Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. Most people wrongly assume that all natives speak perfect English. Turn on the tv or radio, and you will hear numerous grammatical and syntactical errors coming from their mouths. You will hear them, but you may not interpret them as a mistake, because, after all, all natives speak perfectly, right? Wrong. The difference between a native making a mistake and a non-native is...
9 days ago • 3 min read
Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. On a good day, you feel like you can do anything. You work out, you study, you read, you work and play and practise your English! You feel incredible. But what happens when it's not a good day? Can you still show up and practise your English, even if it is just for ten minutes per day? The answer is yes! Why? Because the person who is able to form and maintain a habit like...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. Arguments, complaints, and disagreements are all common when dealing with opinionated humans in the 21st century. In times of social media, people are more accustomed than ever to expressing their thoughts, and often in ways that are considered rude and inappropriate. Fortunately, the way we communicate offline is different to how we interact online (for the moment at least!)....
24 days ago • 3 min read
Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. The world is getting smaller. Not literally, but in terms of travel, commerce and business in general, it has never been easier for people, products and services to traverse borders. Nowadays the people you serve can come from every corner of the globe, and this presents both opportunities and challenges. One of the challenges is cross-cultural communication. Building rapport...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. We have seen in previous editions of 1% the importance of communicating effectively. If an amazing idea or product is presented badly, then the chances of it being adopted or bought are reduced significantly. We don't want that to happen, ever. So here is what you can do to make sure you present your ideas successfully. There are three fundamental things you need to do. I call...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. There is a general belief among non-native speakers of any language that accent is important: I need to sound like a native; I want to sound English/American; I want to speak like ______. We have to stop this thinking! Accents are beautiful. They tell part of our story. They should be celebrated, not laughed at. The problem is we have been trained to notice anything that is...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. In a recent post I talked about the importance of communication skills in a technological world. I am going to build on that post because after listening to a podcast interview with the Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn, Aneesh Raman, I am even more convinced of the value that humans can bring to a changing world. In the interview, Raman talks about his new book, Open...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. In a recent English Proficiency report by Education First, a language training company, Spain ranked 26/37 European countries for general English abilities. The conclusion of the article talking about the report in El Pais was that "Spain studies English, but doesn't finally speak it." From my own experience teaching, general comments from people reflect difficulties in...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Welcome to 1% Every Thursday you receive tips and content to help you improve your English skills, 1 % at a time. Communication skills, otherwise known as 'soft skills' or the ability to interact effectively with other people, are more important than ever according to many leaders and academic institutions. Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary Of A CEO, one of the world's most listened to podcasts said recently, "Human skills, people skills, are going to be of extreme value in a world of...
2 months ago • 2 min read