چگونه در یادگیری انگلیسی موفق شویم؟

016 - How To Succeed in English?

Hey there! Kevin here, in the city of Denver, Colorado recording another episode of the Feel Good English Podcast for you and your friends and family.

Today I have another TED talk Tuesday episode, but I’m going to do things a little differently in this episode. I found a short, threeminute TED Talk; and instead of just talking about the main ideas from the talk, I’m going to go a little deeper into the actual words and phrases that the speaker says. Explaining these words and phrases to you to help you understand them better. So let me know what you think about this; if you like it, if it’s boring, if you find it valuable. Because I’m new at this, your feedback is very important. Send me an email or a voicemail or you can send me a letter. Write a letter, put a stamp on it, send it to me from your part of the world. If you want, I’ll give you my home address; that would be interesting who does that anymore? No one!

So, anyway, here we go get into the lesson. Today’s TED talk is on a talk by a woman named Ariana Huffington. She’s a very famous journalist. She has the website The Huffington Post, which is very popular, and she’s going to talk about the importance of sleep. How do we succeed by getting more sleep?

A simple idea, a very short talk, let’s get into it, here we go!

So the question she asks is how do we unlock big ideas? So at the beginning of the talk, she says, my big idea is a very, very small idea, that can unlock billions of big ideas that are at the moment dormant inside us. So the ideas are dormant, the ideas are sleeping. In Portuguese actually, we say “Dormir” similar in Spanish, I don’t know how to say sleep in your language, but dormant kind of comes from that.

Moving on, she says this is a room of type A woman. What is a type A woman? Well, type A women, type A men are men and women who want to be leaders. They always take control of the situation, they are go-getters, we could say somebody who always takes the next step, takes action on things. So type A women are very outspoken, they speak a lot, they want to be leaders, they are in the front of the room; that is a type A person.

And she says, I learned the hard way; the value of sleep.

Learning the hard way, so to learn the hard way means to learn from failure. You do something, you see the consequences, you do it incorrectly and you learn the hard way. You learn that what you did was wrong, but you had to learn that by actually doing that wrong thing and suffering the consequences. So she learned the value of sleep, the hard way. Why? Because she talks about, she fainted from exhaustion. Obviously, she was working too much. She broke her face. She says that, her cheekbone; and after that, she started talking to medical doctors and scientists and realized that to be more productive, more inspired, more joyful, “more happy” (happier), she needed to get enough sleep.

Then she talks about having dinner with a guy who bragged about having four hours of sleep, to B-R-A-G. It’s a good word, to brag is to boast, to be arrogant, to talk about how good you are. To brag to say, oh, “I only sleep four hours and I’m fine.” So to brag his is a negative thing. It’s to be arrogant in a certain way.

You brag about how good your English is; oh, my English is better than yours. That’s bragging. Say “I got more money than you, my car is cooler than your car.” That’s bragging so don’t brag. Brag is a childish thing. It’s kind of an immature way to act.

And she says, he’s bragging about getting little sleep and she said, well, if you get five hours you probably be more interesting.

She joked, she thought that, but…

Moving down the line here, at two minutes she says there is now a kind of sleep deprivation one-upmanship, one-upmanship. To one-up somebody is to do better than them, to do one step a better than them. So they get three, you do four. They get five, you do six. So you’re one upping them. You’re literally always trying to compete trying to be one better than them.

One-upmanship is in the noun form. She uses kind of a play on words. This one-upmanship is, this idea that everybody has to be one better than somebody else. And actually using sleep or sleep deprivation to be better than somebody else. So the less sleep you get, the better you are, you one up people by getting less sleep than them.

Then she goes into this idea of planning breakfast with somebody at 8:00 and someone says, oh that’s too late! Because they get up early, so then they are going to get a game of tennis in; if you get a game of tennis in, it means; to find time to do that before. So I’m going to get a game of tennis in. You could say, I’m going to get a shower in before we leave. I’m going to get some studying in before we go to dinner. So to get something in, is to find time for it to complete it before doing something else. So to get a game of tennis in.

So going down to the end finishing up, she says, she urges people to shut your eyes and discover the great ideas that lie inside us, to shut your engines and discover the power of sleep.

So to urge is to encourage, to want people to do something, I urge you to do this. I advise you to do this. I suggest that you do this. It’s not forcing people to do it, but it’s to suggest them to do something, I urge you to shut your eyes and discover the great ideas. To shut your engines and discover the power of sleep. So she’s using engines as a metaphor, like a car, to turn off your engines.

So that’s it. Go watch the video on TED, go through this, it’s very short. Listen to it or you can just listen to the audio. You don’t have to watch the video, TED; you can download the audio. So go through there and listen for these words, you’ll hear them.

You might want to come back and listen to this episode again, and just learn with your ears, or your eyes, or both. Get these words, these expressions, understand the meaning, look them in context, listen to this a few times. Watch the video or listen to the video a few times on Ted.com. Write these words down if you want.

So what about you? Do you think sleeping eight hours…I personally feel much better the next day if I sleep seven or eight hours. I’m realizing this more, and more and more. It can be hard to get this much sleep. We have very busy lives. However, I can also find myself being a lot more productive in the hours that I do have when I am rested and I had a full night’s sleep as opposed to waking up early and trying to get things done, but then just getting tired soon and not being able to be my best self for the day. So let me know your thoughts. Do you sleep enough? Do need to sleep more or are you somebody who is totally happy with four hours a night?

And your joke of the day; did you hear about my brother who slept with his head under the pillow? When he woke up, he discovered the fairies had taken all his teeth… See you next time!