Hi there and welcome back to the Smart English Coach podcast.
Here's a quick question for you.
Imagine that you have 30 minutes to improve your English.
What do you do?
Do you open your vocabulary notebook and review some words?
Or do you read an article and highlight some interesting phrases?
Or perhaps do you watch a video in English and make some notes?
All of these things can be useful, but I want you to think about something.
After those 30 minutes, how much of that English can you actually use?
Because there's a big difference between learning a word and making a word your own.
So you might recognise an expression when you see it, you might understand it when someone says it,
but then when you're in a conversation, someone asks you a question and suddenly that vocabulary disappears.
You know it's somewhere in your brain, but you can't find it quickly enough.
And this is one of the biggest differences between being almost fluent and fluent.
It's not just knowing more words, it's being able to access the words that you know.
So in this episode, I want to show you how you can turn 30 minutes into a powerful fluency exercise.
A simple way to take new vocabulary and make it part of your active English.
And by the way, this is also the principle behind the summer speaking challenge that I've created for this year.
Short, focused speaking practice that helps you stop collecting English and start using it.
We can talk about a type of vocabulary trap.