Productive Weekend Vlog: Balancing Work and Personal Life | Learning English with ChatGPT

Hi everyone! Welcome to the new video. Today I am doing a vlog kind of video. I had some random thoughts about languages and I felt a little bit overwhelmed by foreign languages and I wanted to share this with you, but I didn't want to make a whole video out of this, so vlog it is. I just came back from a morning walk with Loki. It's Saturday today and this is something I like to do with him on the weekend, just to go around the neighborhood, walk with him and it's so nice that he is tired already in the morning. Also we stopped by my favorite coffee shop. It's not actually a coffee shop, it's more like a breakfast place here in LA. It's called and the best almond croissants ever. If you're ever in LA, don't hesitate and go there to get almond croissant. It's amazing. So I had my favorite breakfast there and now that I came back I've got a pretty huge to-do list for today. Well, first today I wanted to record a new video for the other channel of mine about French. This is something I want to do right now because then we have cleaning coming, so it's going to be hard to record anything. I also need to buy a new name tag for Floki because his old one is kind of broken and I cannot use it anymore and this is why I haven't been taking him to parks and beach because I was afraid to set him off leash without a name tag. You never know. Then we've got some laundry to do and I've been meaning to create Craigslist postings for three monitors that I have in my closet for a very long time and hopefully today is the day to do it. Then I plan a yoga or a workout. We'll see how it goes. Probably yoga for today. I usually do a 15-30 minutes workout every day and I try to mix and match. Like yesterday I did a workout, today is going to be yoga. And yesterday I did a workout. I did Pilates and I don't think I did a good job. It was my third Pilates workout and I'm not sure I'm really doing this right, but it was a lot of fun because I did it with a friend. At least we laughed. And then I've got some plants to water. I usually set up the reminders for myself, like automatic reminders. And I've got pay credit cards to do on my list today. I want to teach people French. I just finished recording my French video right on time because my cleaning lady just texted me. She's coming in 15 minutes. And while I'm waiting for her, I'll just do a couple of simple things and I think it's going to be pay credit cards. So about credit cards. I am so annoyed with building my credit score here in the US. Credit score is something important and one of the ways to build it is to open multiple credit accounts and use them and pay them fully in time. I've been reluctant for a very long period of time and I only got my first credit card maybe a year ago. So my credit score is super new but I'm doing this. I'm building it because it is supposed to have some benefits for you when you apply to rent an apartment or if you want to buy a house, it's going to give you better rates. If you're not from here and you're not aware about this, this is a score that shows them your credibility or how responsible you are with money. So in some situations it really can come in handy. No, I was able to rent a good apartment without it. But yeah, still I choose to live here. I think it's fair to play by the rules of this place. So I'm building my credit score and I've got a reminder for myself every weekend to check my credit cards. And I'm using, I have two credit cards. It's Discover which is very easy to get if you're completely new and I didn't have any credit score when I applied. Also I have Apple Card. It's pretty convenient. I like the application and two or three percent of cash back. Also nice, they give me good balance and I'm also trying not to spend more than 20-30 percent of the balance and this is why it's also annoying. I have really random purchases maybe once in two months or something and it's easy really to forget to pay everything back. So that's why it's really important for me to have the notification and nothing nothing do here. Let's check Discover. Nothing do here. Very good. Cleaning is done. I love it when the apartment is clean and fresh and our cleaning ladies are amazing. They do great job. And also we just had lunch. We ordered some Indian food and it was delicious and I've got a couple of more things to do on my list but before I keep going I wanted to share some thoughts and feelings about foreign languages and I wanted to say that I from time to time I feel a little a little bit overwhelmed by foreign languages and how much I need to speak them in my life. A couple of days ago it was one of those days I felt really tired of English and even of all the other languages like French and Russian. I got tired because I have to speak it every day and sometimes I'm just like can I just speak Russian? I speak it at work, I speak it while I make the videos and also I speak it with local friends and neighbors every day. But another thing is that I got so I think upset and discouraged about all the mistakes that I made in my previous videos because now that I'm doing these videos I need to re-watch my videos before I upload them when they are edited and I don't like to do this. I don't like to re-watch myself and hear myself speaking English because I can instantly notice all the small errors that I'm making and it makes me really upset because I know what would be the right correct form to say but I'm not saying it and I'm so upset with myself being so inattentive maybe. My tongue goes faster than my brain and sometimes my hands go faster than my brain when I write and I have a lot of typos. This is me and this upsets me and what kind of made me feel slightly better is that I just wrote down all the grammar topics or pronunciation topics that I want to revisit so I make less of these mistakes. English language problems this note is called. I wrote four things. The word at least because I'm not sure about E sound here and I cannot differentiate any of E sounds in English. Also O sound in focus and motivation. I know I'm saying these two words quite often and I want to make sure I can pronounce them correctly so I just want to learn pronunciation of these words and potentially learn more about O sounds in English. Then present perfect in Russian language there are only three tenses. One for past, one for present, one for future. Simple. In English and in French by the way or any Romance language tenses systems are more elaborate and they allow to express some meanings through different tenses so this is why all students who are coming from a Slavic culture will always be experiencing issues with tenses