspect of zoos raises significant moral questions about the treatment and use of animals in such settings.

Firstly, zoos often prioritise visitor satisfaction over animal welfare. This can lead to animals being displayed in ways that attract more visitors but are harmful to the animals themselves. For example, forcing nocturnal animals to be active during the day to fit zoo hours, or keeping animals in smaller, more visible enclosures that restrict their natural behaviours. Such practices emphasise the entertainment value at the cost of the animals' well-being.

Secondly, the profit motive can lead to zoos cutting costs in ways that directly harm animals. Inadequate funding for proper habitats, healthcare, and nutrition leads to poor living conditions. Animals may suffer from various health problems due to poor diets and lack of space, all because maintaining optimal conditions is often seen as too expensive.

Furthermore, the commercial nature of zoos means that they may engage in breeding practices not for conservation purposes but to increase the population of 'popular' animals that increase visitors. This selective breeding for visual appeal undermines genuine conservation efforts and focuses on generating income rather than protecting species.

In conclusion, the commercialization of zoos highlights a troubling conflict between making money and caring for animals ethically. The enjoyment of animals by humans, under conditions where the animals suffer, is fundamentally unethical and supports the argument for banning zoos.

Against the Ban #2 - Human Education

Compelling (adj). Meaning: that makes you pay attention to it because it is so interesting and exciting. For example, his eyes were strangely compelling.

Encounter (v). Meaning: to meet somebody, or discover or experience something, especially somebody/something new, unusual or unexpected. For example, She was the most remarkable woman he had ever encountered.

Foster (v). Meaning :to encourage something to develop. For example, The club's aim is to foster better relations within the community.

Preservation (n). Meaning: the act of keeping something in its original state or in good condition. For example, preservation of the building was the government's priority.

Poach (v). Meaning: to illegally hunt birds, animals or fish on somebody else’s property or without permission. For example, the elephants are poached for their tusks.

One compelling argument against banning zoos is their significant role in educating and inspiring the next generation about wildlife conservation. Zoos offer a unique platform where children and adults alike can learn about the natural world and the importance of protecting it.

Firstly, zoos provide an opportunity for people to see and connect with animals they might never encounter otherwise. This direct exposure can foster a sense of responsibility and a desire to participate in conservation efforts. For many young visitors, seeing animals in person can create a lifelong interest in wildlife. This emotional connection is crucial as it lays the foundation for future conservationists who will support environmental preservation.

Secondly, educational programs in zoos are designed to teach visitors about the challenges facing wildlife, including habitat loss, climate change, and illegal poaching. By providing this knowledge in an engaging and interactive way, zoos help people understand the complexities of conservation and the critical role humans play in addressing these issues.

Furthermore, many zoos offer programs specifically tailored to engage young people, such as zoo camps, guided tours, and hands-on activities that explain the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem health. These programs are not just informative; they are also designed to be inspiring, motivating young people to care about and take action for the natural world.

In conclusion, although the way zoos make money can be worrying, their role in education is very important. By teaching and inspiring young people, zoos help develop future wildlife supporters and conservationists. The positive educational effects provided by zoos make a strong argument against banning them. They show how zoos can help both animals and people understand the need for conservation.

In the United Kingdom the majority of university courses cost around 27,000 pounds, which is about 33,000 dollars. In the United States, another country with privatised university tuition, fees are much higher averaging between 40,000 to 120,000 dollars for a degree. All these costs don’t include housing, textbooks and personal supplies either.

However, many countries in Europe such as Germany, Sweden and Denmark have either free universities only requiring a small payment for administration costs or incredibly low cost relative to the UK and the USA.

So, let's deep dive into the pros and cons of having free university education.

For #1 - An Educated Society

The first reason why university should be free is the benefits of living in a society with more educated people.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Empower (v). Meaning: “to give somebody more control over their own life or the situation they are in”. For example, the movement empowered women and gave them confidence in themselves.

Equip (v). Meaning: “to provide yourself/somebody/something with the things that are needed for a particular purpose or activity”. For example, rooms vary in size and come equipped with hairdryers, television and telephone.

Pressing (adj). Meaning: “needing to be dealt with immediately”. For example, many believe climate change is a pressing issue.

