A Fantastic English Course. Change your mind, change your English, change your life

Hello! This is Alex. Welcome to the vocabulary lesson for “Grammar is a myth” Let’s start right away.

Our first word for today is issue. You can see this word in one of my opening sentences and it says: “Today I am going to talk about one of the most burning, the most important and the most dramatic issues that every English learner faces with.”

Okay, issue has a few meanings in English, but here issue means a topic of interest or discussion. So in the presentation I say that I am going to talk about one of the most burning which means crucial or very important topics or problem that every English learner faces with. Well, actually, not only every English leaner faces this problem, but also every language learner does face the same problem. When I say a language learner I am definitely talking about a person who learns a foreign language. So now you understand that issue means a topic of interest or a topic of discussion.

Next we have a phrase language acquisition. In this article I say, “Grammar seems to be the most difficult, the most complicated and the most boring part in language acquisition.” Language acquisition is a situation when you listen to the language or when you read in the language and you understand it. Another way to put it is that language acquisition is when you begin to get the language, and because you understand what you hear or read you begin to use it successfully. “You can only acquire the language when you understand the message,” as Steven Krashen, one of the best experts on language acquisition, likes to say.

Okay, another phrase in this presentation is a kind of.

I say, “They make you believe that English grammar is a kind of marvelous box with a secret inside.”

(A) kind of means something like this or that. So they (teachers, educators) want you to believe that English grammar is something like a marvelous, very beautiful, very amazing box with a secret inside. So again, (a) kind of means something like this, but it is not exactly this or that. It may look like this or that, but it is not exactly this or that. They make you believe that English grammar is a kind of marvelous box with a secret inside. It is a box, right! But it is not one hundred percent the same box. I think you get the idea, right!?

Next we have the phrase reveal the secret. For those who did my Unique English Course, which is, by the way, the bestselling book, it is not a new phrase, right? But if you didn’t do this course, don’t worry. I’ll explain it to you right now. The sentences says, “They often tell you, “If you want to know English Grammar, if you want to reveal the secret of the grammar box, one of the obvious ways to perceive it is to take it into pieces”.

Oh, here are some more wonderful words in this marvelous sentence. Okay, I’ll explain them to you, just in a minute, but now let’s focus on the phrase to reveal the secret. To reveal a secret simply means to tell or to show a secret or to make known or public. So they often tell you, “If you want to know English Grammar, if you want to make known or disclose, or to show the secret of the grammar box, one of the obvious ways to perceive it is to take it into pieces.” To perceive simply means to realize or to see something that you didn’t see before. And the phrase to take something into pieces means to break something down into parts or to separate something into smaller parts.

So let’s put it all together and see what we have here.

They often tell you, “If you want to know English Grammar, if you want to reveal the secret of the grammar box, to disclose the secret, one of the obvious ways, one of the natural ways to perceive, to realize it is to separate grammar into smaller parts to take it into pieces”. It is a long sentence, but we did it.

Okay, we move on and we see the word unscrew.

The sentence says, “Everybody knows that if you want to know how something is made, you unscrew the parts and you see that the secret is inside the box.” It is very easy to understand what it means, right? But anyway, let me talk just a little bit about it. Unscrew means to remove a screw from an object. In our case, it is from the box. It has the same meaning like separate something by removing a screw. So the sentence says that if you want to know how something is made, you remove a screw or screws from the box. You separate the box into smaller parts and then you begin to see what the box has inside. You unscrew the parts and you see that the secret is inside the box. But you can only reveal the secret, you can only see the secret, if you unscrew the parts of the box.

Another phrase in this presentation is to boost up.

I say, “Hoping that this is the only way to boost up