Timo Heuers Weblog

The reason why I love Seesmic are they conversations. I had some about different subjects the last days and recorded lots of videos even at a birhday party. But the most interesting discussion was with “an English English teacher living in Spain”, how he calls himself. Cool guy. He’s “cataspanglish” on Seesmic if you want to follow him or watch last videos. My Seesmic name is “timo“.

Cannot remember when the discussion started, but it was in the thread “can you help me to learn english”, which a Chinese girl opened. I recorded a video for it when Chris was asking me for tips for learning and improving English skills.

First of all, English in school is mostly crap. It’s too much theory and too less speaking and writing. The teacher is talking German instead of English and if he is talking English, he has to explain the order twice, English and German after it, because not even half of the class understood what do to.

Of course reading English blogs and tweets is important. Listenings to podcasts also fills the important hole of pronouncing and listening comprehension. One of my favorite English podcasts, called Speaking English Podcast, is run by a German who studies American studies and English studied in Hamburg. He podcasts about grammatical problems and words that sound the same but are used in different ways and spelled different.

But what is passive listening and reading without asking questions and interact? In my opinion the most important thing is to interact with native speakers, it doesn’t matter where they are from (India, UK, US, ..). That’s how you can learn sayings and expressions used to describe things. Don’t hesitate to ask them for a correction of your textes. I did that for the “about” page, but don’t do this anymore for normal blog postings - making mistakes and err is human.

That’s all for now. Do you have any further tips?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Non-journalistic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.