- A. An. The. They're pesky little buggers, aren't they?
So what is the best way to get really, really good
at using those tricky little words
when you're speaking English?
Aha!
Stay tuned, 'cause I've got the answer for you,
but not until after we roll that intro.
(upbeat music)
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening,
depending on where in this big wide world of ours
you're tuning into us today from.
Did that even make sense? Was that grammatical?
I don't know. But great.
I'm Julian Northbrook, and this is Doing English.
Occasionally, I review academic papers.
It's about the only thing that I do in this world
on a voluntary basis, 'cause I don't get paid for it.
I do it because I enjoy it, but also because,
hey, showing a bit of goodwill to the academic journals
is only gonna make getting my own research published
just that little bit easier.
Right? Right.
I don't know if you know anything about
the scientific publishing system,
but basically the way it works,
a scientist or a researcher,
somebody like myself who is doing research,
whatever field it is that they do it in,
for me it's obviously second language acquisition,
they will do some research and then
they will write that up into a paper and submit it
to the academic journal of their choice.
Then they will wait for a while
whilst that journal sends their paper out to reviewers,
who will read the paper, write a critique or a review
and give their feedback and all of that good stuff,
as well as a note saying
should it be published or not published or what have you,
which they then submit back to the journal.
If all the reviewers say, "Great, this is brilliant,"
the article then gets published.
If the reviewers all say, "No, this is shit,"
or if they say this needs to be changed,
this needs to be changed, or this needs to be changed,
then it goes back for revisions and you get the idea.
Well, when you're reviewing these papers,
you get a mixed bag.
Some of them are, let's say, pretty shitty.
Quite a few of them, in fact.
Some of them are pretty good,
and occasionally you get ones which are solid
and really, really quite good.
The one that I reviewed today was one of those,
and it made my happy bone tingle, I can tell you.
Now, this particular paper,
it's all anonymous, so I have no idea who wrote it,
but it was pretty good.
The writing itself left somewhat to be desired.
It could have been tidied up a little bit.
It could have been phrased a little bit better in places,
just to make it clearer, easier to read.
But the research itself was solid.
Basically, the researcher was looking at function words,
little words like "a," "an," "the," "of,"
you know, those tricky little critters
that just trip us up all the time.
No matter how advanced we get in a second language,
they still seem to trip us up.
We make mistakes, we get them wrong
on a fairly regular basis, and sometimes
it seems like they are impossible to learn.
And indeed, there are some, I will say,
quite famous English experts out there who claim that
learning the function words
and truly mastering them to a native-like level
is impossible, which frankly is bullshit.
If you're finding it hard, if you are struggling
and unable to actually improve and get good at using them,
well, the methods that you're using are wrong.
Now, this paper was looking at these function words
and mistakes that are made with them.
But what made the paper, what made the research special
was that the researcher was actually looking
at mistakes made with these function words
as they appear in chunks.
And indeed, almost all function words do appear in chunks,
that is, they're not used by themselves
as discrete individual words.
They appear as a part of a larger chunk of English.
And this research paper was looking at erroneous, malformed
chunks of English because the function word
had either been missed or mistaken in some way.
So, for example, the chunk "at the end of the day,"
maybe the person had said, "at the end of day"
where "the" had been missed out from the chunk.
"At the end of the day," "at the end of day."
And the conclusion that the paper came to
was that we can, and almost definitely should,
teach and learn in chunks as a way of mastering
these little tricky words like "a," "an," and "the."
You see, instead of trying to get
to the bottom of "a" versus "the"
and which one we should use in which place
and trying to consciously work all that out
in our heads as we're speaking or producing language,
much better is to actually just
learn in chunks in the first place,
that we learn as a single complete whole
and use as a single complete whole.
Because if you learn that it's "at the end of the day"
instead of it's "at the end of day,"
well, then, you don't need to worry about it.
You just learn it and you use the chunk, boom, as is.
So we've gone from something which is
really, really complex and really difficult to learn
to something which is dead simple
and the result that we get from either approach
is exactly the same,
except this way is a lot, lot easier to do.
I, of course, have been saying this anyway
for a long, long time.
What can I say?
The academic world has not caught up
with the greatness of Julian Northbrook yet,
or perhaps I should have got off my ass
and done such a research project
and got it published first, but hey.
No use crying over spilled milk, is there?
The point is, if you are struggling with the little words,
then change the method that you are using.
Stop looking at them as words and grammar
and trying to work it all out from there,
and start seeing the English language
as a set of chunks to learn, to use as is
and just don't worry about the function words.
Just learn in a way that makes them irrelevant.
If you want to know more about chunks
and how native speakers use them
to speak so fluently and naturally, and how, importantly,
you, the English as a second language learner,
can learn in the same way to speak as native speakers do,
you're gonna wanna check out
my bestselling book "Master English Fast:
"An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English,"
where I talk at length about the chunking process
and how you can learn in that way
so that you can speak in that way,
function-word-error free.
Great.
Just click on the link in the description
or head over to MasterEnglishFast.com.
It comes as a paperback version, a Kindle version,
and either way, it comes with a complete audio version
for your listening enjoyment.
Right!
That's it for me, Julian Northbrook,
signing off from another video.
Take care, don't get caught
doing anything that I wouldn't do,
and I'll see you same time, same place as always
in the next extraordinary video.
Thank you and goodbye.
(upbeat music)
Are you sick and tired of forgetting
all of the vocabulary that you learn
as quickly as you learn it?
If you are, you're gonna wanna check out
this video right here.
I give you three ways to stop
forgetting everything that you learn.
And, if you wanna know
which language is the closest to English,
you're gonna wanna check this video out right here.
Enjoy.