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Vocabulary: Talking about CLOTHES in English

Hello, and welcome back to EngVid. You've found the right place to learn English. Today, we're going to be learning to speak about clothes, about choosing the right clothes, giving compliments, the names of different styles of clothing.

So first things first, instructions. If you're holding a party, you might tell them to arrive in a particular type of clothing. You might say, "Dress up." Okay? You expect them to dress up. You'll maybe say to the women to wear skirts and maybe even say to the guys, "Wear a tie." Okay? If it's a smart, smart occasion.

"Vamp it up!" is a bit of a party term. If you're a girl and you're inviting other girls to come and party with you, "Vamp it up." You expect mascara and make up, etc. Obviously not for the guys. Don't worry.

"Put your glad rags on!" This is another phrase about partying. Kind of put your, sort of, retro flares on and your, kind of, checked shirts. You're going out for a night on the town.

Now, I know we've got some viewers who live in Russia. You might want to "wrap up warm". I'm going to Norway this weekend, and I'll certainly be wrapping up warm. Or you could just say, "Wear a shirt and tie" or, "Put on a colourful jacket." Maybe you're having a fancy dress, okay? "Fancy dress" is where we wear -- maybe you dress up as Mr. Men or as superheroes. "Fancy dress" is a particular type of character party. Good.

Other types of clothing, "Sunday best". You go to church, and you have a nice Sunday lunch. You'd ask them to put on their "Sunday best", their best clothes for a Sunday.

If it's a, kind of, smart, sort of, business networking -- perhaps at someone's house -- maybe "smart casual", respectable clothing.

"Evening wear" is a little bit more smart, okay? "Evening wear", kind of, suits, shirts, ties, maybe "black tie". That would suggest a bow tie. Or in America, you call that "tuxedos", okay? Or "professional work attire". That's, kind of, the kind of clothes that you would go to the office in.

Now, I'm going to be going to a party this evening, so I'll just go and spruce up. See you in a little bit.

So I'm ready for my party. I've put my after-shave on. And, wow. Look at her. She's looking pretty good. I need to think of some compliments, some nice things to say about the clothes she's wearing.

A nice simple one, I could say, "Great outfit." Or, "You're looking great." Now, if I'm talking just about the clothes, I could say, "That -- those trousers go really well with the top you're wearing." Or, "It works. It really works with your hair, the hair colour and trousers." Or, "The top, it just so suits your particular eye type, your eye colour." So you can pair the colours of their hair and their eyes." Or you could just say, "That really suits you." Okay? "Suits" is the same word as a business suit. You can use it as a verb as well. "It really suits you."

Now, some more compliments. You can use "so" as a, sort of, substitute for "very". So I could say, "You're looking so smart." Or, "You're looking so elegant, so graceful, so stylish." Or, "You're looking dapper." "Dapper" is more often used about men than it is about girls. But it's a great adjective for saying that you're looking good.

Now, some nasty things to say about what someone's wearing, some criticisms. "I am sorry, but those colours just don't work on you" or, "Those colours, they don't really work very well with you. They don't suit you." Okay? Or if I just don't think their clothes balance with them, I could say, "You don't really pull that off." Like, if I were wearing a yellow checked suit with a pink spotted shirt, my wife would say to me, "Benjamin, you can't really pull that one off." Okay.

Now, if you're very knowledgeable about fashion, you could say, "That's a bit last season." Okay? "Season." We've, you know, spring, summer, autumn, winter. And fashions, you have spring fashions, summer fashions. "A bit last season. The clothes you are wearing are a bit 2012."

Now, particular things with the clothes. If the colour is a bit faded -- can you all see my trousers? The colour, it's a bit faded. Okay? It's a bit torn. Can you see here? My trousers, they're torn. I jumped over a fence to get into a festival, and now, they're torn. Okay? "Ripped." It's the same thing.

The Secret to English Vocabulary – How to remember more

Hi. This is Rebecca. Let me start this lesson by asking you a question. Which of these two exercises is easier for you? Let me go through them with you.

"Chaos means __________."
Something. Fill in the blank. Okay? In other words, they're asking you here: the word "chaos" means what?

Or second question:
"Chaos means
a) sadness
b) disorder
c) illness".

Okay? Think about that for a second. So, which of these two questions was easier for you? Okay? If you're like most students, you will probably say that this question was easier for you, because you had a choice of something. And here, you actually had to think of the answer. All right?

So, let me explain why that is the case. Here, in the fill in the blank question, you were asked to remember the answer. When you're trying to remember a word, you're using your active vocabulary. In English, like any other language, you have two kinds of skills. We have productive skills and receptive skills. Productive skills are what we use when we are speaking and writing, because when we speak and write, we have to remember words in order to do that. Right? And receptive skills are what you use when you're reading or listening, because when you do either of these activities, you just have to recognize the word, so you have to recall what they mean, but you don't have to think of them by yourself. You just have to recognize them.

