4 Words

All right.

So we’ve done variations and you can use that exercise anytime to improve your English skills.

Now we’re going to go onto an exercise that I designed specifically to improve your ability to think in English.

Now if you’ve already seen this in my other course about learning to think in English the English brain course then I’m sorry.

I want to cover it in this course because I think it’s so important and a lot of students have told me how useful it is to them.

So I want to make sure that we included in this course so that you can use it to actually start thinking in English thinking in English is very important.

If you can start thinking in English then you can start speaking in English more naturally.

You don’t have to translate in your head.

All right.

So this is very simple.

Let me explain how we do it.

All right.

So the forward exercise is going to force us to use English very flexibly very creatively.

We have no choice but to think in English to do this.

Choose four words.

And once you get good you can use five maybe six.

And I recommend using different forms of words.

So don’t use only verbs maybe use a verb.

Use an adjective.

Use another verb use a noun different types.

And it’s good if you choose words that can have many different forms like cooler coolest cool right.

Because cool has different meanings too.

That’s good.

Don’t put each word into its own sentence.

They all have to be in one sentence.

You can move them around in any order you like.

Doesn’t matter what order they’re in.

That’s fine.

In fact you should be moving them around and trying them in different ways.

You can explore the different meanings of each word.

As I mentioned cool means like you’re or you’re an awesome person.

And it also means kind of cold.

OK.

But also you can change the forms.

So for example think we can say thankful.

Thanks.

There are lots of different forms of words as well.

So one sentence not two sentences very important that you make it fit in one sentence that forces you to be very creative.

OK.

Any order any form.

Now I’ve decided to use for this one.

We’re going to use communicate and turn and fool and cost.

And honestly when I was working on this class plan I just chose four words.

I chose the first four words I thought of.

There’s nothing special about these words.

If you want to change them and choose different words you should.

And all you have to do to do this exercise is sit down write forwards down and then see how many different sentences you can come up with and how many different meanings you can come up with.

Let’s look at two ways that we can use communicate turn fool and cost.

I’m going to give two examples but there are many many other ways we can use these words to make a sentence.

Just before we do let me go over a couple of the different forms so we could have communicate.

We could have communication.

We could have communicator right.

We could have a couple of different forms of communicate turn turning turns.

OK.

Those are OK.

Fool foolish Fool are fools.

OK.

We can use those cost costs sometimes costing.

OK.

So let’s let’s look at a couple of examples sentences.

Number one the cost of a failure to communicate.

Whose turn it is to speak might result in someone looking foolish.

OK.

So we have communicate in its original form the one we have here.

This turn doesn’t mean turn left or right but in order.

Whose turn is it.

It’s my turn.

OK then we have foolish foolish which is one form of the word fool and we have cost in its original form.

OK.

Let’s see if we can come up with one which is very different.

Next one I foolishly turned onto the wrong road because of miscommunication and it cost me a job.

So do we have cost.

Yes.

This one we’ve used the verb form miscommunication.

Well OK.

That’s a form of communicate miscommunication is a noun.

OK.

We’ve used it as a noun full.

We’ve used foolishly foolishly.

This is an adverb used an adverb foolishly turned and turned in the past tense past past tense we’ve used turned.

So we’ve got all four of our words full cost turn and communicate.

But we’ve used them very differently than the previous one.

And we could keep going.

I don’t want to bore you with many many examples but I hope this gets the idea across.

Nothing special about the words you have to force yourself to stick with the rules follow the rules no more than one sentence.

Once you get good at it try five words try six words and it’s very important that it actually makes sense.

It can’t just fit together.

Dramatic and you say all the grammar is right.

It also has to make sense.

It has to be logical.

It has to be something that you could hear in a story if it’s grammatically correct and you’ve just got a bunch of.

And then and then and then and then.

And the sentence is this long.

You failed.

It’s got to be a nice neat clean sentence.

OK.

You’ve got to follow the rules.