Catalyst (n). Meaning: a person or thing that causes a change. For example, The protests were later seen as the catalyst for the new political developments.

Equitable (adj). Meaning: “fair and reasonable; treating everyone in an equal way. For example, we don’t live in an equitable society!

At its centre, education empowers individuals. By making university free, we enable more people to access the tools and opportunities needed to reach their full potential. With a university education, individuals gain not only specialised knowledge but also critical thinking skills, creativity, and a lifelong enjoyment for learning. Development of these different skills will be even more important in the future when automation and artificial intelligence replaces more low-skilled work.

But the impact of education extends far beyond the individual. Society is made up of individuals and more educated individuals would make for a better society. Positive social change can happen when more people are equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate the difficulties of the modern world.

Educated individuals are more likely to contribute meaningfully to their communities and economies, driving innovation, productivity, and social togetherness. They are better equipped to address pressing issues, from environmental sustainability to technological advancement, creating a culture of continuous improvement and adaptation.

Furthermore, education is a catalyst for social mobility, breaking down barriers and opening doors to opportunities previously out of reach. By ensuring that education is accessible to all, regardless of economic background, we create a more equitable society where talent and merit, rather than privilege, determine success.

Against # 1 - Less Funding, Reduced Quality

The first reason why university shouldn’t be free is the reduction of education quality due to less funding.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Appealing (adj). Meaning: attractive or interesting. For example, spending the winter in the UK wasn’t appealing.

Prestigious (adj). Meaning: respected and admired as very important or of very high quality. For example, my parents wanted me to go to a more prestigious university.

Allocate (v). Meaning: to give something officially to somebody/something for a particular purpose. For example, a large sum has been allocated for buying new books for the library.

Stretched (v). Meaning: to make use of a lot of your money, supplies, time, etc. For example, the pandemic has stretched healthcare resources to the limit.

Jeopardise (v). Meaning: to risk harming or destroying something/somebody. For example, He would never do anything to jeopardise his career.

While free university may seem like an appealing policy, it may have significant negatives for funding and the quality of tuition that students receive. According to the Times, in the top ten universities around the world, three are in the UK and the other seven are in the United States. Top universities around the world, including many prestigious institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, have earned their reputation through large investments in research, infrastructure, and faculty. These institutions attract top talent from around the globe and drive innovation and excellence in education.

However, making university education free could lead to a decrease in funding for universities, as governments may struggle to allocate sufficient resources to support the increased demand for higher education without additional revenue streams. This could result in budget cuts to academic programs, reduced investment in research and development, and limitations on faculty hiring and compensation. Governments that want to reduce their spending may introduce spending cuts to education that would harm the quality of the education offered to students.

A decrease in funding could impact the quality of education and the overall student experience. Class sizes may increase, leading to less individualised attention and interaction with professors. Resources such as libraries, laboratories, and student support services may be stretched thin, limiting students' access to essential learning resources and opportunities for academic and personal growth.

Moreover, reduced funding for universities could hinder their ability to compete globally and maintain their status as leading institutions of higher learning. As top universities in the United States and the United Kingdom face increased pressure to maintain their rankings and reputation, any decrease in funding could jeopardise their ability to attract and retain top staff and students, as well as secure research grants and partnerships.

For #2 - Student Debt

The second reason why university should be free is the issue of student debt.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Lenient (adj). Meaning: not as strict as expected when punishing somebody or when making sure that rules are obeyed. For example, the teacher was lenient with students that were late.

Burden (n). Meaning: a duty, responsibility, etc. that causes worry, difficulty or hard work. For example, the heavy tax burden on working people.

Hinder (v). Meaning: to make it difficult for somebody to do something or for something to happen. For example, a political situation that hinders economic growth.

Stifle (v). Meaning: to prevent something from happening; to prevent a feeling from being expressed. So, this is similar to hinder.For example, They hope the new rules will not stifle creativity.

Alleviate (v). Meaning: to make something less severe. For example, the policy was introduced to alleviate the suffering of many people in the North of the country.

