In Canada, you can play golf at a VERY nice golf course for under $200 per time.  Sometimes it’s much less than $100.  And I’m talking about really beautiful golf courses, not just average ones.

So why then, would any reasonable person pay $100 000 per year for a membership?  It made no sense to me before.  Now it makes perfect sense.

These guys aren’t paying for how nice the golf course is.  That is only part of it.  It’s a small part actually.  What they are really paying for is the community.  Think about the other people who go to those courses.  Most of them are also successful business people.  They pay for status and ability to meet these people.  They talk and do business together.  They make friends and get their children in this rich group of successful people.  In some ways, the whole thing makes me sick.  I wish the world were a more fair place.  But the reality is that it’s not.  It does make sense for these people to stay together, meet each other, and network together.

It’s MUCH more likely that you will meet someone worth doing business with on one of these super expensive golf courses than if you were to try to meet these types of people at other places where “regular” people can go.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about a social networking website for English learning.  These aren’t the exact same thing, but you’ll see what I mean in a minute…

People who speak English as a second language and are actually serious about improving their English, their business, their lives, etc, don’t have anywhere to go to meet each other online.  There are a lot of garbage websites that allow anyone on there.  If you want to speak with someone to “practice your English”, you can absolutely find a partner on a million free sites.

But the problem with this is HUGE.  These sites that allow anyone to join, attract people who aren’t really serious about learning English or really serious about anything at all.  Why?  Because most people in the world are not serious about anything they are doing.

If you want to meet a partner to speak English with, share ideas, share stories, share culture, you will want to meet someone who is at or above your level.  You want someone who can challenge you and you can learn from.  It’s not easy to find these people, but they exist.

Imagine for a second that you wrote on your Facebook page, “I am looking for someone to learn from, talk about business and life, and really challenge each other to improve our English skills”.  I can’t imagine you will find anyone.  Maybe, if you are lucky, someone will say “Yes” to your offer, but they probably won’t be the type of person you are hoping for.

As you probably know, Add and I have been making a new free video EVERY DAY at www.LearnEnglish232.com  

We are hoping to get people to get in the habit of going there every day for the new lessons.  We want to grow that site to 50 000 visitors per day.

But many of the people who find this site or that site aren’t super serious about learning English.  We also want to find the SUPER SERIOUS people and provide an opportunity for amazing English, business, and life learning that does not exist anywhere else on the internet.  That’s our goal.

The people who are not serious will not pay a small monthly fee to join the membership part.  And that’s great.  Our plan is to build a membership site for serious learners.  Everyone will have a great profile with an awesome photo, bio, linkedIn page, Skype number, where they are from…  A lot of stuff.  Then these people will be able to search through the other serious members and we can all have a really high level and private conversation.  Also, the members will be able to contact each other and set up high level language exchanges and other things.  It will be a real community.  I’ll be on there providing reading material, movie talk, technology stuff, and a bunch of interesting and high level topics for group discussion.  We’ll all push ourselves to get better and better in not only English, but in life too.

I want to have a lot of great free English learning content for everyone to enjoy, and a high level SUPER VIP program that is connected to this one and also adds a lot more.  We’re still talking about how we want the site to be.  And since some of you guys who are reading this right now will be interested in joining it, it would be great to hear your ideas now.  We are building it for you and other high level people like you.

What do you think of this idea?  What would you like to see in that program?

Help us design it with your ideas and then it will be much better that way!

And by the way, don’t worry, it won’t be expensive like an elite golf course!  It doesn’t need to be.  The only reason I used that example was to try to make a point.

Love to hear your thoughts guys.  By the way, does anyone here already have the great habit of going to www.LearnEnglish232.com everyday yet?  What do you think?  Have you shared it with your friends, students, or teachers?  What do they think?  We’re still in the beginning stages of developing this, and we’re sure this will be the best yet!

It will be connected in some way with China232.com VIP membership, so don’t worry about that.  We’ll take care of you guys and make it kick ass!  There will be tons of amazing free stuff for everyone and an insanely awesome high level private English learning VIP club.

