grUzLlTOHhw.txt

Speaker 1:          00:02          Quinn when Nanjie a zine are a queen. When Umangi a zine or man, these people in Beijing don't speak Chinese. Maybe I need to speak louder. Queen [inaudible] Queen. When Angie a zine or

Speaker 2:          00:22          [inaudible]

Speaker 1:          00:28          guys, this is Paul. The title of this video is why your phrasebook fails you. A lot of people buy a phrase book right before the start of their trip or they buy a phrase book at the airport after they've checked in for their flight or they buy their phrase book after they've arrived at their destination. And quite often these people claim that there for his book wasn't helpful for them, but didn't help them communicate with the locals. Well of course it didn't because you didn't use your phrase book to study. You didn't use it the right way. So I would like to call this video something else. I like to call it why you fail your phrase book your phrasebook had high hopes. Your phrase book really wanted to be your sidekick and wanted to help you out. Had wanted to be a tool that you used. It wanted you to take the lead. So it could do that. It's best to help you. But unfortunately you let you a phrase book down. You didn't take the lead, you tried to give the lead over to the phrase book, expect it to do everything for you. And I have news for you. Unfortunately, phrase books are not human. They can't take the lead, they can't communicate for you. They're just a tool. So you need to use them the right way.

Speaker 1:          01:38          Basically, if you use your phrase book, uh, to pull phrases out on the fly, just to look things up when you're going about your, your trip, like you're shopping and you need to look something up so you, you look in the shopping section and find a phrase that suitable for what you need. Um, basically it's going to fail you. It's not going to work like that. You really need to do this. You need to use your phrase book as a tool to study and learn some of the language. If you do that, then you're going to have a much better experience with it. So how can you make your phrase but useful as a tool for studying? Well, the first thing you need to do when you start learning a new language, even with a phrase book, just for travel purposes, you need to get the phonology down.

Speaker 1:          02:17          You need to learn the sounds of the language, how to understand them, but how to pronounce them. That's, that's point blank. The number one thing you need to do because if you don't, nobody's going to understand you and you're not going to be able to understand them. It depends on the language to some extent. Like, uh, some languages have quite simple phonological systems, but if you're learning a language with tones or something, something like that, that's new to you and you don't put in the time to learn that first. And if you just read the phrase out of the phrase book, it's not gonna come out the way people understand it will just sound like jibberish. Right? So you need to get the phonology down. You can do that before your trip, hopefully. Um, get on the Internet. Look for some examples of the pronunciation.

Speaker 1:          02:55          Um, take a lesson or two if you can like get even on Skype, get a teacher from I talky and uh, take some skype lessons. They'll help you with the pronunciation. And I've tried to get that down. Or once you arrive at your destination, talk to a local, get some help from them. But the point is you need to learn what those sounds are, how to produce them, practice a bit and get used to that. So that's the first thing. The next thing is to learn the basic sentence patterns of the language. Now for his books are great because they have tons of examples of basic sentence patterns right now. So you can just read through them and you can get a sense for how to build simple sentences. Some people are like me, they're kind of inductive learners. They like to just look at the examples that figure it out, look at the examples and we think, hm, this must be the subject.

Speaker 1:          03:40          This must be the object, this must be the bourbon. We like to figure it out from examples and compare different examples and see what goes where and learn how to piece together sentences. So if you're an inductive learner like that, then you can just flip through it, look at similar sentences and try to figure out what parts mean, what, learn how to build the sentences yourself. Some people are not like that. They're more productive learners. They like to have the rule first, they'd like to know the grammar rule, and then they can look at the examples in that makes sense to them because they already know the rule, right? Some people are more like that, so if you'd like that, no problem. Because most phrase books have a pretty good grammar section. It's short usually, but it gives you the basics. Just the basic enough explanation to understand the examples, to read that.

Speaker 1:          04:22          Then flip through the book, find examples and try to match them up with the rules and see how they make sense to you. So get the sentence structure down. That's the second thing. The third thing, a third thing is vocab. Get some vocabulary, right? Phrase books are good because they have every day vocabulary. It's you'd stuff that's useful in regular daily life situations and you can look up different kinds of topics. Uh, phrase books are usually arranged by topic or subject, right? So there's a section on maybe like going out and partying, that's like one section. So some of the phrases might be like how to order a drink or how to talk to a new person in the bar or something. Then there might be a section on going to the hospital if you're someone with an illness, right? And you can look up that section.

Speaker 1:          05:02          So whatever vocabulary you might need in Europe, kind of travel or um, for your own lifestyle or whatever, then you can look up that vocab and you can learn it. So the way I like to learn vocabulary is using, well, it's one way, it's just kind of a shortcut method, I guess you can put it into a chunky monkey is a flashcard system. Um, it's this flashcard application for your smart phone or also on the computer. You can get it for free. It's free on Android, on, uh, on Ios. You've got to pay some money for it, but it's worth it. It's awesome. So you can build up a basic vocabulary, load those words into a Hanky and enjoy yourself on them. So words or phrases or even full sentences if you are getting to that point, load them in and then drill yourself on those vocab.

Speaker 1:          05:48          So you can do that one of the plan. You can do that whenever you've got free time, uh, on keys. Awesome. So you can just look through the phrase book based on topic, on based on just what everyday words you think you will need a little demand. Study them. Okay, so that's the three things. Get the phonology down, get a sense for the basic sentence structure, get some basic vocabulary. And once you have those things, then now you've used the phrase book well at, and now you're in a good position to look stuff up. If you need something on the fly, if you try to look stuff up on the fly without having any basic understanding of the language yet, then you're not going to understand their response, even if they understood you. So you've got to do some studying. Use it as a tool to learn, not just as some kind of little, a magic, a magic toy that's going to speak for you and get the job done for you. Now you've got to put in the effort yourself, and that's the fun of it. That's what makes communicating fun. That's where it makes learning a language fun. So do it yourself. Don't expect the phrase book to do it for you. All right? That's the basic message later,

Speaker 1:          06:56          we just edit that part out so.