When planning this episode, I had a look at my student debt to see how much I owed. I have a bachelors and a masters degree that cost me a total of £37,000. In the UK, we are able to get a loan to pay for our tuition fees. But, like most loans, we’re expected to pay interest on this and right now I’m in over £65,000 in debt. While this seems shocking, this is completely normal and everyone who I studied with at university will be in a similar situation. In the UK, you don’t start paying this back until you earn over 27,000 pounds a year and even then the monthly repayments aren’t much. This means that most people don’t actually pay all the money they owe and the loan gets cancelled at the age of 65. However, in the USA, the repayments are expected to be in full and a lot sooner, with some loans needing to be repaid in 10 years.

Is this the start that we want to give young people? Charging students huge amounts of money for wanting to better themselves, gain qualifications and become more employable. While this isn’t a severe issue in the UK as the loan repayments are lenient, in the USA student debt can be a source of financial burden. The debt that they acquire will follow them around for years into the future impacting their decisions on everything from further education to career choices.

The weight of student debt extends far beyond graduation day. For many, it becomes a constant source of stress and anxiety, affecting mental well-being and overall quality of life. Young graduates find themselves entering the workforce already burdened with significant financial obligations, making it difficult to pursue their dreams, start families, or invest in their futures.

Moreover, student debt has wider implications for society as a whole. It hinders economic mobility, as young adults are forced to delay major life milestones such as buying a home or starting a business due to their financial constraints. This delay in economic participation not only stifles individual growth but also slows down the overall pace of economic progress.

By making university education free, we can alleviate this burden of student debt. Students can focus on their studies without the constant fear of debt, allowing them to fully engage with their academic pursuits and extracurricular activities. This, in turn, can lead to improved academic outcomes and a more enriching university experience.

Finally, the fear of debt could be enough to persuade young people from not going to university. This could contribute to economic divisions in society as richer families will be able to help pay for tuition, while poorer students are forced into taking expensive loans.

Against #2 - Devaluing of Degrees

The second reason why university shouldn’t be free is that degrees will be devalued.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Devalue (v). Meaning: to give a lower value to something, making it seem less important than it really is. For example, work in the home is often ignored and devalued.

Strive (v). Meaning: to try very hard to achieve something. For example, they were always striving towards perfection.

Foster (v). Meaning: to encourage something to develop. For example, the company tried to foster an inclusive working environment.

Complacency (n). Meaning: a feeling of being satisfied with yourself or with a situation, so that you do not think any change is necessary; the state of being complacent. For example, His early success as a writer led to complacency and arrogance.

Diminish (v). Meaning: to make somebody/something seem less important than they really are. For example, the win was diminished because many thought they cheated.

One of the primary concerns with implementing free university education is the potential devaluation of education itself. When something is provided for free, it is often perceived as having less value. In the case of higher education, making it free could lead to a decrease in the appreciation and respect for the educational experience.

Paying tuition fees for university education is not just a financial transaction; it also represents an investment in one's future. When students and their families contribute financially to their education, they are more likely to take their studies seriously, engage actively in their courses, and strive for academic success. This financial commitment fosters a sense of responsibility and ownership over one's education, leading to greater motivation and dedication.

Also, when university education is provided for free, students may be less inclined to fully engage with their studies or take advantage of the opportunities available to them. Without the financial stake in their education, some individuals may approach their university experience with a sense of entitlement or complacency, leading to lower academic achievement and a diminished sense of accomplishment.

Furthermore, the perception of education as a valuable asset may be reduced when it is freely available to all. Employers may question the quality of degrees gained from institutions where education is provided for free, leading to scepticism about the skills and competencies of graduates in the job market.

Additionally, the devaluation of education could have broader societal implications, affecting the overall competitiveness and productivity of the workforce. A workforce that values education less may be less innovative, less adaptable to change, and less equipped to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving global economy.

For #3 - Reduce Inequality

The final reason why university should be free is the possibility of reducing inequality.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Socio-economic (adj). Meaning: relating to society and economics. For example, people from different socio-economic backgrounds worked in the company.

Counterparts (n). Meaning: a person or thing that has the same position or function as somebody/something else in a different place or situation. For example, the Foreign Minister held talks with his Chinese counterpart.

Disparity (n). Meaning: a difference, especially one connected with unfair treatment. For example, the wide disparity between rich and poor was highlighted.