Sounds like a win/win to me!  What are your thoughts on this whole topic?  Even the part about rich people paying so much for golf.  Does it make sense to you too?

Your comments are always appreciated.  You guys have been great lately with that.  Keep it up.  I read EVERY one!!

Give yourself a break!  What do I mean?  I’m not talking about a holiday (although, going on a holiday is pretty sweet).

I’m just talking about giving yourself a break from any feelings you have of guilt.  We all have things that we’re feeling guilty about, maybe not super guilty, but even just a little.

Maybe your diet hasn’t been great lately.  Maybe you haven’t been the greatest boyfriend or girlfriend in your relationship lately.  Maybe you aren’t happy with how little you’ve been exercising or studying.  Maybe you have been doing as well as you’d like in business or at work.  I don’t know.  But I am guessing there is probably at least one thing in your life where you feel like you are kind of  blaming or even hating yourself in some way.

My advice today is simple:  Take a break from any self-hate, guilt, or worry that you have for at least today.  Just take a moment to realize that this worry and guilt you feel isn’t helping you.

I’m not saying that you should just do whatever you want and not care anymore.  I’m just suggesting that you take one day to completely forgive yourself 100% for anything that you are blaming yourself for.  Forget about what you did or didn’t do.  The blame isn’t helping the situation.  You should also stop blaming other people or outside events.  Just accept whatever situation you are in, at least for today.  See how you feel.

Just smile, relax, and enjoy being you.  None of us are perfect and we all have things we are blaming ourselves for.  It sucks our energy and makes us feel less confident, less happy, and just worse in pretty much every way.  This self blame, even if it is pretty small, isn’t helping the people around you either.

So just let go of any pain from the past that you are holding onto.  Today is a new day and you can change anything in your life starting now.  It will be a lot easier to do this if you can stop dragging the pain from the past into each and every day.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.   Your responses to the last blog were absolutely amazing by the way!

Have a great day

Ok….. Today’s topic is about “being yourself”.  This phrase is used all the time in spoken English.  It’s supposed to be good advice.

In most western countries (maybe other countries too), if you ask you parents for advice on how to act when you are on your first date, most of them will just tell you to “be yourself”.  Everyone seems to agree with this idea of “being yourself”, but I honestly wonder if they are even thinking about it AT ALL when they give this kind of advice.  I often think people just say things without really thinking about what they are saying.  It drives me insane!

What does “be yourself” mean anyway?  Basically it just means “don’t be fake” and “do and act the way that you feel is natural to you”.

Well, that sounds great, but what if the “real you” doesn’t work?  What if people don’t like “the real you”?  What if they are offended by your jokes or your personality?  Should you change? or should you just keep “being yourself” and seeing what happens?

I’ve thought about this question a lot actually.  I’ve thought about it for my entire life.  Sometimes I even think about it when I make lessons for this website.  I don’t want to offend or upset other people, but I still want to be my REAL self.

The reason this question is so important to me is because “the real me” doesn’t always work; not even close!  Bosses and teachers often HATE the real me.  They get embarrassed by my sense of humour, etc.  (The truth is that I don’t like them either, but that’s another story)…..

After thinking about this question for years and years, I think I believe that I should try really hard to be myself.  It’s too important.  The truth is that I might miss out on certain opportunities because I’m not always obsessed with doing what society thinks is normal, but if I am not myself, I will end up feeling completely sick.  And who wants to feel sick?  That’s horrible.

The truth is that I never want to offend anyone.  It’s never my goal.  It’s also true that I don’t always have the same opinions as other people.  We are all different to some extent.

So what should I do?  Do I have to keep all my thoughts and opinions inside?  Should I be afraid of accidentally offending someone who is overly sensitive in my opinion?  I hope not…

It’s kind of a weird feeling when you make podcasts and videos.  Trust me, I totally know 100% that I’m not some super famous person.  But, over the years, millions of people have downloaded our podcasts and/or watched our videos.  (It’s a lot more of the podcasts but the videos on learnenglish232.com will catch up fast).  The point is that Add and I have seen tons of comments about our work.  We know that we have fans, but we also know that thousands of people probably listen to 30 seconds of one podcast or watch a few seconds of one video and think “I hate these guys”, “This is boring”, “This sucks”, or WORSE.  It’s only natural that this happens, it’s just a weird feeling when you experience it personally.

