Understand Tricky British English: Idioms & Grammar Explained | Rule 6/7
10:11 Share

Hi there and welcome to Rule 6 of the 7 Rules of Adept English. Rule 6 is called the Helping Hand of Adept English. With our Listen and Learn method, the biggest part of your learning will be achieved through spending a lot of time listening. A lot of time listening to a

and understanding quality English material. But rule six, the helping hand, refers to those times when I give specific help on certain topics. A little bit of help where it's needed can go a long way. I aim to give you shortcuts with the difficult parts of English. Every language has its difficult parts and English is no exception.

I'm sure you'll agree. Why is English difficult? Well, the Oxford Summer Courses website gives the following reasons. There are lots of rules in English and there are even more rules for written English than there are for spoken English.

And then, of course, the rules get broken all the time. On top of that, English is a language made up from so many other languages. It means the typical English word doesn't exist. They're all different. The Oxford Summer Courses website estimates that, in fact, 29% of English comes from friends.

29% of English comes from Latin and 26% of English has its roots in German languages. And the remaining 14%, well, that just comes from everywhere else. English is like a dog.

which has many breeds, many types of dog in its heritage. It does help, however, that I've studied Latin, French and German. So I'm in a good position to explain words and their origin to you. And of course, there are the rest. English words like shampoo, which

which comes from the Hindi. Robot, which comes from Czech. Jubilee, which comes from Hebrew. And anorak, which comes from Eskimo. But anorak can also mean a nerd. That's N-E-R-D, which brings me to another problem with English. We love anorak.

our slang, S-L-A-N-G. And slang words, when they've been used enough, enter the dictionary and become part of mainstream English. So there's all that. More reasons why English is difficult. It's full of idioms. We don't mean what we say. We often mean something else, which seems entirely unconnected.

with what we said. Who could guess that it's a piece of cake means something is easy. That's something you'll need an explanation for. And when it comes to our verb tenses and our noun plurals, well, neither of those are a piece of cake. And pronunciation, well, that's a whole other area of illogical, inconsistent stuff. And it's

English just has so many words and so many words that mean the same thing, except that they don't.

Exactly. They mean almost the same thing. Get them wrong and English speakers will smile. It's not that they're being unpleasant or laughing at you. It's just that a slightly wrong word usage sounds funny to us. But more than anything else, it's that inconsistency. It's the fact that English is, well,

So illogical. So a helping hand is needed all over the place in English. And I give you a helping hand with all kinds of things on our courses, in our podcasts and in our subscription episodes. For example, in our pronunciation course.

I give help with silent letters, looking at words where not all the letters are sounded. Words like write, W-R-I-T-E. So that has a silent W. Or psychology, which sounds like it should begin with an S.

but actually begins with a P. Those two are words you probably know, but there are plenty others that you may not know. I take you through tricky spellings. I cover the words which mean the same or which sound as though they mean the same, but don't. I help you with difficult grammar. What on earth do we use all those verb tenses for? I cover these sorts of topics occasionally in the podcast,

but much more in our paid subscription episodes, where there's opportunity for me to cover even more topics because we do so many episodes. Basically, whatever I listed before as a reason why English is difficult, I'll have given a helping hand with that in a podcast episode.

a course or an episode. The Helping Hand of Adept English runs through everything we do, even where the point of a podcast is more for interest, a topic I've chosen because I think you'll find it interesting. I do that to keep you listening so that your brain gets opportunity to practice.

so that your brain can do its unconscious and automatic learning. In everything I do, where I've used a more difficult word, I explain it. I want to cover topics that you'll find interesting, but that often means using more difficult or less well-known words. With an explanation, hopefully you'll understand it without translating, so we can cover some quite fascinating subjects.

Adept English refuses to be boring. Like many other language websites, we like to think you'd listen to our episodes anyway, even if they were in your own language. So I don't restrict vocabulary to what's easy because that would restrict our subjects. But I give you help with what's difficult. And guess what? The helping hand just means you learn more.

And the helping hand runs through the courses too. In new activate your listening, I let you listen to an article with no help at all at first. Then I give you lots of help in the form of a vocabulary recording. This is like a tutorial, just you and me. Then you can listen again to the article.

knowing much more about the words. This means that you get to fully understand recordings that you didn't understand to start with. This will bring up your level of English beautifully. More examples of the helping hand. I draw your attention to where, say, UK and US

words are different or where the words are the same, but the spelling or pronunciation is different. I talk about words in English which are difficult to pronounce, sometimes even for me, or about words which are frequently pronounced incorrectly. I talk about the mistakes that English speakers make and some of our most popular podcasts are

are the ones where I've taken a recording of someone speaking who has a very difficult accent. And then I explain to you what they're saying in my accent, which is familiar to you, so that hopefully you can understand. For a bit of fun, go onto YouTube and look up our most popular video, the one with the most listens. I imagine you would find the person on that podcast

to be very difficult indeed to understand without a bit of help. And on the helping hand, I also welcome your feedback. I don't always know what's difficult with English because it's my language, but you can tell me what you find difficult. I'll listen and I'll include it in my material so you can play a part in shaping the helping hand of Adept English.

Just a recap before I go on the other rules that we've covered so far. Rule one of Adept English says listening and understanding what you hear is the most important task of learning. Rule two says practice by repetition makes your English automatic. This is the only way to fluency. Rule three says do your English learning while you do other things.

save time. Do your English language learning at the same time as your exercise, your travelling, your chores. That way, you'll keep learning English until you're really good at it. Rule four says be kind to yourself. Stop that self-criticism and just

give yourself time to learn through listening. Remember the four stages of learning and how we all travel through them. Wherever you are in your language learning, that stage is normal. You're not bad at languages. You just need the right method and

and time. Rule five, nothing but English, no translating and nothing but English, everything learned in context so that your brain can learn in the same way that you learned your own language. And today, rule six, have you forgotten it? English is difficult, a pain in the neck. So use the helping hand of Adept English to make it all much easier.

Don't forget to listen to Rule 6 a number of times and join me again tomorrow for Rule 7. We're nearly finished. But there is so much to say in Rule 7. There's so much good advice still to come. And actually, some other reasons for listening too to Rule 7. Rule 7 could save you money as well as time. See you tomorrow for Rule 7 and the final part of our course.