English for Polish-speakers: Learn English Vocabulary Fast

Thank you for taking this positive step to improve your English vocabulary. As the course developer, may I assure you that every care has been taken to make this course as interesting and beneficial (a nice word – it means “of good use to you”) as possible.

The most important benefit you can expect from doing this course is that you will grow your vocabulary by a few hundred words. As a result, you will be able to communicate better at work, in job interviews and when you are travelling.

So may I introduce myself?

My name is Mark. I’ve had a rich and rewarding life, with many wonderful and very scary experiences.

My working background has mostly been in IT sales, but I’ve done almost every aspect of IT. Over the years I’ve worked for IBM, Hewlett Packard and Xerox. I’ve had my own factory and done a whole lot more.

Let’s talk about the course: This course was developed because of the feedback I’ve had from over 100 of my students that I’ve taught and mentored online, where they all agreed that a strong vocabulary is the best foundation for learning English. My teaching experience has earned me “Super Tutor” status on two platforms and I have given over 4000 hours of online lessons. The qualifications I have include the TEFL and TESOL certificates, as well as a certificate for specialised Business English teaching.

Okay. Now then: What are the course objectives?

I would expect that your key objective in doing this course is to improve your vocabulary. Our key objective is to teach you new vocabulary as effectively as possible.

The methodology we use is to show you words that you already know, but usually didn’t know that you knew them. This may be difficult to understand, so here’s an example: The word “airport” is virtually the same in most languages. We have done a LOT of research, and prepared hundreds of examples of these words for you.
To learn these words, you need to practice with them, and we give you written exercises to do just that, which brings us to Homework exercises. We have given you a lot of exercises where one lesson is made up of five sentences, each using three of the new words – fifteen new words per lesson. Each lesson should be done in fifteen to twenty minutes. When you’re starting out, this may take a little longer. If that’s the case, don’t worry about it, and don’t lose heart! Just keep on doing the exercises.

There’s also some additional value. In the next lesson, we give you the results of research guidelines and suggestions on how to learn and remember your new vocabulary better.

Finally, after the exercises are all completed for all Sections, we give you our modified Flash Cards system to remember, to use and have fun with your new vocabulary. If you find a lot of new words that you want to use often or understand better, you may want to do this section right away – you don’t have to wait until the vocabulary exercises are finished before using it.

Lastly, if you want to have your work checked for both the correct use of the words, as well as your grammar, for a small fee you can submit exercises for evaluation and corrections, by a native-speaking, qualified tutor. Please contact us using the email address tutor@loveyourlife.co.za

Most importantly – enjoy the course!

When you’re studying, what percentage of information do you actually remember?

“Retention time” means how long you can remember what you’ve learnt. The retention percentages for material studied through various methods are different from one person to another, and depends on individual learning styles and the difficulty of the material.

We have researched this, and here are approximate retention percentages for different learning methods:

• 10-20 percent of what you READ, for example a text book.

• 20-30 percent of what you HEAR, like listening to a lecture or presentation.

• 30-40 percent of what you WRITE

• 50-90 percent of what you do, for example, teaching others

Just a reminder that these percentages are averages, and results are different for different people. Most importantly, higher retention times needs you to be more active with the material.

A PDF file is attached with more details and strategies that could help you. Please study it and use the parts that you like to improve your retention time and total study results.

Welcome to the course materials.

This section starts your learning journey with simple, everyday words. You should be able to work through these exercises quite easily, because most of these new English words you will already know in your own language.

Please – I must stress this – even though the words are quite simple, you must do the written exercises. Right now you are building the foundation of your fluency, and this foundation has to be solid. These exercises are more important than they may seem.

The method we use here of combining 3 words into one sentence is the same for all the exercises in this course. However, if you find this too easy, try combining 6 of the new words into one sentence. That’ll be really challenging, and a lot of fun.

Most importantly – enjoy the course and the learning experience. Please go ahead and download the first lesson. See you soon. ‘Bye!