English Byte - #1

Welcome to the first issue of the English Byte newsletter!

As I meet more and more people like you from the Spanish-speaking world (well most of you are from this world), I’ve realized one thing, “Why is no one helping them with their English?”

I studied linguistics and education in college. I used to be an English teacher before becoming a programmer. And nowadays, I’m spending most of my free time obsessed with understanding how to reach native-like fluency in a second language. So, I started the English Byte newsletter, which is my second newsletter after my Spanish newsletter.

My goal with this newsletter is to help you:

• Reach native-like fluency in English

• Get a job for an English-speaking company

• Improve your English for the workplace

As a reminder, I’ll send you this every Monday morning and it’ll have 5 things for you:

1. a new word or phrase

2. a pronunciation tip

3. a real-world conversation audio clip

4. a piece of content I recommend

5. an exercise for improving your English

I think you’re going to absolutely love it. Without further ado, here’s the first edition!

📖 Word/Phrase - bump

You know when you send a message to a coworker and you’re waiting for them to reply but it’s been a couple of days? You can reply “friendly bump” as a way of saying, “hey, gentle reminder I’m still waiting for you to reply to this.” Other similar expressions are:

• Ping

• Touching base

My coworker actually used this in a Telegram chat this week:

💬 Pronunciation Tip - Critique of Tony from Argentina

I saw this done by a Spanish teacher on YouTube and decided to steal his technique. My friend Tony from Argentina speaks English very well, but there are subtle things I hear in his accent that could be improved for him to sound more like a native American English speaker.

Here's a short video where I play an audio message by him and critique it.

🗣️ Real World Conversation - Tone in written text

This week at work, I let my emotions get the best of me. I wrote a passive-aggressive message to a coworker when I should have set my emotions aside and used direct communication instead of tone.

Here's a short video where you can learn how to avoid tone when writing messages in English to your coworkers and not make the same mistake.

🔗 Content - Theo - t3.gg

I want to recommend Theo’s channel because I genuinely enjoy his content. He does a mix of content like “soft skill” type stuff that will help you get better at interviewing to deep technical topics like Next.js Server Actions. It’s heavily JavaScript/TypeScript stuff but he doesn’t talk too fast and this content will also help you get better as a programmer.

💪🏼 Exercise - Word Web

If you feel like your vocabulary is that of a 10-year old, then this exercise is for you! Here’s what you do:

1. Pick an area of your work - for example, git.

2. Write down all the words you can think of in Spanish.

3. Look up all those words in English - Wordreference works great.

4. Make flashcards - I recommend Anki.

I’ve been doing it with my friend Tony who is from Argentina to help him grow his technical vocabulary (and me in Spanish) and it’s been helping a ton.

Thanks for reading! Hope you have an awesome week! 😄

Your friend,
- Joe