School Vocabulary, Making English Part of a Daily Routine, and the Present Perfect (Ask Jack #2)

Hello, everybody! This is Jack from tofluency

.com, here with episode 2 of

Ask Jack. So thank you everybody for your response to the first episode.

If you haven't seen that already, you can click the link to watch it now

but if you have, then here is episode

two for you. Now, it's another beautiful day

here in Asheville, North Carolina, so I'm going to do this

again here on my porch. So

let's get straight into question 1 in today's episode.

Stan from Russia asks: do you say

I'm in the fifth grade or I'm in year five?

thank you for your question, Stan.

So, there are two main ways that I know of to say this,

and it depends on where you're from.

So, for example, if you're from the UK

you say I'm in year 7; I'm in year 10.

But if you're in the US, then you say things like

I'm in the seventh grade; I'm in the 10th grade

etc. So, a lot of it depends on where you are

and who you are talking to. Now, this brings up an interesting difference

between

British English and American English and, more specifically, the school systems.

So, in the UK, we say things like, "I'm in primary school"

where in the US it's, "I'm in elementary school."

Now, we both say "high school" but in the UK

this is from ages about 11 to 16,

in the US this is from ages 16 to 18.

Now, if you're in college

in the UK this means that you're from

16 to 18, and this is before you go to university.

If you say I'm in college in the US

this means university. So there are many little differences here

and it's confusing for me, someone who has been brought up in the UK

but now lives in the US. So, it is quite confusing

but you get used to it.

Erikson from Brazil asks: how can I make

English part my daily routine? Thank you for this great question

Erikson. Now to make English part of your daily routine

is really going to help you make fast

progress, so it's a really important thing to think about.

however it's also important to know that

if you introduce more English into your life

then you have to give up other things, for example,

if you want to do more work on your pronunciation

then this might mean giving up watching television

or spending time with family or even just sitting on the sofa playing

computer games.

So, that's important to know because if

there are things that you give up that you don't want to give up

and you're doing English instead, then it's going to be difficult to sustain this

over the long-term. And that's what we want to do: we want to build these habits

and make English part of our routine over

the long-term. Now, the other thing to know

is that you can do things in English while doing

other things as well. A big example

is listening to English while driving to work or listening to English while

doing the housework, so (there are) many things that you can do in English while doing other

things.

And that will help you use more English on a daily basis.

The last thing I want to say is that

to make something part of your routine, you need to make it a habit.

And to make something a habit, you need to ensure that you can do it over the

long-term.

So, when you do things in English make it relevant to you

make it fun, and make it sustainable.

Doing this will help you use your English, and do the things you need to do in

English,

over the long term, and that will lead to

fast progress to fluency.

Victoria from Russia asks: what's the difference between

I have been to and I have been in? Victoria thank you so much for this

question

and I'm glad you've asked it because this is where I see a lot of mistakes

being made.

Now, think about these two sentences: "I've been to France

ten times." "I've been in the US for

five years." Okay, so there's a difference between those two sentences

and this just shows that we can use the present perfect

to express something differently and we can use different prepositions.

Now, the biggest mistake I see is people saying

I've in England for

4 times/5 times/6 times. This

is wrong because when we're talking about how many times we have

been to a place we use "to"

as a preposition, for example, I can say

"I've been to France ten times." Now, when we're talking about an

action that is continuous untill now

that's when we use the preposition

in. So, I can say, "I been in the US

for five years or nearly five years now."

So, that's a really big difference between the way we use this.

Now, my question for you for this episode is this:

Which countries have you been to? Which countries have you

been to? Leave your answers below this video. Thanks for watching

and see you next time! Oh, one last thing...

I need more questions so click the link

and ask me a question. You can ask me a question about learning English,

the English language, or anything related to English

So, do it now! Bye!