At the end of the day, I think Add and I have to keep on being ourselves and just being happy with it, no matter what happens.  We certainly have to try to keep getting better and to be the absolute best we can, but we need to just be careful not to “change” anything about our fundamental “core” beliefs.  We want to make the best stuff in the world for our REAL fans, and just forget about anyone who doesn’t really understand the whole point of the 232.  Let’s face it, some people don’t get it.

Large companies have no personality because they are too worried about trying to make everyone happy.  That’s not really our job.  That seems too boring.  I was talking to another popular online teacher about this the other day.  He told me he has decided not to share his real thoughts and feelings with the world because he doesn’t want to “get into politics” or have to deal with all the emails from people he offends.

I totally understand his perspective, but Add and I have a different opinion on this.  We want you guys to know the real us.  We think it will make for much better lessons, and a much more interesting environment for real discussion and real English learning.

What do you guys think?  Should we keep being ourselves?  Should we worry about accidentally offending people with some of our jokes?  Should we be even MORE like the real us?

We’d love to know your thoughts on this.  One thing Add and I both love is brutal honesty; you know, the real truth.  If you totally agree, please say so and why.  If you totally disagree and think something we say or do is retarded or ridiculous, please say that too.  Not just with this blog, but always.  No matter what the feedback is, we love hearing the real truth.  It makes everyone better and it makes the world more interesting.

Also, what about this question in YOUR own life?  Are you your real self all the time?  When, if ever, do you think it’s useful to be “fake”?

I hope this blog made sense, and I hope you found it at least somewhat interesting.

Ok……….          I’m waiting for those comments guys!  And girls

Oh ya… If you have ANY blog topic requests or video lesson requests, please write them in the comments and I’ll do my best to make that asap!

Andy

Up until now, we’ve relied on sending you emails, and Facebook posts to get you guys back to visit the website.  There are so many websites and so many distractions both online and offline.  If we remind you guys to come back to this site through an email or a Facebook post, we get A LOT more people on this site everyday.  Even if you like to use some particular website, you probably don’t go visit it everyday.  (Unless it’s Facebook or your email).  I’m almost positive that there are no more than 5 websites in the whole world that you visit everyday.  Am I right?  Is this because you don’t like many websites?  No way.  We just often forget about them because most websites aren’t a habit ,even if they are useful sites.  We’re trying to change that by making our websites a part of your daily habit (Of course, if you want that to be true).  We don’t want to send 10 emails per day and annoy you guys, but we want to make sure you know about anything new so that you at least have the option of checking it out if you want to.

Now, as you probably know, we’re getting into making daily English Learning Videos on LearnEnglish232.com.  It’s hard work, and the point of making them every day, is to get people in the habit of going directly there everyday, because they KNOW that there will be a new lesson.  If people come back over and over again to the same website and use it often, we say that the website is “sticky”.  It’s a useful marketing term.  It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly hard to make a “sticky” website, even if you put stuff on there everyday, and even if it’s stuff that people like!  That can be stressful, but it’s ok, that’s part of the fun.

Besides making the site “sticky” with useful new content everyday, we need to both help many new people find the site, and stay in communication with you guys.  Email is great, but we can’t go crazy on that.  Facebook is pretty good.  Subscribing on Youtube or Itunes is pretty good too.  But TWITTER?  It should be good, but I STILL don’t know what I’m doing on there.

Well…..  I don’t want to give up and be a quitter, but I do have to admit that I have a lot to learn on there.  Our new Twitter feed only has 16 followers!  HA!  Here it is:  Learn English On Twitter

I’d love your advice and suggestions.  I know that at least some English learners are using Twitter.  Why am I such an idiot?  I seriously get jealous and go crazy when I see other Twitter feeds with tens of thousands of followers.  What are they doing right?  If I tweet our new videos, does anyone care?  What makes people push the “retweet” button?

