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Welcome to Finance Friday - level up your finance knowledge.

Motivational Monday - Learning English

Before he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair gave a speech outlining his priorities if he were to win the upcoming general election. During the speech, he used a technique of repeating a word three times for emphasis.

“Education, education, education”

“Ask me my three main priorities for government and I tell you education, education and education” Tony Blair 1996.

From this, people could see that education was the most important priority for a potential New Labour government. New Labour was the name of Tony Blair’s political party at the time (previously and subsequently just ‘Labour’).

Location, location location

Similarly, many people believe that the most important thing to decide when buying a house is location. A great house in a bad location will not be desirable.

Think about the best house in your town in the poorest neighbourhood.

There is a reality TV property program in the UK called ‘Location, location, location’.

What is the connection with learning English?

If you ask me what I think the three most important factors in learning English, or indeed any language are I would say:

“Consistency, consistency, consistency”

Consistency - the quality of always behaving or performing in a similar way, or of always happening in a similar way.

Nowadays, there are many ways to learn English:

• Group lessons

• Individual lessons

• Online lessons

• Conversational classes (only for C1 & above, in my opinion)

• Grammar Apps

• Online courses

• Social media sites

• Business English newsletters 😊

• And so on…..

It is important not to feel overwhelmed and realise that it is the consistency of doing something that is more important than what you choose.

How often?

It can take anywhere from 100-200 hours of focused study to move up one level on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scale, which is a widely used system for measuring language proficiency. Please note that this is dependent on the individual learner and circumstances.

In my opinion, improving by one level in the lower levels is achievable in one year and probably two years for the Advanced and Proficiency levels.

For this reason, I recommend around 2 hours of study per week. This could be a mixture of say, a one-hour lesson plus 10 minutes per day self-study.

Whatever you choose, always do it consistently!

Questions & Answers:

An interesting topic came up in a lesson this week.

Question: Premises or premises?

There are two different meanings of this word.

Premises - plural of premise

Premise - noun - countable - the idea or theory on which a statement or action is based.

• The theory of evolution is based on several key premises, such as the gradual change of species over time and the concept of natural selection.

Premises - as in Business/Commercial/Company premises

Premises - noun - always plural - the buildings and land owned by a person or company for commercial purposes

• The company expanded so fast that they had to move to new premises

We can also talk about off-premises and on-premises

• All our training is done off-premises i.e. at a different location e.g. a hotel conference room

• All our cakes are produced on-premises - i.e. made by ourselves at this location

Do you have any Business English questions?

Please email me and I will do my best to answer them in future newsletters.

Until tomorrow - have a great day!

Iain.

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