Conversations In English
To speak a new language, you need to understand a lot of what you hear before you speak in that language. English is no different, you really need to be 10 times as good at comprehending what you hear in English before speaking in English becomes more fluent, more automatic.
Why do you need to practice listening to a new language and building up your automatic language comprehension?
Well, just like children learn a language for the first time, listening to their parents repeating and correcting words over and over. Nature has designed our brains to acquire communication and languages in this way.
Don’t worry. It will not take as long as the first time we learned this way. We can speed this learning process up, because we have some big advantages over young children, we already have experience of this process and knowledge of languages.
Using advances in our understanding of the human mind, we can make further improvements on how we can learn a new language. Taking advantage of how we store things in long-term memory and short-term memory, use spaced repetition and the psychology of learning to be more efficient in the way we store our new language.
When you listen to one of our lessons you are getting so much more than a few thousand words of English vocabulary you using our Listen & learn system of learning a new language.
Most Unusual Words:
100th
Webpage
Hospitalised
Most common 3 word phrases:
| Phrase | Count |
|---|---|
| For The NHS | 4 |
| Captain Tom Moore | 3 |
| Conversations In English | 2 |
| Of His Garden | 2 |
| Story Was About | 2 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
The mp3 audio and pdf transcript for this lesson is now part of the Adept English back catalogue . You can still download and listen to this lesson as part of one of our podcast bundles.Transcript: Practice Conversations In English Good News Stories
Hi and welcome to this latest podcast from Adept English. Adept English is here to help you to improve your conversations in English, with our ‘Listen & Learn’ system. If you find the podcasts difficult, or you would like to just make sure that you know all the essential English vocabulary and you have no gaps, then our 500 Most Common Words Course is for you. You can buy this course on our website at adeptenglish.com – and start straight away. This course will make the podcasts easier to understand, because the most common 500 words in English make up a high percentage of any written or spoken English. Once you can understand and use these words automatically, you’ll be well on your way to fluency in English. And if you think 500 words sounds easy – then bear in mind, each verb and its many forms counts only once. So actually, there’s a lot more to this course than simply 500 words. Try it out today!
Boost Your Learning With Adept English
So our Adept English podcasts sometimes do teaching, I sometimes do lessons. And sometimes I just give you English conversation topics, so that you can practise your understanding of conversations in English. So today I’m going to talk about two news stories from last week – you may have heard them. And I enjoyed these stories because they were positive ones, amid all the bad news. And I like both of these stories because they celebrate older people.
Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!
⭐ Anne Frank, German Writer
Video
106 years old
The first news story was about Connie Titchen, aged 106 years, who had been hospitalised – that means taken into hospital – with the virus. And last week she recovered, she got better. The NHS staff on her ward gave her a round of applause – that means they clapped, like this – they clapped as Connie Titchen left hospital. When we hear so much about how this illness affects older people, that’s an encouraging story that even someone of 106 years can survive. And the newspapers were reporting that she is the oldest person to have recovered from the virus in the UK. Mrs Titchen, who is grandmother of five and great-grandmother of eight had been in hospital in Birmingham for three weeks. She was born in 1913, just before the first world war – and was a keen cyclist, dancer and golfer. It was said of Connie Titchen that she ‘likes a cheeky MacDonalds every now and again’!
Raising money for the NHS
And the second new story, was about Captain Tom Moore. This retired army captain, aged 99 years, was originally hoping to raise £1,000 for NHS Charities Together, by doing 100 laps of his garden, before his 100th birthday. A ‘lap’, L-A-P is when you go round something once, like a runner on a track. So Captain Tom has been going round a 25m lap of his garden in Bedfordshire, with the aid of his walking frame and wearing his war medals. He finished his 100th lap last Thursday. And guess what? At current count, he’s raised more than £21 million pounds for the NHS! That’s crazy. There is now a petition, a list with lots of signatures, asking that he be knighted – Sir Tom Moore, rather than Captain Tom Moore. Captain Tom last week had done more than 50 interviews for the press, for the media. It’s as though he’s an A-list celebrity. And that sum of £21 million is still growing – so by the time you’re listening to this, it’s probably even more. Donations come through his JustGiving webpage.
📷
A photograph of an elderly couple happily dancing indoors.
Speaking to BBC Radio 2 he said that the money was "absolutely enormous sum" and "very difficult to imagine". And he thanked everyone for support. He began raising funds to thank the NHS, after he’d had treatment for cancer and a broken hip. On his final lap, soldiers from the 1st Batalion Yorkshire Regiment formed a ‘guard of honour’. If you look this up online, you’ll see photographs of this.
Captain Tom Moore said "I say thank you very much indeed. I appreciate it because the object for which we're donating is so important and so necessary... I think you're all so kind and thoughtful contributing to this cause,". And apparently the total includes a donation, money from the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, who also recorded with the Duchess of Cambridge a video message for Captain Tom, to thank him for his efforts.
More raising money for the NHS
There’s a Scottish lady, named Margaret Payne who has now started a similar project – climbing her stairs over and over again. She’s 90 years old – and is saying that she plans to climb the stairs such that it’s the same height as a Scottish mountain – and she’s also raising money for the NHS.
Download The Podcast Audio & Transcript
Goodbye
I love these news stories – and I’m sure there are great stories like these going on, all around the world. Let us know what’s happening in your country, efforts to raise money, people doing heroic things and let’s learn everyday English at the same time.
Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
