Coffee Chat with Shayna!

hi everyone I think we are live if you can see me and hear me please let me know in the chat and I would also love to know where you are joining me from um I see someone from Italy uh let's see how many students are on here got a few I know I sent out the announcement of this live stream kind of like last minute it's because I just decided to do it spontaneously because I made a little mistake and I sent out one of my emails about the Black Friday sale this morning at 2 a.m. it was supposed to be sent at 2 pm. so I sent it out 12 hours too early and I said in the email that there were only eight hours left in the sale and a lot of people were confused um but I'm sorry about that it was my mistake I was getting a lot of questions about it so I figured instead of just answering Everybody by email I could come on live spend a little time with you uh I've got about 30 minutes before I have to go pick up my kids and just uh answer some questions about my courses about the Black Friday sale you still have time okay I apologize for the mistimed email but you still have about nine hours left to uh get the Black Friday sale so I said this is going to be a coffee chat uh because it's very casual um you can ask your questions I've got some that I wanted to make sure to answer but instead of drinking coffee I'm actually drinking tea today and I hope you like my espresso English mug so the first question I wanted to talk about was someone wrote in and asked aren't your courses always 50% off why is this different and um I understand why he was confused it's because normally if you buy all of my courses that's the whole package everything you see there um that's called the espresso English Academy and then you do indeed get a 50% discount you can get that year round but what's special about Black Friday is that you can get 50% off any individual course so if you're only interested in let's say business English you can get that course for half price or if you only want to work on let's say Advanced vocabulary you can get that for half price without buying the entire uh package okay so I hope that clarifies um what the Black Friday deal is um thank you uh for the encouraging words let's see we've got someone from France from Italy Guatemala Algeria awesome love it love it I love how I can have students from around the world um in my classroom um let me see so another question that I got a few times was really what do you recommend Shaya um I want to improve let's say I'm Upper Intermediate uh I want to become more fluent and speaking which of these courses should I take and it can be a little difficult as you can see I have like 18 or 19 courses in ebooks and sometimes if you're looking at the allall you might wonder okay which one so I also wanted to give you a few tips and guidelines uh about how to choose a course uh so you don't choose um maybe one that's not that doesn't meet your needs so first I'll start for those of you who are Upper Intermediate or Advanced the courses I would recommend for you I have two that are on the advanced level there's Advanced grammar and there's Advanced vocabulary and collocations and right now would be a great time to join because you can get both of them to for the price of one since it's 50% off but you also might be interested in the reading course why do I say that it's because in the reading course the texts that are used for that course they are written at a native englishspeaking level so I did not simplify them for English Learners so if you're Advanced that would also be a good one for you it also includes uh correction of your writing and I also recommend the listening course the listening course is interesting it's kind of multilevel because it has both slow and fast audio so if you're Advanced you would want to use the fast audio it's just like normal speed for a native English speaker right and if you're maybe at the intermediate level then you could still get the listening course but use the slower audio it's not super slow it's just slowed down a little bit to help you understand as much as possible and then hopefully as your listening skills build and improve as you take the lessons you can work your way up to the faster audio if you're again on the more experienced side of English learning you should also consider the idioms course and the slang ebook so a lot of times what differentiates maybe a more basic or more intermediate English learner from a more fluent English learner is those um informal Expressions right the ability to use these these phrases these things that you don't always learn in textbooks or you won't necessarily learn by just studying vocabulary but just those informal phrases that native English speakers use and so you can learn a lot of those in my idioms course and slang ebook so those were a whole bunch of recommendations for you if you are more experienced um if you are now let's go down if you are more on the pre-intermediate level then I would suggest starting with vocabulary builder level one everyday English speaking level one both of those courses have two levels there's level one which is kind of more pre-intermediate and level two which is more intermediate and again if you want to get two for the price of one you can do that today uh before the sale ends but those are good for establishing your foundation of the most essential words in the vocabulary builder course and the most essential phrases in the everyday speaking course right because you you don't want to just learn words you need to learn how to put them together into phrases and for those of you who are also more on the beginner or pre-intermediate uh side I also um recommend the pronunciation course because pronunciation is one of those things if you can get in the habit of nice clear pronunciation from the be from the very beginning look at me I'm making pronunciation mistakes if you can develop clear pronunciation from the very beginning that will serve you well throughout all the rest of your English learning journey and it will mean that people can understand you even if your phrases are very simpler even if you're not using really complex grammar if you're just saying simple sentences but you have clear pronunciation then you will communicate successfully and that is the goal right whereas if you have super Advanced grammar and super Advanced vocabulary but your pronunciation is just kind of uh it's just not good it's not clear you have a lot of a a strong accent then people aren't going to understand you even though you have a lot of advanced um words and grammar okay so for those of you who are earlier in your English learning journey I recommend um vocabulary one English speaking everyday English