English Daily: How to Enjoy Learning

Engramme: Your Daily English Programme #62: How to Make Learning Fun (Listening B1-C1)

Think Before You Listen

What is "learning"? Do you enjoy learning? How can learning be made fun?

Watch and Listen

Watch the Video: What did Mike Boyd (the presenter) try to learn? Does he think it was a complete waste of time? Why (not)? (Type your answers in the comments below and get feedback)

Let's Practice

This video presents one of the best examples of a Scottish accent of English. It is true that the accent may not make it easy for the learner to understand the English being spoken; nevertheless, it is considered one of the major accents of English. This lesson aims to give you a chance to practice listening to this accent.

Listen Again: There are 13 mistakes in the video transcript below. Can you find and correct them?

This is my summer 2006 copy of guitarist magazine. I bought this when I was 16 years old probably because of the clickbait tie-all “world's greatest guitarist”. The guy featured on the front cover of this magazine is called Derek Trucks. One in-terrace thing about Derek is that he doesn't play guitar using his fingers. He plays guitar using a piece of glass known as a slide. Upon reading this article, I went out and bought Derek's CD’s song lines, and I remember listening to it for the farce time. It was like nothing I've ever heard before. I remember thinking to myself, “I'm gonna learn how to do that”. I got myself a slide and started practicing. Slide guitar is hard: for one, there are no discrete distinct notes anymore. It's just a bake sliding scale of infinite possibility, which means it's really easy to go out of tube. I remember spending hours at just the simple thing. It was like learning guitar all over again. I would spend huge amounts of time just trying to play a single clean note. After days of painstaking practice, I began to get somewhere with it and I got really enter this new style of playing guitar. I went down the rabbit hole. I got so into this I ended up modifying my electric guitar to suit slide better. These pickups here give a really fast tone and all the electronics in here are suited to slide, and to put all this in, I had to learn how to solder. And then after that, I ended up saving up and buying this fender amp which has valves in it which gives me an even nicer, warmer toe with a slide. I got really into this for, like, a year, just listening to, playing, writing, and recording slide guitar music. And I look back at that period of my life, that period of just absorbing and learning information, with such fondness and sentiment and nostalgia. But why? Why do this? Why invest such a huge amount of time learning to play slide? It's not like I found a band where I play slide guitar, and 99% of the time now I'm just playing regular old fingertip tile guitar. It's not really the outcome of your learning that is the prize; it's the process itself that is the most rewarding. It might seem like blood, swear, and tears at the time; but looking back, it's the process of learning that I reminisce about as opposed to the outcome of my practice. It's fun to go down the rabbit hole of learning, to research techniques and treat yourself to new equipment, and be a beggar all over again. I guess the point of this video is that when learning something, you went embarking on a new challenge to understand that those crappy moments of struggle and album grease, those are the ones that you will reminisce about later; those are the ones that you will cherish, and knowing that makes it easier to put in the hours. So, enjoy the grind!

(compare your answers with the ones in the first comment below)

Over to You

Have you ever had a similar experience: making a lot of effort to learn something, "a lot of blood, sweat, and tears" (as the presenter mentioned)? What was it and why was it so hard? Did you later reminisce about the process of learning itself and realize how rewarding/fun it was?

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Here You Are at the end of another lesson on Engramme: Your Daily English Programme.

Review the Vocabulary from this post HERE

Teachers can download a Print-Friendly Version (pdf) of this lesson at this link