How to Improve Your English Daily
Ups and downs, motivation vs depression, willingness and setbacks. How about we commit to a quick year review?
Welcome back to another amazing monthly decision: to Improve Your English Daily! More than ever before, this commitment to improving our English skills reflects such exemplified significance.
For a couple of weeks now, there's a thought that’s been spinning in my head. That’s the fact that I do always highlight how in this era in which we’re living, we’ve got all the resources we need in order to improve the skill we desire. I’m still positive about this, nevertheless, most, if not all of the resources available, are in The English Language.
Even though at times tools have a feature for us to change the language to one that we’re truly familiar with, it doesn’t push aside reality, and that’s the fact that the tool, itself, was developed by people who think in English (or at least for the most part).
Furthermore, most of all the resources I’ve personally tackled for improving a certain area in my life are indeed, written or spoken in English.
I needed to bring light to this, it’s otherwise pretty relevant to acknowledge it. But don’t worry! By deciding to start, months from now you’ll be laughing at how hard it was when you first started!
After all this further ado discussion… kind of. Let’s get down to today’s topics, shall we?
Index
1 — It’s already divided, let’s conquer.
2 — Group activity — Sharing & Year Retrospective
3 — Solo activity — Daily training, with someone
I do encourage you to jump straight to the point you find the most attractive rather than reading everything out of behavioral habit.
It’s already divided, let’s conquer
Recently I’ve been thinking quite a lot, huh? Being completely honest, I’ve noticed how truly important it is to be open to teamwork. As much as we can do on our own, we’ve got certain limitations such as having a healthy sleep schedule, budget, family, etc. By grumbling on how amazing teamwork truly is, we might be missing rather huge opportunities. Luckily enough, we might even come to prefer and appreciate working in teams.
By grumbling on how amazing teamwork truly is, we might be missing rather huge opportunities.
The world is already rather divided, while at the same time completely overly connected through the internet. Why would we keep our heads inside this negative box of useless competition when instead we could agree to form larger groups of joint progress?
I might be biased by the fact that once I found the community in which I felt comfortable in, plus said community depicted constant personal growth while at the same time always being available to help others (completely aligned with my principles), showcased one of the biggest career growth peaks I’ve ever experience in my whole lifetime.
Thanks to all of my UKG team and Holberton School Uruguay peers and staff, you’ve made me feel part of something bigger.
Back when I was in Medicine School, I never felt like I truly belonged, that might’ve been due to low self-esteem or other factors, the culture was rather competitive as well and having family in the area did help a lot, I did not have that privilege. Furthermore, the constant feeling that by asking others for help I was annoying them or even depicting vulnerability by “not knowing” as much as them did, played quite the toll on me.
That wasn’t the place for me, I am grateful I was able to acknowledge that and work on finding where would my happy place really be at.
Anyhow, I did find my subgroup in which I could add value to the team, that was at the statistics lab, but I was still in the career path to become a doctor, not a statistics researcher. That wasn’t the place for me, I am grateful I was able to acknowledge that and work on finding where would my happy place really be at.
Incredibly enough! I was lucky and found the place I belonged, the technology industry! It might not be all the industry as I am painting it to be, however, there’s a thing about open-source projects, the creation of new software, it’s another point of view. It’s a let’s conquer together solutions for humanity to take advantage of as a whole.
I am a creator, a visionnaire, a team-oriented person.
I am a creator, a visionnaire, a team-oriented person. Let me share with you all this African proverb I learnt when I joined Holberton School’s program:
“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”
Never before had I been stroke by a concept until now, the realization that not only finding our why might draw our path towards our wildest dreams, but the fact that by being part of a bigger community is how life does result in true perfection.
Recently I’ve been reading book “The Infinite Game” by Simon Sinek, he highlights how when companies demonstrate their commitment to a Just Cause, and stand strong for it, their workers are all aligned and feel part of “something bigger” to work together for.
What about extrapolating this concept to our personal lives? Why stay in a meaningless way of living when we could be part of rather wider accomplishments? As that might be, adding value to the one thing we all have in common: being human.
Group activity — Sharing & Year Retrospective
As we’re approaching the last month of the year, wouldn’t it be nice to reflect and share with our group of people? By sharing our experiences with people, we shall both make catharsis and get an idea of what 2024 might bring for us.
Today’s activity is based on sharing, talking, putting anxiety and shyness aside.
Today’s activity is based on sharing, talking, putting anxiety and shyness aside. Committing to this safe open space for talking is one, if not the best way to improve together and talk without over-thinking.
You’ll need:
- Pre-cut little papers — make them nice, you deserve them!
- A pen per person
- A timer
The How
Let’s just aim to share today, shall we? To share thoughts, experiences, situations that provide growth or just because. Let’s also put our judgmental minds aside, there’s no need for a grammar police officer to join today’s discussion.