speaking level one and pronunciation and of course the basic and intermediate grammar ebooks that's that essential Foundation of English grammar okay now those of you who are intermediate level that might be a lot of you um or you're not exactly sure where you are really almost any course will serve you well I'll tell you that one of the most popular is phrasal verbs in conversation so phrasal verbs are those combinations of a verb and preposition like get up or throw out or um sit down and uh a lot of phrasal verbs are a little tricky because some of them are easy to understand like stand up we know what that means but then some of them are not literal like crack up meaning to start laughing very suddenly start laughing very hard crack up it doesn't make sense if you just translate it literally so in the phrasal verbs in conversation course you can learn those phrasal verbs in context all of the phrasal verbs are used in dialogues so that way you can um instead of just trying to learn them from a list you can learn them really in the situations in which a native English speaker would use them so that's our phrasal verbs and conversation course that is one of the best sellers uh the listening course is also up there along with everyday English speaking uh both levels what's great about everyday English speaking is that not only are all the lessons based on dialogues so again you're seeing the phrases used in like real situations but also the courses have the ability to record yourself speaking and send it in for feedback and correction so um that's a way to really get personalized feedback from our teaching team um it's low pressure you can just record yourself it's not live you can do it on your own time or if you want to you can write out a couple of maybe points you want to cover um and it's just really useful because we'll let you know if there's anything that needs to be improved in your pronunciation any fixes to be made in vocabulary or grammar or any phrases that um we could suggest to expand your fluency further Okay so some of our best sellers for the intermediate level phrasal verbs and conversation the listening course um everyday speaking levels one and two um and 1,000 cations 1,000 cations is an ebook and collocations are the combinations of words that we uh put together naturally like in English we say I made a mistake we don't say I did a mistake um things like that and so a lot of times if you're making mistakes with collocations people will still understand you but it doesn't sound quite right it sounds a little bit unnatural so the goal of the 1,000 collocations ebook is to teach you a thousand of these uh collocations so that when you speak it sounds more natural and what's great about that ebook is it's 1,000 cations in 10 minutes a day and I mean it uh each lesson is really short and sweet just five minutes to read the lesson five minutes to try the quiz and you're done done so literally in the time that you're drinking your cup of coffee or or tea you can learn your collocations for the day and uh become more fluent in English Okay um before I move on let me just take a peek at the chat um so yes I have advanced grammar um it's a 45 lesson course and advanced grammar I forgot to mention Advanced grammar also includes writing tasks where the writing tasks are really designed to help you use the grammar you just learned so if we just had a lesson on a second conditional thinking about uh imaginary situations then the writing task will ask you to write about um imagining a situation the goal is to get you using the second conditional and then again you can send it in and get feedback from our teaching team hello from hungry um okay here's a question about uh the whole course that's the whole package what I call the espresso English Academy um is there an option to get the whole course in monthly payments and can I get credit for the previous course I already bought yes and yes so if you go to um courses. espresso english. netacademy let me type that in the chat courses. espresso english. netacademy um you will see that there is an option to do a monthly payment plan so you can spread out the amount uh over I think four months or 10 months I don't remember what's on the page you'll have to go but it it makes it easier right because you're pay you're still getting that discount but you can pay for it over time and if you have already bought one of the one or more of the courses or ebooks inside this there please email me help espresso english. net because you can indeed use the credit from your previous purchases okay I don't want anyone paying two times for the same thing it doesn't make sense so you can use the credit from your previous purchases but email us help espresso english. net to find out how much credit you have and get your um custom coupon code okay um someone asked which is better it should I just join the whole thing or should I buy individual courses which one makes more sense uh the answer is that it really depends on your learning goals if you are only really interested in in improving one or two aspects of your English so you really only want to learn phrasal verbs and business English then I'd suggest just join those two courses but if you're looking to improve all your areas vocabulary grammar speaking phrasal verbs idioms business pronunciation uh collocations uh then I recommend the academy for two reasons one is because uh it really does have everything you need in all those areas um and we know that in order to be fluent you have to be strong in all the areas of the language right you can't have like great listening skills and terrible speaking skills you won't be fluent so the academy really has everything it's very comprehensive it's also the best discount and you might not know this but we recently added something called the conversation Cafe to the academy and what that is is it's like a private Facebook group but not on Facebook it's actually inside the espresso English Academy website and what we do in there is every day I post conversation starters so it will be a question like what's your favorite season of the year and why and then students will answer and so we'll get to interact practice a little more get to know each other um I can correct anything that needs correcting uh a couple times throughout the year we also do challenges so we just finished up a prepositions challenge it was 30 days of focusing on a different preposition every day and learning 10 ways to use it so 10 ways to use about 10 ways to use for 10 ways to use with um it was kind of intense but the students in the academy did an awesome job uh they put it into practice every day and they um by the end of it they knew 300 ways to use prepositions in