درسنامه تفسیری

Friends - Commentary

Our topic this month, friends. Friends is also a nice TV show. I actually know a lot of people who use the TV series, Friends, to improve their English. When you use a TV show to improve your English, do it in a specific way. If you are very advanced. If you understand a lot of English, if you can watch an American TV show and you understand most of it quite easily, then you don’t need to do anything special, just watch more TV. That’s easy. That’s an easy way to learn English, just watch TV, movies, watch American TV and movies or Australian or British, whatever you want.

Most people, however, need to use a specific technique to do this. I call it the movie techniques. I’ve talked about it in many webinars many times. A quick review. What you do is you watch a TV show or movie, scene by scene. You learn it deeply. So you watch the first scene, that’s maybe the first five minutes. You can use the English subtitles. When you watch it the first time, write down any words you don’t know or any phrases you don’t know. Look in a dictionary, find the meaning of the words. The phrases, some of them might be idioms, maybe you can’t find the exact meaning in a dictionary, so look on an idiom website. You can do a search online, just search for American idioms or British idioms, whatever.

So, in that way you learn all of the vocabulary for that scene, but you’re not finished. Then you’re gonna go back, watch the scene again, you can still use the subtitles, read along, and then repeat again and again. Rewind play, rewind play. Just practicing your understanding, remembering the meaning of the words. You might do that for one or two days. Then turn off the subtitles, because now you already know the words. Now you can practice just your listening, so your listening gets faster and better, faster and better. So with the same exact scene again, the same five minutes or so, rewind play, rewind play, rewind play, listen, listen.

Do that for a few days too.

You can then go to the next scene or, if you really want to practice a lot you could use the same scene again and use it for pronunciation practice. So then what you would do is you would play one line, one phrase, one sentence, pause and then you would repeat it yourself out loud, very loudly and strongly. When you repeated it, try to sound exactly like the actor. Try to use the same exact voice, the same emotion. Even your face and your body should copy the actor. So move like the actor moves when they speak. Use the same eyes, same mouth, same facial expressions, everything. Try to copy them exactly. Then you would play the next sentence, pause and do it again and again and again. You might do that for a few days.

And then on to scene number two, and in this way you will slowly go through one show. It will take a long time but you’ll learn it very deeply. This is a better way to learn than just watching the whole thing.

Okay, now onto our topic – friends.

This is a nice topic. Friends are a great part of life. And it’s unfortunate that some of us, including me; I think all of us at some point, can lose track of good friends or we get too busy with life and we don’t give enough time to our friends. This month we’re going to remedy that.

We’re going to focus on friendships this month.

1. Step one, what I want you to do, make a list of lost friends.

These are people that you once were friends with and you still have a good feeling about them, but you’ve lost track of them for some reason. An example might be an old high school friend. Once you make that list, next…

• Try to find them.

Do this online it’s the easiest way. You can get onto Facebook, Twitter, Google or whatever and just search for them. Put their name in, search and see if you can find them. You may not find all of them, but you might find some. For example, just recently an old friend of mine from middle school recently found me somehow, on Facebook. I was quite surprised, it was great to hear from him. I hadn’t seen him in years since middle school, so it was many years, but it was quite nice to reconnect with him a little bit.

• Once you find some of these old friends that you’ve lost track of, contact at least two of them.

You could send a Facebook message to them, an email or see if you can find a phone number or address. Something, in some way, just to reconnect with them to say hi, I was thinking about you. We haven’t seen each other in such a long time and I thought about you and thought I’d like to hear what you’re doing again. Very simple. Reconnect with old friends.

That’s your first thing to do this month.

Second thing to do this month…

1. Make a list of your top four best friends in life.

If you only have two then you might need to think of some old friends two, but your top four best friends in life.

• Next, schedule a weekly call with each of them.

Put it on your calendar. And, of course, contact them and say let’s talk. Let’s catch up. Can you chat Friday morning or Saturday night, whatever? Actually schedule it and then talk to them. Call them up, each one of those four friends.

• Also, on your own calendar schedule, put a reminder to send them an email once a week. That means every single week send them an email.

They don’t have to be long emails they can be short. It might be a couple sentences. You might just say hey, how are you doing this week? I’ve been busy. I was thinking about you, hope you’re doing well, something like that. Keep that contact with them and rebuild it if necessary.

