English Byte - #2

Welcome to the second issue of the English Byte newsletter!

Excited to have you and 128 new people join us for this week’s edition!

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

📖 Word/Phrase - get a wild hair up (one’s) butt

So this one’s funny. My friend Levi used this the other day and I literally had to google it because I had never heard it. And I’m a native speaker lol. It basically means you have an unexpected impulse. Another example, you could get a wild hair up your butt and take the whole family to Disneyland.

💬 Pronunciation Tip - Critique of Mateus from Brazil

Thank you to Mateus for sharing a video for me to critique. He’s a reader of the English Byte newsletter and a friend from Twitter.

Here’s a 5-min video where I critique his pronunciation.

If you want pronunciation feedback, reply to this email with a video or audio file and you might be featured in the next issue!

🗣️ Real World Conversation - Async PR Review Discussion

If you’re not doing it already, getting in the practice of doing Pull Request reviews and discussions in English is a great way to practice using different technical terms and prep yourself for working on an English-speaking dev team.

Here’s a short YouTube video with some commentary on a PR review between myself and my friend Chris aka Coding in Public.

🔗 Content - How to learn any language in six months

📣 Shoutout to our reader Gino (@rlgino) for sharing this TEDx Talk with me for this week’s newsletter! It’s from 9 years ago but is’ a fantastic talk by Chris Lonsdale about language learning. And what’s great about TEDx - many of them have captions/transcriptions available.

💪🏼 Exercise - Create a Separate Twitter Account

If you’re serious about getting good at English, I recommend creating a separate Twitter account. I’ve done this for Spanish and it’s a gamechanger. Why? It’s a digital immersion and you can tailor your feed and the UI to be in English and focus on using English 100% of the time. It’s a literal switch for your brain. Try it!

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

Your friend,
- Joe