In Episode 20, Tim talks about the common verb BECOME and six synonyms you can use in its place to have more control over your language and sound more sophisticated. One of these verbs is GET, which Tim already spoke about in Episode 6. The other synonyms of BECOME are: TURN, GO, GROW, WAX and FALL. Listen in to learn exactly how to use each of these verbs, and of course hear plenty of examples!

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Language mastery does not stop at level C2.
I’m not the first to propose this idea, but especially for written texts we really need to add some new difficulty levels: D1 and D2, to describe academic texts that use a lot of smart-sounding words.
A good way to get started learning these words is by learning Greek, Latin and even Proto-Indo-European roots that are shared by a large number of words, many of which are very advanced (and make you sound smart and cool):

Words with root VOR: devour, voracious, carnivore, herbivore, omnivore, locavore
Words with root NOC: noise, annoy, noisome, obnoxious, nocebo
Words with root PLAC: please, pleasure, pleasant, placid
Words with root BR/ PR/ FR: burden, born, pregnant, embarrassed, freight, freighter, porter

Cover photo credit: Koreni-00 - Корень — Википедия (wikipedia.org)

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Way back in Episode #7, Tim introduced you to the chewing gum accent, where native and very advanced speakers of English pronounce common words and phrases in ways that barely resemble their written forms. Some of these pronunciations are ones that you already know, for example “gonna” instead of the more book-like, correct form “going to” or “prolly” instead of the full form “probably”.
Three surprising facts:
1. English speakers don’t speak fast- instead they smash spoken words and phrases together
2. Most words and phrases in English have chewing gum pronunciations
3. Each word and phrase has a spectrum of pronunciations rather than just one or two pronunciations
Listen to Episode #18 to hear real-life examples of chewing gum pronunciation so you can start understanding spoken English like a champ.

Photo credit: By Kaugummis.jpg: Pascua Theus aka Körnerbrötchenderivative work: Sir James (talk) - Kaugummis.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12136753

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In Episode #17, Tim talks about the surprising variety of unusual animals you can find in an Ohio suburb: white-tailed deer (like Bambi), eastern gray squirrels (bigger than their European cousins), chipmunks (a bit like squirrels, but much smaller and with their houses on the ground instead of in the trees), lightning bugs (also called fireflies- insects which make light at night) and cicadas (large, heavy, winged insects that sing very loudly and have large, brightly colored eyes).

All links are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons- NYCsquirrel - Tree squirrel - Wikipedia.

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In Episode #16, Tim compares six of the best online dictionaries: Google Translate, Longman’s, Cambridge, Britannica, Wiktionary, Chat GPT, and also Tim’s own dictionaries, one of which, Words For Numbers, is available online as a subscription. Which dictionary is best for students at each level of language learning? What are the strong and weak points of each dictionary? Find out in this episode so you can choose the best learning tools for yourself.

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In Episode #15, Tim shifts his attention from the details of English and English teaching to four true, sad and bizarre stories from his life and travels, as well as a bit of Indo-European etymology. After all, Tim does get around the world and so it is morally imperative that he turn base metal to gold by sharing his horrible experiences for the jollification of others.

Cover photo credit: Koreni-00 - Корень — Википедия (wikipedia.org)

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In Episode 1, Tim talked about the first step to speaking and writing with correct grammar: understanding the details of others’ output so we have correct models to imitate.
In today’s episode, Tim talks about four ways students can reduce the number of mistakes they make when speaking and writing themselves.

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Tim has been teaching English for eighteen years, and perhaps the most common difficulty his students have is with constructing questions. Popular textbooks like English File and Headway show how to construct questions, but students need more examples than these books contain. In Episode 5, Tim gave over two hundred examples of one type of question- yes/ no questions, and he later offered students a free PDF containing 201 yes/ no questions organized in tables and with grammatical explanations.
In Episode 13, you can hear hundreds of examples of another type of question, wh- questions, ones that start with question words like who, what, where, when, why, how and which.

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Listen to Tim’s impressions of Dhaka, Bangladesh- its people, food, places and atmosphere.
Don't forget to check out the travel photos, published originally on Tim's personal website.

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The NGSL, which Tim talked about in Episode 2, is a list of the top 2800 words of English in order of frequency- with the most used words at the beginning so you learn the most important vocabulary first. The NGSL is oriented mainly towards written, non-fiction English, which means that knowing the words in it well will help you better understand newspapers, magazines and books. It will also help you to sound smarter when you speak, and who doesn’t want that? In this episode, Tim tells 27 definitions of a selection of ten words from the NGSL- spirit (1331), lunch (1332), actual (1333), pool (1334), battle (1335), tradition (1336), cash (1337), hardly (1338), award (1339), and coach (1340)- so you understand them in depth and detail.

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