LEARNING TIPS: ENGLISH CONTACT AND TV

Good morning. I hope you had a good weekend.

If I offered you 2 or 3 extra months of time in 2009 to learn English, would you be interested?

Last Wednesday I said that even if you do 4 hours of English class per week between October and June, that's only going to give you around one week of contact! Therefore, you need to include practice with English outside of class, since class is almost never enough.

The answer I often get from students is, "Matthew...I don't have any time outside of class...between family, work and everything else, how do you expect me to find time for English?"

Well, last weekend I saw a frightening statistic in El Pais.com and in El Periódico de Catalunya. The average time spent watching television in Catalunya is 3 hours and 56 minutes per day. (The average in all of Spain is a little less: 3 hours and 47 minutes, according to an article in El Pais.com from January 2, 2009). On average, then, people in Catalunya and the rest of the state of Spain spend about 2 months per year watching television! If we consider that we are only awake 16 hours per day (if we sleep 8), then this is the equivalent of 3 months of days awake per year in front of the television. Wow!

As we have already shown (see Daily Vitamin from 8 January, for example), you don't have to spend hours per day to improve your English; with just a few minutes, over months, you can make big improvements. 

If you're one of those people who spend a lot of time in front of the TV, consider reducing it to allow more time for English. Or at least try to watch programmes and films in English; that makes a basically worthless activity into a valuable English-learning activity. It's a question of priorities and self-discipline. ;-)

Have a great day!