English uh if that challenge has just ended but if you do join the academy now you still get access to it so you can still read through the lessons um and take them on your own time all right let me take check in with the chat here um how many languages do I speak I really only speak two I speak uh English obviously and Portuguese is my second language I did learn Spanish in high school and I was pretty good at it but when I learned Portuguese in college and Beyond Portuguese kind of took over the Spanish in my head so now I can read in Spanish pretty well and I can understand a lot of it because it's similar to Portuguese uh but I'm pretty fluent in Portuguese and I really can't speak Spanish anymore unfortunately okay let's see hello from Angola um okay from Mexico improve my listening and mainly speaking so um we do have two courses focusing on those areas the listening course what it does is it takes you step by step through each lesson has uh something to listen to and what you do is you do kind of a a pro pro Progressive listening okay it's a process so you listen the first time and you try to get only the very general ideas you're not trying to get every word you just listen for some general ideas and I have questions to help you and then the next time you listen you listen for more specific details so the second time you listen you will understand more and then you can answer those questions uh about the more specific details and then you listen again and and this time you listen for some specific words so there's like a Fillin the blank and you try to get those words because it's um audio files you can stop it and Rewind it in case you you missed something you want to listen to that phrase again and then you listen again with the whole transcript in front of you so this really takes you step by step from a more General understanding to a more specific understanding to that very um specific understanding of every word and then finally listening to it hopefully very clearly uh and then for the speaking course uh everyday English speaking each lesson starts with basically a dialogue so for example I have a lesson about how to encourage people and cheer them up so it'll be a dialogue between two friends one of them is feeling kind of down and the other one wants to uh help cheer their friend up and so they'll go back and forth in the dialogue uh using a bunch of different phrases and then after that I explain the phrases and give you some more opt options for that situation uh it also includes quizzes and as I mentioned the speaking tasks where um you'll be able to just record yourself uh send it in and get that feedback okay let's see Portuguese I speak Brazilian Portuguese um I'm not going to say which one is the best but uh my husband is from Brazil and I lived there for many years that's actually where I started my English teaching career and where espresso English started in fact um and so I speak Brazilian Portuguese you are quite welcome I'm so glad to hear you've learned a lot yeah okay we've got a few more minutes before I've got to grab a bite to eat and run so let me ask if there are any further questions let me just go back through the chat and make sure I haven't missed anything see thank you for joining me for this just kind of spontaneous little chat um again I did not plan anything I just felt like I had to come on the air and talk to you all because of the confusion I caused through my mistimed email and I also wanted to uh explain a little bit more about the courses and uh make sure that there were no lingering questions let me also go ahead and check my inbox to see if there are any lingering questions there let's see all right uh oh right okay here we go um okay I'm going to keep it focused on the courses and not specific English questions but I am saving any specific English questions to do more lessons here on the YouTube channel later okay so I hope you enjoyed this this little casual chat um I hope to do them maybe more often uh now that I have this cool live stream uh software um where I can actually show your um I can actually show your comments on the screen yep so this is this is fun um oh okay here's one something for a complete novice in English hm it's a little tricky because all of my courses are in English um I don't have like a course that also has uh Spanish or another language um um but I would still suggest starting with vocabulary builder level one and here's why it's because that course also includes lots of pictures um both because it's for students starting out and because it's actually proven that it's more effective to learn vocabulary when you have uh when you have pictures like we learn a lot by reading but we learn something like 400 times better 400% better I don't remember the exact uh stat when we have a visual aid and so that's why I include lots of pictures in the vocabulary builder courses because that way let's say I show you the word Apple simple example I show you the word apple and I show you a picture of the Apple you will learn to directly associate the objects the apple with the English word Apple without having to uh think of it first in your native language like Masa in Portuguese and then translate that to Apple okay so it's a more direct connection when you have a visual aid um so you can really think directly in English and learn those words and have them come to your mind in English instead of having to go through uh your native language okay let's see let me pop over here in the chat I'm glad to hear my courses have helped yay you're quite welcome okay well I'm going to sign off for today but I am available by email as I mentioned help espresso english. net let me just pop that in the chat help at espresso english. net um you can email us and either I or my assistant teacher Andrew will answer your questions uh if you've joined one of my courses you've probably interacted with my assistant teacher Andrew he does a lot of the homework correction and he is just fantastic um really explains things well and had does good Corrections and I know that everybody all the students who have uh interacted with Andrew have really learned a lot from him so okay you're quite welcome all right well I hope you all have a wonderful afternoon or evening or morning wherever you are in the world thank you for taking a little time out of your day to join me live and I hope to see you inside one of the courses again that Black Friday discount is available for about nine and a half more hours from this moment that I'm speaking live um I'm not sending any more emails about it so this is just the last notice uh and then my next emails will go back to the regular English learning tips all right take care everyone bye bye