I don’t want to just beg for Twitter followers.  That is embarrassing and it won’t work.  But I am very curious as to what a good Twitter strategy would be for the new video site.  I want to start using Twitter to connect with fans and find new fans, but I SUCK at it.

I’m kind of laughing while I write this, but it’s true.  If you are reading this blog and you use Twitter, I’d love to hear from you!  Ok.  I’m begging for advice…  Embarrassing I know!

Thanks for all your support on both this site and the new video site too guys.  Both sites are growing and Add and I are getting ready to make VIP lesson 200!  It’s going to be a surprise!  I think you’ll really like it.

By the way, if there are any terms, phrases, phrasal verbs, or anything you want to learn, please let me know in the comments section.  I’ll try to make a video lesson on that.  And of course, your comments about Twitter will be a huge help, hopefully not just for me, but for you as well.  I don’t want to keep sucking at it!  You guys deserve better!  LOL.

2.  VIP Lesson #200 is coming up this week.  Awesome!  Add and I have a special surprise for that.  It should be sweet!  Hint:  Now would be a pretty smart time to get a VIP membership (In case you have been thinking about it.  It’s getting insanely good in there…..)

3.  LearnEnglish232 is off to a great start.  Thanks so much to all you guys who have been commenting and enjoying the lessons.  We’re putting up new ones every day, so getting  in the habit of visiting that site once a day is a wonderful one.  One question:  Any ideas of how to make it more popular?  Have any of you guys told your friends about it yet?  What do they think?  I’d love to know.  Here is today’s lesson (complete with video AND written examples to really help)

Here is the lesson I just posted:  Would love to hear your comments on all this:

Learn English Slang and Vocabulary

I remember when I was studying “how humans learn language” when I was in university.   It was a 4th year psychology course.  The thing is that humans have a special part of the brain that can learn grammar rules automatically, without having to study them directly.  That is why native speakers who never went to school can usually speak in a way that that is mostly “grammatically correct”.  It’s not always true, but it’s true most of the time.

I don’t even “know” all the grammar rules.  I don’t think about it.  I just know what “feels right”.  That’s from me being a native speaker and from listening to millions of proper sentences and “getting a feel for what is right and what is wrong”.  When I learned Chinese as a second language, I found the same thing.  Of course it isn’t as good as my English, but I still have a feel for what sounds right and what sounds wrong.  We all have that feeling, we just need to pay attention to it.  Studying “verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns… is fine sometimes, and sometimes it’s necessary, but there is certainly no need to go overboard”.   Not only is it boring to study that stuff too much, but it’s so hard to remember when it’s talked about in that way, AND it’s slow for the brain to use when speaking.

If I always had to think, “I need to do this with a noun and that with an adverb, except in this and that case, it would take FOREVER to write or speak a simple sentence”.  I think you get my point.

BUT… Sometimes it can be necessary.  I’ve been noticing that many people who write me questions have a really difficult time understanding the differences between “IS and DOES” at the beginning of a question.  Native speakers NEVER make this mistake, so it’s important to learn the difference so you don’t look “uneducated”.  I don’t mean to sound unkind, but when someone reads that mistake, it looks really really bad.

So here I’m going to explain the difference here:  Grammar Lesson – Important Difference Between IS and DOES

Big tip:  Besides using the lessons at China232, I highly recommend getting in the habit of going to LearnEnglish232.com literally EVERY DAY.  We are making new free lessons on there every single day!  It’s a lot of work, but we want to build it into the best English learning site in the world BY FAR for helping serious people take their English to the next level.  Please tell your friends, teachers, and students to get in the habit and join this new exciting site!  And don’t forget about china232.com  We’re still making the best podcasts we can and teaching everything through conversation.

The combination of using BOTh  China232.com and Learnenglish232.com everyday should be INSANE.  Please help us spread the word to the whole world!  Share you success stories with us.

