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USE CHUNKS - it's NOT ONLY A QUESTION OF FLUENCY but also USING NATURAL LANGUAGE

9/7/2017

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International venues are the perfect place for you to practise your English & for me to discover mistakes which I can teach my students to avoid.

Today I'm at the European Inline Speedskating Championships in Portugal & the speaker is doing an excellent job of introducing the skaters and cheering them on, giving us the results in a variety of languages, the main one obviously being English.

He speaks it very fluently and comprehensibly but makes mistakes because he sometimes thinks in his own language and uses the wrong collocations. As we were leaving the track, for example, he kindly wished us, "Make a good lunch!" Now MAKE LUNCH means to prepare it whilst he almost certainly meant, "Have a good lunch", because HAVE LUNCH means to enjoy lunch. So it's very important to learn chunks of language to sound as natural as possible.

Chunks can also be longer groups of words which are always used together. When you read, listen to native speakers and watch films, observe the sentences which are used repeatedly together and learn to use them so you sound natural. Chunks are like Lego pieces of different colours, sizes & lengths. You can build them together in various combinations but you will always sound more natural than if you translate.

Take my word for it, use chunks to sound more natural!

I hope these tips were useful for you!

Write some chunks in the comments box below for others to learn.

Your English fluency guide,

Susan


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    Author

    My name is Susan Brodar, born in London into a multilingual family and brought up bilingual English / Italian.

    I went to school in London until 15 when we moved to Germany where I finished my British education at Munich International School. I started teaching Italian at evening classes aged only 17 and studied Mass Communications and Journalism at Munich University.

    I continued teaching parallel to interpreting at trade fairs and business meetings as well doing translations. After working at the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade for a year I married my Italian globetrotting companion in 1983 and we set up our home near Venice, Italy where we continue to live with our two teenaged children.

    Having taken my British High School-leaving ‘A’ Level exams in English, Italian, French & German I am completely fluent in all four languages and am taking a DELE certification in Spanish to complement them.

    ENGLISH (native)
    ITALIAN (native)
    GERMAN (C2)
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  • HOME
    • Samples of FAST FLUENCY TRAINER
  • IMPROVE with SUSAN
    • ABOUT
    • TESTIMONIALS
    • How Being Bilingual Led Me To Teaching
    • PUBLICATIONS by Susan Brodar
  • English SPEAKING COURSES
  • BLOG
  • TRANSLATIONS & INTERPRETING
  • TRAVELLER's TALES
    • A WEARY TRAVELLER's TALES
    • TRAVELLING the world for sports: INLINE SPEED SKATING
  • CONTACT