Your third thing to do this month, I’m giving you a lot.

1. With those same top four friends, plan and schedule an annual face-to-face meeting.

Annual, so once a year. You can do it more if you want if they live nearby, but at least once a year. A get together, a meeting, a face-to-face meeting with each of your top four friends. Now, if they all know each other then it’s easy because you can do it as a group. That would be nice.

You could all get together one time as a group and see each other, that’s a great way to do it.

Of course, you’ve decided who those top four are. Contact them again and say let’s get together, we haven’t seen each other for a while, let’s do some meeting, trip or activity together. It needs to be face-to-face.

Again, if they don’t know each other, maybe you do it individually, one at a time with each of them, four separate trips, four separate meetings. If they all know and like each other than you can do it as one big one. Plan it, schedule it. Contact them and find a time when you can all meet and do it. Meet and make it a once a year habit, a tradition.

This reminds me, several years ago when I was in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia for the first time.

I’d never been there before. I had no real reason to be there except one of my old friends, Kenny, was living there; living and working there. So I visited him at his apartment. I found his apartment in Kuala Lumpur and I spent a week with him. I hadn’t seen him in many years because he’d moved away to Asia and at that time I was still living in the United States. But I’d been traveling in Asia for work and I made the extra time, the extra effort to down to Malaysia to see him.

We spent a week together. I stayed with him and his wife in their apartment. He took me to local restaurants. He had a band with some of his friends so I went to see his band practice. It was really quite powerful and rewarding. It helped us reconnect and since that trip we are now closer friends. We stay connected now. That trip really helped, because since then we email each other much more. We message each other on Facebook. I’ve seen him a few more times when I visit Southeast Asia, so it really reconnected our friendship and actually made us better friends. In the past we were maybe, a little friends, we weren’t super close, but now we’re much closer and better friends now. And it’s a result of me making the effort to go there and see him. It really made a difference.

Another thing you can do with your friends to create friendships, especially as you get older, sometimes your lives go in different directions, but a way to keep a connection with friends is to have a shared project together. So it’s great just to get together once a year and hang out, have fun together. If all your friends like to golf you could have a little golfing holiday once a year together. If you like to do something else you could do that, you could go diving. Several of my friends like to scuba dive, so we’ll do diving trips. It’s a good excuse for us all to get together. It’s kind of a shared activity, a shared project.

My clearest example of this is with my two best friends, Kristen and Joe. We created a business together called Learn Real English. They’re English teachers also. They’re my best friends so I decided, I want to do something together with them. I’ll be honest with you, I did not start that business with them for money. I was making enough money from Effortless English and I still do, that I didn’t need another business with them. I did it because I wanted to do something with my best friends. I wanted to have a shared project with my two best friends.

I wanted them to have more freedom, more income, a better life by having a business.

Mostly, I just wanted to work together with them, collaborate with them, and so we created a business together. The great thing is, that business has helped keep us close. It gives us something to focus on. It constantly brings us together. We have to work on the business together, so we talk almost every day, sometimes about the business sometimes just about other things, of course, cause we’re friends. But the business has been a great catalyst, a great means of keeping us connected, that shared project. So I’m so happy I did that.

You can do this too with your friends. No, you don’t have to start a business with them. As I said you could just have a shared hobby together. It could be golf, scuba diving, it could be something with art, whatever. Maybe you all want to learn the same thing, so you just attend a course or seminar together every year. But find something, something that you can all share in common and do together, that will help you stay connected over the years.

It’s important to not only keep the connection but to continue having new, shared experienced together, cause that’s what keeps friendships alive. Yes it’s good that you email and chat with each other sure, that’s important. But if that’s all you do then eventually those old friendships can fade away, because there are no new experiences that you’re having together, so you don’t really have anything to talk about, so it’s really important to keep having new experiences together, that’s how you keep friendships alive, especially old friendships.

That’s why it’s so important to get together face-to-face, not only to have fun together, relax and sit around and talk, but to actually do things together, have new experiences together through a shared project, a shared trip, shared learning, something.

All right, as usual get onto our VIP social site. Get onto our forums and tell us about this. This is a fun thing. Friendship it’s wonderful, I want to hear about your experiences as you reconnect with old friends, as you make stronger connections with your existing friends. Tell us about the fun things you’re doing together.

See you there. Bye for now.