And by the way, Add and I have a special plan for the milestone VIP lesson # 200 next week.  It’s gonna be SICK!  Get ready!

If you watch the news at all, you probably noticed that there was a terrorist attack in Boston during the marathon.  Two bombs went off, probably a “suicide bomb”.  Coincidently, here is my latest video lesson on a suicide bomb

Anyway, here is a basic recap of what happened.  Someone, or a group of people, decided to blow up some buildings during the famous Boston marathon yesterday.  At least 3 people have died, including an 8 year old little boy.  No one knows who did this yet, and obviously the US will do whatever they can do to find out who did this attack.

It’s a very sad and horrible thing when innocent people die for no reason.  But we’re living in a world that still isn’t perfectly peaceful.  Not even close.  It’s pretty disgusting and pathetic that there is still war.  It is amazing to me that humans are smart enough to make the Iphone, but not smart enough to figure out how to stop war and religious hate.

I’m very curious what the 232 international audience thinks of this.  Any guess as to who did this?  Why do you have this guess?  What should the American government do when the find who did it?  Should they start a war?  Why or why not?  Why does the US seem to get this kind of attack more than other countries?  Is some of it their own fault in some way?  Could this happen to any country or is their something “special” about the US that makes this type of attack more common?

We all watch different news, we all have a different education, we all speak different native languages and grew up in different cultures.  It’s the perfect topic for this English learning blog.  You can practice your English writing in the comments below, and we can learn from each other about what people from different parts of the world think.

What would you do if you were Obama?  What would you recommend to him?  I’m very very interested in what you guys think.  There are of course no wrong or bad opinions.  I don’t even know what I think yet.  I am just curious to see what you guys (and girls) think about all this.  Any opinions would be awesome!  Let’s chat in the comments below.  Please say where you are from to make it more interesting.  Thanks guys

(BTW, we just made an AWESOME VIP lesson just now.  We’ll have more free ones too, but the VIP room is getting sick!  I can’t believe that was already VIP lesson 198.  We’re almost at lesson 200 in JUST the VIP room alone.  That’s INSANE.  There is so much stuff in there that kicks ass… We’ll have to do something special for #200.  Any ideas???  Please let us know in the comments below)

Ok, so as you know, the 232 brand is expanding (growing AND getting better).  We bought businessenglish232.com (nothing there yet but big plans) and of course the new English learning video site learnenglish232.com that we’ve been working on every single day.

Whether or not you are a VIP member yet, you should check that site out every day; it’s great for helping spoken English and remembering ALL the meanings of words and phrases.

We are literally making a new video lesson every day on LearnEnglish232.com  There will be other stuff there too, but videos will be a key part of that site.  So… You’ll be able to see something new every single day there.  It’s going to grow fast and we hope to see you there and participating in the comments.

We have A LOT of content (lesson) ideas already, but if there is anything that you’d like to see in terms of videos, topics, or whatever, please let us know in the comments on LearnEnglish232 OR in the comments of this blog post.  I’ve been reading and responding to as many as I can on the new site.   I haven’t even been sleeping and am going wild on the coffee!

We’re absolutely going to keep making China232 better and better.  That plan hasn’t changed at all.  It’s better than its ever been, but the point of this blog is to get you guys to ALSO go to learnenglish232.com for daily lessons of a different style.

I will give you a 100% guarantee that the mix of listening to both the full length podcasts on this site, COMBINED with watching all the focused videos on the new site (1 per day), your English will get better almost twice as fast as with the current method.  Both styles are important.  This site gives you long dialogues of common American style speech, the new site will give you DEEP meanings of words, slang, phrasal verbs, etc.  It will help your memory, writing, and speaking.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve started out with a lot of “phrasal verb lessons” on that site.  I’m going to be teaching those, important and useful vocabulary, awesome phrases, super slang, stuff for IELTS, TOEFL, and TOEIC, and whatever else I can think of that will be useful, fun, and interesting for you guys.

Please let us know in the comments what you think of this new plan, AND what you think we should teach?