Disproportionate (adj). Meaning: too large or too small when compared with something else. For example, the area contains a disproportionate number of young middle-class families.

Intergenerational (adj). Meaning: ​including or involving people of different generations or age groups. For example, the intergenerational conflict and political turmoil of the 1960s.

Supporters for free university education argue that it has the potential to significantly advance equal opportunities and reduce inequality within society. By removing financial barriers to higher education, free university education ensures that all individuals, regardless of socio-economic background, have equal access to the benefits of a university degree.

It should come as no surprise that working class people are less likely to go to university than their richer counterparts. Research suggests that “Fewer than one in five young people from the lower social class groups participate in HE, and although this proportion has been increasing, it remains well below the 45 per cent who participate from the higher social class groups”. The cost of study has been cited as a major reason for their decision not to go. According to one poll “students from the wealthiest postcodes tend to start thinking about university earlier than those from the poorest, with 39% of richer pupils considering higher education at primary school compared with 27% of their most disadvantaged peers”.

It could be argued that these disparities reflect the impact of financial barriers, limited access to educational resources, and systemic inequalities that disproportionately affect working-class communities. Free university education addresses this disparity by eliminating the financial barriers that prevent many working-class individuals from pursuing higher education. By making university education accessible to all, regardless of socioeconomic status, free university education ensures that talent and potential are not limited by financial circumstances.

Moreover, free university education has the potential to reduce socioeconomic inequality by empowering individuals to obtain the skills and qualifications needed to succeed in the modern economy. A university degree opens doors to higher-paying jobs, greater job security, and increased opportunities for career advancement, helping to narrow the income gap between different segments of society.

Additionally, free university education promotes social mobility by providing individuals with the tools and resources needed to break free from intergenerational poverty. By investing in education, society can create pathways for individuals to improve their lives and contribute positively to their communities and economies.

Furthermore, free university education fosters diversity and inclusion within higher education institutions, enriching the academic environment and promoting cross-cultural understanding and collaboration. When individuals from diverse backgrounds have equal access to higher education, society as a whole benefits from a more equitable distribution of talent, innovation, and expertise.

Against #3 - Reduce Taxes and Government Spending

The third reason why university shouldn’t be free is the ability to maintain tax and government spending levels.

The key vocabulary to listen out for is:

Overlook (v). Meaning: to fail to see or notice something. For example, he has overlooked one important fact.

Substantial (adj). Meaning: large in amount, value or importance. For example, substantial numbers of people support the reforms.

Expenditure (n). Meaning: the act of spending or using money; an amount of money spent. For example, plans to increase expenditure on health.

Subsidise (v). Meaning: to give money to somebody or an organisation to help pay for something; to give a subsidy. For example, the housing projects are subsidised by the government.

Trade-off (n). Meaning: the act of balancing two things that are opposed to each other. For example, there is a trade-off between the benefits of the drug and the risk of side effects.

Advocates for free university education often overlook the significant financial implications for government spending and taxation. Implementing such a policy would require a substantial increase in government expenditure, redirecting funds from other important areas such as healthcare, infrastructure, and social services.

In countries where higher education is publicly funded, taxpayers bear the burden of financing universities through their contributions to government revenue. Introducing free university education would likely require higher taxes. This would place an additional financial burden on taxpayers, reducing their disposable income and limiting their ability to invest in their own priorities, such as healthcare, housing, or retirement savings.

Moreover, the allocation of tax money for free university education raises questions of fairness and equity. Taxpayers may feel resentful about subsidising the education of others, especially if they themselves did not benefit from such a policy or if they have already paid off their own student loans through hard work and sacrifice.

Moreover, the opportunity cost of free university education cannot be ignored. Every pound spent on subsidising tuition fees for higher education represents a missed opportunity to invest in other areas with potentially greater social and economic returns. This could include early childhood education, vocational training, or research and development in emerging industries.

In essence, while the idea of free university education may appear attractive on the surface, it comes with significant economic trade-offs and opportunity costs. Governments must carefully consider the implications for government spending, taxation, and the broader economy before implementing such a policy, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently and equitably to maximise societal welfare.

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