The Monday Byte

Welcome to the Monday Byte where I send you 5 things each week so you can improve your English and land a remote dev job.

📖 Word/Phrase - what do you think?

Whenever you're trying to get someone’s opinion at work, there are multiple ways to ask for it. Here are a few I tend to use as a native English speaker:

• what do you think?

• how’s (short for how does) that sound?

• what do you say?

The first is open-ended. The second is might be you proposing something such as “let me write the PR description first, then you can come in and edit as needed. how’s that sound?”

And the final one is where you’re trying to get buy-in on something you’ve proposed, which could be formal or informal. “What do you say we grab lunch after solving this bug?”

💬 Pronunciation - 13 Critiques to Learn From

I was out of town for a company offsite so I didn’t get time to do a new pronunciation critique. But! I was looking at the playlist on YouTube and we’ve done 13 already!

That means you can see non-native English speakers from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Europe and Russia to see what stood out in their pronunciation. Enjoy!

Want me to critique your English? Reply to this and let me know!

🔗 Content - Engineering/Parenting Analogy

Sometimes it’s hard to understand an analogy in a language that isn’t your native one. So I thought this would make for great practice.

I saw this on Twitter and bookmarked it a couple months okay. See if you can read it and understand why it’s a good analogy.

💪🏼 Exercise - Shadow a YouTube Intro

Spend 15-seconds shadowing this YouTube intro from a video about Next.js by Lee Robinson. The goal is to try to match his pronunciation (words, speed and intonation) as closely as possible.

Link to the clip

Enjoy the week, we’ll talk again soon.

- Joe