So the vocabulary that's involved here on this side is your passive vocabulary of being able to recognize things. The vocabulary that's demanded here for speaking and writing is your active vocabulary, which you need when you're doing these activities and which you needed here in the fill in the blank answer. Okay? So, this is true not only in English. It's true in every language. You have a productive... You have productive skills and receptive skills. You have an active vocabulary and a passive vocabulary. And, in all languages, people's passive vocabulary is always much, much larger than their active vocabulary. That's why you can read hundreds of books and understand thousands and thousands of words, but you may not actually use those words yourself, even in your own language and certainly in English. So, next, I'll explain to you how to develop this active vocabulary.

So there are many ways to improve your active vocabulary. Today I'm going to show you one way. All right? So, what I've done is written a lot of vocabulary on the board, and what I'd like you to do is to take a theme, a vocabulary theme. What do I mean by a vocabulary theme? I mean an area, such as here, I've taken education, here I've taken religion, and here I've taken business or work. All right? And then you divide it. Let's say you have a piece of paper or you could do it, you know, on... You could do it written or you could do it in your mind, and you divide it into categories, such as: in the field of education, you want to think of people, you want to think of places, and you want to think of actions which are the verbs. Right?

So you could start by just doing it in a simple way and see if you can come up with at least three examples. All right? Three examples of people in education: "teacher", "student", "principal"; places: "school", "college", "university"; actions: "study", "teach", "learn". Okay? In the area of religion, if we're talking about different kinds of people, people of different religions: "Muslims", "Christians", "Hindus"; places in the area of religion: "mosque", "church", "temple"; actions could be: "pray", "bless", "believe". Obviously, these are not the only examples; I'm just showing you how to do it. In the field of business, for people you might put: "manager", "employee", "supervisor"; for places: "office", "factory", "department"; and for actions, things like: "work", or "recruit", or "promote". Okay?

Secrets to Speak Excellent English: Don't study grammar rules.

Hi, I’m Joe Weiss, one of the directors of Learn Real English. And today I’m going to be speaking with you about the second rule of speaking excellent English. So what is that rule? Okay, the second rule is don’t
study grammar rules. I know you may be surprised, but it is a very important rule. You’re surprised because
most students are told when they’re learning English that they must study grammar rules. And they’ve been
learning English for many years. Some of them in high school. Some of you have been learning at University
or in a language school.

So now I have a question for you. Have you been successful? Do you feel good about how your English
learning is progressing? Many of you have been studying for a number of years. So here’s the question you
need to ask yourself. Are you able to speak English quickly, easily and automatically? If not, then you need
to ask why. Why are you not able to speak English quickly, easily, automatically? That’s what you want.
Well the reason is because you’ve been studying the wrong way. But I’ll tell you. It’s not your fault. Many
people experience this same frustration. And why is it that they experience this frustration? Why are they not
able to speak quickly, easily and automatically when they speak English?
Well the reason is because they focus too much on grammar. They study grammar rules far too much. Why do they do this? Well the reason is because their teachers tell them that is the way that you learn the English language. They tell you the best way is to study grammar rules. And you look at your textbooks. The
textbooks have many grammar rules in them. So as a result, that’s why many people believe it’s very
important to study these grammar rules.

So I know the next question you may have is why is it important to not study grammar? Well there have been a lot of reports, there’s a lot of research that shows that when you actually study grammar rules it impairs your ability to speak. When you go and speak the English language, you think of these grammar rules.
They’re in your head. Instead of trying to automatically speak, you try to remember the grammar rules. So
it’s not automatic. And one of the main problems with this is that you cannot speak quickly. You cannot
speak easily or automatically either.

Now when you’re writing, it is different. You have plenty of time. You can write slowly. You can go and
correct yourself. You can even consult a book or ask a friend what the best way is to write something. But
when you’re speaking, you do not have that much time. If someone asks you a question, they want to hear
your response immediately. And you want to be confident when you talk with them.
So I know many people probably have the same question right now. How is it that a native speaker learns
grammar? Well, I’m a native speaker so I think that I can answer that question. When I was learning to
speak English, I did not study grammar rules. I didn’t even know what a grammar rule was. The only time I
began learning grammar rules was when I was in high school. And that was only as a means of helping to better my writing skills.

Now we’ve already talked about writing and how that’s different than speaking. But the way to learn how to speak grammatically proper English is by a lot of input. And what I mean by input is taking things in. For the most part I mean listening. Taking things in through your ears. You hear the way grammar sounds. So
when you hear someone speaking, you know when it sounds right. You don’t have to think about what tense
it is. Is this the past tense? Is this the present tense? You just know that it sounds right. And when you go
to speak, you’ll use the correct grammar. This is one of the keys to speaking quickly, easily and effectively.
Now we’ve already gone over what Rule 2 is and I want you to repeat it with me. Ready? Don’t study
grammar rules. In fact, I’m going to take this one step further. If you have textbooks, it’s time to throw them
away. Textbooks that teach grammar will only hurt your ability to speak English, so it’s time to throw them
away. You can even light them on fire if you want. Just don’t use them to learn English.
Okay, so as we promised you, we’ll be sending you an e-mail every day. So in the next couple of days you’ll
be receiving some more information from us. And in these e-mails you will get to see how to learn grammar
easily. And I will tell you, it is not going to involve memorizing grammar rules so you can be happy about that.
I’m happy that I don’t have to tell you to memorize these grammar rules.
So keep an eye on your inbox to your e-mail and I hope that you’re excited to get these next e-mails because we’re excited to share them with you. Now we’ve come to the end of Rule 2, I want us to all say it again.
Don’t study grammar rules. Okay. I wanted to leave you with that. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video and I
look forward to providing you with more teaching soon.