Do you guys like the idea of 3 sites?  China232.com, LearnEnglish232.com, and BusinessEnglish232.com?  Each of the sites will have a different, unique, AND useful purpose.  Hopefully we can do a good enough job to make you guys a super fan of all 3!  That is our goal, and we know that you will only use it if it’s great stuff, so Add and I are going to do the absolute best we possibly can.

The next few months are going to be wild for China232.com and ESPECIALLY LearnEnglish232.com  Please keep giving your ideas while we make this site because we are still trying to make something that is PERFECT for what you guys really want and need.

Enjoy our Daily English learning Videos  (Bookmark that site and check it every day as a new and awesome habit.  You won’t be disappointed!)

And don’t forget to let us know what you think and what you want to see there!  I’ll respond to your comments!  Can’t wait to hear from you

Add and I have been working like a couple of crazy mad dogs on our new site: www.learnenglish232.com

We’ve shown you a couple of videos, but now we’ve got the site up with new logo etc.   We are going to be putting up new free English learning videos and lessons on that site every day!  So go back and check often.

Please check out this NEW LESSON PAGE design with lesson and let us know what you think.

Do you like the design?  Is it easy to understand?  How is the video?  Will you share it with your friends?  Is the written part of the lesson good?

Imagine thousands of this type of lessons.  That’s what we are planning on doing IN ADDITION to making the china232 VIP section better than ever.  We are just working harder and making better stuff for you guys.  That’s the only difference.  Please check out the new site and leave your comments either here or there.

If you feel like sharing with your friends, students, teachers, or anyone, that would also be a great help to get some more feedback on the site before we start going totally crazy making lessons.

Also, what video topics would you like to see?  We are planning on making thousands on phrasal verbs, business English, slang, daily spoken English, vocabulary, Tests, etc.

Any ideas, shares, feedback, or anything would be a great help.  We’ve tried so hard on this and we really hope you like it!

Here is the NEW LESSON

Looking forward to your feedback and thoughts boys and girls!  You guys are the best

Today I want to talk about how we teach young kids in different cultures, AND how you think we SHOULD be teaching young kids.

I think most countries in the world have realized that history has been unfair to women in very many ways.  In history, it’s usually men who went to school, men who earned the money, men who had the power etc.  Even today, we see that it’s often easier for men to get promotions at work (Not all of the time, but often).

We’ve made a lot of progress.  We now see huge companies, like Yahoo, with female CEO’s.  We see women who are presidents of countries.  Times have really changed a lot in most places throughout the world.

I have some questions for you:

What more needs to be done to help women have more opportunities in the world?  Is it already “fair” or do we still have a lot of work to do in order to make things more fair to women?

SHOULD we be treating men and women in the same ways when they are children?  In your opinion, do you believe that there are naturally some jobs that are better for men and some jobs that are better for women?  Do you think this idea is total BS?  For example, do you think that being a police officer is more of a “man job” and being a nurse is better for women?  Is that crazy?

If a couple gets married and has 2 kids and the mom stays home and takes care of the house and kids while the father “brings home the bacon”  (That means earns the money for the family) is that ok?  Should we respect a woman’s choice to do this?  Is being a “housewife” ok?

What about if the father stayed home and the mom worked?  Should we think that is normal too?  Should people respect a man for staying home with the kids while his wife works?  Is this “manly”?  Is being a “house husband” ok?  Why or why not?

Should we try to forget words like “manly” or “womanly” in our languages?  Are there some types of attitudes and behaviours that are more suitable to men and women?

Should we teach our sons and our daughters the EXACT same things ALL the time?  Should there be any difference in how we teach men and women to behave?   What is the difference between men and women in this world in your opinion?

Please share where you are from and why you think the way you do.  Thanks so much!

By the way, here is a video I just made.  I’d love to hear what you think of this style of video.  If you like it, please subscribe for free to our English Learning Videos  I’m going to be making very many!  There will be awesome stuff for free and even cooler stuff in the VIP section!  Great news for all.  Here is the video on the phrasal verb put down