The Rose Collective

“Teach me English”, I typed. 

ChatGPT wrote, “I’d love to help you learn English!   Before we start, could you please tell me a bit more about how you’d like to learn? For example:

1. ✅ Do you want conversation practice (like speaking and listening)?
   
2. 📘 Or do you want to learn grammar, reading, and writing?
   
3. 💬 Or do you want daily English for life in the UK (shopping, work, travel, etc.)?

Once I know that, I can make you a simple plan — with short lessons, practice sentences, and words to use every day…”

Identifying my learning needs

The above is a story to illustrate how frustrating it can be when someone is so lost about what to learn to improve their English.  However, we can now seek help from ChatGPT.  For me, it helped clarify my learning needs before looking for resources.  Otherwise, I would have been struggling to choose between Minnie and Winnie the Pooh!  

First of all, like ChatGPT suggested, I had to divide the learning into four skills : 

• Speaking
• Listening
• Reading
• Writing 

Then, I had to choose the skills that I wanted to improve.  Since conversation is necessary in my everyday life, I have decided to focus on speaking first.  How about you?  What are your needs?

Secondly, I needed to find ways to get better at speaking.  I heard a conversation between two local people on the street the other day.  A lady said to her partner after getting out of her car, 

“See you in a bit”.  

How would I say it if I were her?  I compared it with the way she spoke. I realized that my intonation was completely different from that of a local person.  That explained why my local friend looked puzzled for a second after I said it to her.   

I thought to myself, “I need to work on that.”

My plan

I began with Speech Shadowing.  What is it?  According to ChatGPT, it refers to “ a language learning method where you listen to someone speak and repeat what they say almost simultaneously…” .  I thought it would improve my pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation, etc.    I found a YouTuber named Ashley Howard who tells English classic stories in the Received Pronunciation (RP) accent.  The name of the story was “Pride and Prejudice”, and the video lasted about 15 minutes for part one. 

Here is how exactly that shadowing exercise worked.  It was separated into three sessions :    

1. listen to the full passage being read by the YouTuber;
2. Go line by line and repeat after the YouTuber;
3. Speak along with the YouTuber at the same time.

I have done this a few times. I enjoyed not only the exercise itself but also the story. How convenient that I killed two birds with one stone!  

Besides this, I came across a funny idea lately: singing along to songs to practise intonation and pronunciation.  Try it, and tell me whether it helps. 

So this is just something that I came up with during my learning journey, how I identified my learning needs and plan.  I am no expert, but I am an expert in struggling to learn.  With today’s technology, we can easily discover dozens of powerful English resources.  Whether it be with Winnie the Pooh, Minnie, or ChatGPT; for academic reasons or for fun; it is all your choice.  Let’s “mingle”.

by Pat Tsang