and not only Slavic, right? Because we're not the only ones with a very simple tense system. Also passive forms of verbs. This is something I really haven't used I think and especially like future perfect tense that kind of stuff and I wanted to add something else oh articles the a n and that kind of stuff the same issue there is no articles in Russian and I like it it's definitely fun but in English and in French there is such a category an article and it also helps to convey some meaning so I just want to be able to to have this tool under my belt to be more flexible when I speak English and also when I make these kind of videos because obviously here I need to speak like without preparation nailing all of this down will help me be more flexible when speaking when I try to speak French English words come always first and also if you watched my previous video about maintaining language skills you know that I do a bunch of things to maintain my French skills but all of them are mostly about listening and consuming information and not about active practice I do have one lesson per week with native teacher but it's only one lesson per week I used to have lessons every day I used to get practice every day and now I don't and obviously my speaking skills are not as good and it also kind of upset me I'm not really sure what to do about French and not having enough of speaking practice probably I just should let it go because I I don't see how now at this point I can have more speaking practice only lessons I'll just keep reading in French listening to my favorite podcasts in French that's going to be fine when I need French I'm gonna just quickly improve my skills and speaking skills once I need them I do this when I speak Russian it's terrible Russian I have to use so many English words because again English words come first and my brain is lazy and it's kind of okay whatever let's use the English word or combination or even let's speak half English half French which sounds really weird and terrible with my English that has Russian accent I don't like it I just think just making an additional effort not to use English when I speak Russian and also learn vocabulary I don't even have vocabulary to talk about my work in Russian so every time I need to talk to my mom it's always so hard to describe what I do at work and how I earn money I don't even know the vocabulary so probably this is where I could start I'll learn the vocabulary all of this got me just feeling overwhelmed and I thought that it's probably maybe it is important to share because people may feel the same way or may not let me know in the comments if you do feel overwhelmed and tired of foreign languages sometimes and you just want either be silent or switch to your native language when I search on YouTube for videos like this to just to see if there are any people who experience this in the same way I didn't find anything so I felt like oh this could be something maybe I should share it's definitely not the end of the world it's just the way I felt that's it hello everyone good morning sorry for my morning face I slept in today and woke up at around nine or ten which is not typical of me I've got a couple of more things to do before I head out and go to the ocean I'm gonna go to Malibu today to my favorite Italian restaurant to have some pizza or pasta and then to have a walk on the beach and this is also something I like to do because I like to have to-do lists even for weekends but also I like to have a small thing that is not productive and before I go I just wanted to quickly show you how I use chat gpt I use it for many things but for learning languages and correcting my English in particular so yesterday I wanted to reply to the management of my building I submitted some feedback and they addressed my concerns and I wanted to thank them and uh to say that I am glad to see the changes so I wanted to say something the gate was fixed since I submitted my feedback well I actually checked the whole message but I just want to give you this particular sentence as an example of how you can use chat gpt to learn English if you're not familiar with this if you don't know what chat gpt is it is a new AI tool it's a conversational tool so you open chat gpt and you can ask any question that you have and it's gonna generate an answer for you and the nature of questions can be different I asked chat gpt for helping me with coding issues with learning how to code with English sentences also I asked it to give me some ideas for my youtube channels and all that kind of stuff and every time it gave me good answers I cannot guarantee it is 100% correct all the time it worth checking verifying but I think it is amazing it is faster than googling and it is better quality sometimes than googling so my sentence I passed it to the chat gpt and it immediately gave me the correct answer and it corrected my grammar I did the same thing multiple times sometimes it gives you present perfect and then you can ask for it to explain why it decided to use present perfect and then you can ask follow-up questions how to use present perfect how can I learn present perfect and that kind of stuff but also sometimes it just kind of changed my sentence a little bit so the tense that I used would also be okay past simple and you can always ask follow-up questions like what's the difference between this sentence and my sentence that I passed and it always tries to explain you in a very concise and short way and this is something that I like about chat gpt it just gives you the gist which is sometimes exactly what you need and another use case for me is investigating bugs in my code or not necessarily in my code well I am in my role I'm doing a lot of things that I'm not familiar with and I need to learn on the go and sometimes this means that I need to prioritize what I want to learn because there are a lot of things that I don't know so while I prioritize some things the other things are just waiting in the queue and while I'm debugging I can always use the tool to get quick answers to get some yes maybe shallow high abstraction understanding but still it is something it's better than nothing so I think chat gpt is amazing it is not sponsored it doesn't need to be sponsored because everyone talks about it it is definitely something that can boost your daily activity language learning included okay hopefully that was useful I hope you enjoyed the video if you did give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing to my channel for more language and content like this and if you're interested in learning french then check out my other youtube channel the link will be in the description and I'll see you in my next one bye-bye