Tomatoes and improving your English!
“What do tomatoes have to do with improving your English?”, you may be asking. Well read on and you’ll soon find out!
It is commonly believed, in order to learn a language proficiently, that it is sufficient to follow a course once or twice a week with a teacher or even an intensive course when they manage to organize one, and not do anything else in between. It is not.
You didn’t learn your mother tongue this way. You lived it, breathed it, listened to it, spoke it, read it and wrote it for years before you became proficient. You made many attempts, made a lot of mistakes, practiced it daily, continuously learnt new words and expressions before it become your language.
You didn’t just learn it with a teacher, but with your family, your friends, books, games, the TV, the radio, internet, everything that surrounded you gave you input and helped you to become a proficient speaker of your language.
To learn a second language you have to be committed and there has to be continuity. Not everyone has the possibility or the desire to go and live in another country to learn a language. So you have to optimize your time wherever you are, with what you have available. Now with internet there are no excuses. Everything is easily accessible. You just need to create the time to do it. How? The Pomodoro Technique!
Today make a commitment to practicing and improving your English on a regular basis. The Pomodoro Technique is a fantastic and fun time managing method that uses a timer to create blocks of time of 25 minutes, in which to work in a highly focused manner on one specific task without any interruption. You then have a 5 minute break.
Each block of time is known as a pomodoro – tomato in Italian. You decide how many pomodoros it will take to complete your task or how many you would like to dedicate to a specific task that day. You schedule them, click on the timer, start your activity and then stop when the timer rings after 25 minutes.
This method was developed by an Italian called Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. He called it the Pomodoro Technique because he originally used a tomato shaped timer to develop his method! Nowadays there are many devices on line that you can download to get the same results (I use an app called Focusbooster). Below you will find some links to find out more about the technique and some links to timers you can download. It is a fantastic, efficient and fun method to make your days much more productive.
So make this commitment and schedule a pomodoro a day to practice your English, or even just one pomodoro a week, but, as Nike says ‘Just DO it! ‘. Watch the headlines of the news, read a brief article, review new phrases or new vocabulary, complete a grammar exercise, listen to a song. You could even break a film down into 4 or 5 pomodoros and watch it in short blocks over a longer period.
Remember – a little, but often, will get you a long way. So no more excuses now. I guarantee that you will quickly see the difference and have fun doing it too!
Here are a couple of links to Wikipedia for a shorter article and a list of suitable software to choose from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_technique_software
Try the technique and let me know how it goes.
Enjoy learning!
