Hi, everybody! I am Georgiana, your English teacher and founder of SpeakEnglishPodcast.com. My mission is to help you speak English fluently.

In this episode:

- I'm going to talk briefly about how to activate your English vocabulary.

- Next, I will comment on the appearance of mysterious islands. Sometimes, on a given day, certain people have seen some structures on the horizon that have caused an element of surprise. What could it be?

- Finally, we will practice fluency with a short mini-story of questions and answers—the best exercise to speak without translating mentally.

First of all, I want to thank all of you who are writing to me. I read all the emails personally, and I also answer them myself.

One question I sometimes get is this:

How can I activate my English vocabulary?

I've covered this topic before, but I think it's worth remembering. Most of the time, students understand much more than they can talk. That is, they have a lot of passive vocabulary, but no active vocabulary ready to be used in a conversation.

An easy way to improve, but sometimes not too obvious, is to listen to the same audio several times. This is one of the techniques I use in my premium courses, although you can also use this podcast.

Let’s say you have short audio with some vocabulary and expressions you want to activate. If you listen to it once, even if you understand it, you will forget most things, but if you listen, for example, once a day for a week, you will surely activate an essential part of the vocabulary.

Another way to increase the number of repetitions of words is to listen to a specific topic. This way, you are much more likely to hear many times the vocabulary that is characteristic of the topic.

Finally, you can listen to the same author, even if they speak about different subjects.

A useful resource is this podcast.

Ok. Let’s continue with something a bit different.

I am going to comment briefly on something that I found very interesting.

Imagine the following situation: In the morning you decide to get up early and go to the beach for a walk along the shore. Half asleep, you look up at the horizon and notice something strange. You try to focus a little more and you see a kind of island. "That island wasn't there before," you think.

What I've just told you is something that has surely happened to many people.

Now I am going to explain to you what has happened here, but... What do you think it is? Is it possible that it is really a new island emerging from the depths of the earth? Is it an invasion of aliens?

I know my students are very smart, and I think they already know what it is. It's an optical effect. This effect is called Fata Morgana. It comes from Italian because this phenomenon can be observed in Sicily, Italy.

This optical effect is produced when hot air and cold air near the surface act as a refracting lens. If there is a certain object on the horizon it can be seen elongated and elevated, producing strange and mysterious shapes. This usually happens in the morning, after a cold night.

There are people who do not know what it is and even get scared. Some think it is a big structure, like a city, floating on the horizon.

If you are curious, you can search the internet for the expression "Fata Morgana".

There are many very curious photos.

By the way, you can get the transcript of this episode and much more on my website:

SpeakEnglishPodcast.com

Now, let’s practice.