Secrets to Speak Excellent English: Learn Phrases, not individual words.

Hi, this is AJ Hoge, one of the directors of Learn Real English. And now I want to talk to you a little bit
more about Rule #1. What is Rule #1? It is learn phrases not individual words. So, of course, what is a phrase?
A phrase is a group of words, two or three or more words. So, that’s Rule #1, it’s very simple, very easy, that you need to learn phrases, phrases, phrases. Focus on phrases, not on individual words.
So this is pretty simple, right? But it’s very powerful. And let me tell you why it’s powerful. So I know you
probably learned English with normal textbooks and in normal schools. And so you’ve probably studied a lot
of individual English words, right? You have your vocabulary list. There would be one word and then there
would be the meaning in your language, the translation. So, that’s not so good. What we really want to do is
learn phrases, groups of words, and there are a few reasons for that.

Number one, when you learn phrases, you are actually learning a little bit of grammar each time. Because
what is grammar? Grammar really is the way that words go together. It’s how we put words together and
which words go together, right? So we know that “he” and “goes”, those go together. He goes to the store.
We don’t say he go to the store, right? So we learn after time it’s he goes, he goes, he goes. That’s the
correct phrase. You don’t need to know about past and present. You don’t need to know about first person, second person, third person. You don’t need to think about all those grammar rules but what you do need to do is just know that these words go together. And how do you do that?
The easiest way is you just learn phrases. So when you find a new word for you, something that’s new, in
your notebook always write the words that it is with. Write the whole sentence or write the phrase that it is in.

Very, very important. And then when you review your vocabulary, when you look at your notebook again, you
never study just the one word. You always review and try to remember the whole phrase. And you learn the
meaning of the whole phrase. When you do this, of course you’re learning a lot of vocabulary, but you’re also learning some grammar. But you’re learning it in a more natural way, the way that native speakers learn it.
So that’s one of the big benefits of learning phrases instead of individual words. It’s a very, very natural way
to improve your grammar and to learn grammar. It’s not the only way, there are other ways, too, and we’ll
talk about those in later rules. But it is certainly one way that’s very powerful.

Another important thing about learning phrases, it’s faster. Now we’ve got a lot of research studies, there’s a lot of information about this and about learning phrases and learning individual words. And we find that when you learn phrases, when you focus on phrases, in fact you improve two to three to even five times faster using phrases instead of just individual words. So when you do this, again why is it so powerful? Because you’re learning in groups of words.

If you study word by word, one word and then one word and then one word, it’s not natural, right? When we speak we don’t speak one word by one word by one word. We speak in groups of words. We speak in
phrases. And in fact, this is how native speakers, you know, Americans or Canadians or British people, this
is how we learn English. We always learn words in groups, almost never just one. And this is true for little
children, too. Little children usually learn groups of words, chunks of words.
And that’s why they can learn so quickly. They’re not studying one by one by one. They’re learning whole groups of words. In the beginning they only know what the phrase means. Maybe they don’t know every single word in the phrase, but they understand the whole meaning of the group. And then later, of course, as they learn more phrases they will begin to understand each individual word also.

This is a much faster way to learn a lot of vocabulary. It’s also the best way to speak faster. When you’re
speaking if you think of each individual word, word by word by word, your speaking will usually be kind of
slow. And it will sound unnatural because you’re speaking word by word by word by word. You have these
strange breaks when you’re speaking. That’s quite normal for a lot of students because they studied in
schools, they used textbooks. The breaks, when they stop, when they pause, they sound very strange to an
American, to a British person. They sound kind of unnatural. Because they learned individual words, not
phrases. We learn phrases. When do we pause? When do we have a break? Well we break between
phrases. That’s what sounds natural.
So this will also increase your speaking speed. The more you study phrases the faster you will speak. And
also your speaking will sound more natural to native speakers, to Americans, to Canadians, to Australians,
etc. And that’s very important. It will help other people understand you better.
So as you can see, there are a lot of very important benefits when you learn phrases instead of individual
words. So this is very powerful but so, so simple. How do you use it? It’s easy. Every time you hear a new
word, every time you’re reading and you see a new word, always write down the whole phrase. Write down
the other words that are with it. When you review, when you look at your notebook again and you study a
little bit…again you never study just the one word, always the whole group, always the phrases. That’s it.
Very simple, very easy and yet super powerful. So do this every every time that you learn something new
with English, alright?
When you do this you’re going to speak faster, you’re going to learn three, four, five times faster. Everything will improve, even your grammar. Okay so that is all for today. That is all for Rule #1. We will see you next time. Thank you and have a great day. Bye bye.