Have you ever heard of an abstraction? This is probably a new word to you but the meaning is not new to you at all. An abstraction is an idea but not the actual thing. Real English learning can sometimes be an abstraction.
When you go to a restaurant, you look at the menu, it’s a piece of paper. It’s what we call an abstraction. It’s not anything you would eat. It’s just words on a page. You can read the menu. When you read the menu, you’ll get some ideas in your mind about what the dish will be, how it might taste, how it might smell. But that’s not real, you’re just imagining. It’s all in your head, it’s all an abstraction. You can’t eat the menu. You can try, but you’d only be eating paper. You would get no taste or smell or nutrition from eating the menu. The menu is an abstraction, the meal is the real thing. The meal is the real life. And no matter how good the menu is, even if the description’s amazing, it will never really give you the experience of eating the actual food.
You need real world English, that’s why I do this podcast. In my podcast, I don’t talk about grammar rules. I talk about real life topics. Real world English. In this latest podcast, I talk about a book right now that I enjoy, “Dumbing Us Down”. I talk about life strategies that I think might be useful or helpful to you. I talk in a very normal, real world, conversational way. I do this because you need real world English – real English learning! You don’t need grammar rules, vocabulary lists, et cetera.
Please join me as I discuss the importance of emphasizing word endings, new books I am reading and more about abstractions!
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