HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009

Happy New Year everyone!

I hope you enjoyed the holiday season, and I especially hope that it included some contact with English.

Doing an English course is like joining a gym (gym = gymnasium). Unless you actually go to the gym, you will not improve. And unless you actually go to English class, you will not learn.

But the situation is even more complicated with an English course since we normally have a fixed number of days and times when we have class, whereas a gym offers flexibility; you can generally go when you want.

Even if you do four hours of English class per week between October and June, that's only going to give you around 120 hours of contact. That's barely the equivalent of one week of practice! And if you don’t stay in contact with English in the summer (July-September) and during holidays (such as Christmas and Easter), you will lose much of what you have learned.

If you truly want to learn English, the only solution is to take responsibility for your learning and make contact with English a part of your Daily routine. If not, you will probably never reach your English objectives.

We want to start out the New Year by giving you some basic information and simple tricks that can help you to learn English more effectively. We have covered some of these things before, but in any learning process repetition is one of the most important factors. So, starting tomorrow we will begin to review some of these tips. For now, you should read this vitamin aloud (en voz alta) three or more times. ;-)

I'll see you tomorrow.