But how? How can we get this activity started? Today’s activity’s being insipred by a recent event I attended here in Montevideo: LA MeetUp. Which is a Meet Up of Meet Ups, kinda weird right? I found the concept of “open space” to be just amazing.
The Open Space concept provides us with a safe, timed, comfortable place to discuss our opinions, I’m switching a little bit the theme to be aimed only about our Years Retrospective, in that sense, we can skip wasting time in looking for topics everyone’s interested in.
Starting should be pretty straight forward, papers and pens shall be handed to each person that’s taking part in this activity.
Now here comes a truly important part: someone should volunteer to be the moderator. I do highlight the volunteer part, that’s due to the importance it has that the person chooses to play this role, and it’s not because of peer pressure.
First group decision: settle on how long each subtopic (under our general topic of Years Retrospective) shall take. It might be 10 minutes, 20 or more even, that’s up to your group to decide.
Why don’t I provide a time estimate? Because that’s part of the activity, for people to make the first group decision of coming to the very first single conclusion of “how much time should we spend on this part of the activity?”.
When a person’s sharing their thoughts, try to not interrupt them, let them finish their thought process.
Now that that’s settled, the moderator shall share the message to the group that’s the time to start making some notes on their piece of paper (in English). These notes are just to describe general outlooks, here’s an example:
When a person’s sharing their thoughts, try to not interrupt them, let them finish their thought process. This suggestion comes from the fact that humans need some time to get to the sweet concentration spot, and by interrupting them, we do not only break this special moment, but also make it seem as don’t care.
While we might find our own thoughts more relevant, it’s about building a stronger community and safer place. I’d suggest that the moderator explains this beforehand. Since we’re doing an activity that might be hard on our self-esteem, and also hard to do because we’re practicing a language that’s other than our mother tongue, interruptions might lead to confusion and disrupt the groups attention.
Make it a safe place to talk and express yourselves.
Well, well, well! Now, it’s also up to your group to decide who’s starting. Make it a safe place to talk and express yourselves. Start sharing!
Now let’s take a minute to think about this… Where people still doubting about their English skills? Or rather about how much they’ve experienced this year? Amazing, isn’t it?
Solo Activity — Daily training, with someone
Hmm…kinda confusing, isn’t it? Why would I be writing the title to work with someone while at the Solo Activity? That’s an easy peasy question!
The answer’s it’s just before your eyes: the internet. By just logging online, then that’s it, you can get yourself an English pen pal! Then now you get why Solo, but with people, hehe.
Back when I was in high school, I had English Workbooks that had a variety of exercises, but one specifically stood out in the crowd, that’s the pen pal exercise. There was always a specific exercise that read something like:
Here’s some websites that are focused on exchanging contacts as pen pals:
- Compatipal
- Geek Girl Pen Pals
- PostCrossing
Isn’t it just crazy how we’ve got everything we need in order to improve our English skills right in our hands? Well! No more time to waste, let’s see other ways:
ChatGPT
Yes, I know, I’m always going back to ChatGPT. But how wouldn’t I take the most out of this recent invention, it has everything we need in order to improve our skills, plus it’s free. I do am a proud Plus member, but I’ve worked hard in order to become so.
To start with, you shall write thoroughly your intentions, explain what your goals are and what you expect the ChatGPT to do in return. For instance, if I want to have a pen pal relationship, I’d say:
Then, below this starting prompt you should write the first email, or as you please honestly, make this your very own path.
Our How to Improve Your English Daily Club
Since now I’ve got quite the following (OMG!!! THANKS!!!), I’ve been pondering on developing some sort of website, a platform to exchange contacts or some way to put all of these ideas I’m monthly writing about into more of a hands-on approach.
Given a considerable amount of people are willing and could take advantage of this idea, I could create a lightweight website for doing such exercises. Might be creating a safe space to exchange about specific topic daily, or an online discussion site, where I could start being the moderator and see where this shall go!
Anyhow, do let me know your thoughts and ideas below, if you consider you’ll benefit from this, just leave an “I’d join” below and I’ll add your vote!
To bring this article to a close,
I’d like to take a brief second to highlight how grateful I am! I started out this journey on sharing articles online for people to get inspired by and improve their English skills, and now I’m certainly experiencing wild rejoice by reading all of your comments.
This language has opened so many doors for me, even made it available for me to explore a new way for creativity to run wild in my mind. I just couldn’t keep it to myself, I needed to share it with others.
I do want to highlight that feedback’s truly appreciated, even if it’s not straight up positive, I do read everything and aim to become better each month. Bringing fun out of the box activities is quite the challenge but I committed to it and am more than glad to continue!
Hopefully, I’ll be posting once a month. Next post: end of 2023.
Follow me on GitHub here. Also, here’s my LinkedIn just in case.
