English with PORO

Transcript: Part 1 - How Professional Writers Take Notes on Books

00:00
All right, so I thought, Jesse, we should do a habit tune up segment we've been doing these off and on I think people have been enjoying them. These are segments where I just take a piece of advice or a strategy from my productivity canon things I've written about in my books or in my newsletter over the years and just get into it a little bit, tune up or refresh people's understanding of that habit.

00:25
So in today's habit tune up, I want to talk about the corner marking method for taking Book Notes. So the general topic here is taking notes on the books you read. But before we get into the specifics of what I do, we got to make it clear that there are two general schools of thought among those who think about reading two different schools of thought about the role note taking should play when you are reading books. Now, these are my names, but I think most people would agree with these general categories.

00:58
The first is what I call the zettelkasten school of thought. So inspired by the zettelkasten. Note Taking system, this school of thought says you should always take notes on books you read, regardless of why you're reading them or what you're reading them for. You should take notes, you should capture that information into some sort of smart system. So that it can be fuel for this external brain.

01:23
That is cybernetically augmenting your cogitation. So if you're a big zettelkasten, for example, adherent you would be putting notes on in Rome, or an obsidian. Or what's the other one notion, and they would be connected with semantic links to other notes and forming this web of knowledge that you can later pull from. There's all sorts of variations of this general philosophy.

01:53
Ryan Holliday, for example, copies, quotes from books on the index cards, and he categorizes them in these big boxes. And you can then go back later and find index cards by boxes to get the quotes and stories he needs for his book. So it's this whole notion of this is fuel for your external brain, get the information into some system where it can form connections, be retrievable later, but also help help you generate new ideas. That's the zettelkasten school of thought.

02:21
The other school of thought on book Note taking is what I call the pragmatic school, which says only take notes on a book, if you have a very specific purpose for which you're using that book, those notes should be serving that purpose. So for example, if you think this book will be relevant for a book chapter you are currently writing, then you would take notes on that book for use in that specific book chapter.

02:45
On the other hand, if you're just reading a book, because it's interesting, then there's no notes to be taken just, it's better to focus on reading as much as you can, and just enjoying bathing in knowledge. That's the pragmatic method. It's very focused. I am a believer in the pragmatic method. I'm not saying it's best, I'm just saying, This is what I happen to do. So let me make this concrete for you.

03:06
As we talked about earlier in the show, working on a new book, a book about slow productivity. I was just working on the opening to a chapter on the principle of doing fewer things. And I wanted to tell the story of Jane Austen and Andrew Wiles. Andrew Wiles is the Princeton professor who solved Fermat's Last Theorem, back in the early 1990s. And for various reasons, their stories interleave what I vaguely remembered of them as their stories interleave in interesting ways.

03:41
And they do a good job of exemplifying the power of actually reducing the number of things on your plate as compared to other people in your same circumstance. Right. So that was a general idea. So I got a biography of Jane Austen, Claire Tomlins biography, which is excellent, by the way. And I got a book on Fermat's Last Theorem, Simon sings book, Fermat's Enigma, which tells the whole story of Andrew Wiles, it also tells the whole story of Fermat, and etc.

04:05
But it's the most comprehensive story of Andrew Wiles and his tackling of the proof. I bought those books to write these chapters, and one of them I already own, but the other one I bought. And I went through, and I took notes on those books, specifically aimed at what I knew I was going to read. Then a couple days later, I went through those notes, and I used it to actually help my reading.

04:25
So that's an example of pragmatic note taking. How do I take those notes in this circumstance? Well, this is where I use the before mentioned corner marking method, which is a method for taking notes that focuses on minimizing friction as quickly as possible. How can you get the information you need at the fastest possible speed? Because that is the mindset I'm often in when I'm book writing, because there's a lot of books I need to get through.

04:52
So I thought what I would do here is load up our magic Telestrator. So again, if you're listening, you can find this video at Cal was at youtube.com/count Import Media. So Jessie is loaded up here, just a sample page from a book. This is a page from our friend Greg McEwan book, effortless. And I'm just going to use the marketing tools to actually show you what my marks look like.

05:17
Alright, so over here on the right, we see a sample page. If there's something in this page that I think is relevant, I put a slash in the corner. So imagine that slash registry was in the corner of the page, why in the corner, because when you're flipping through the book, you can quickly identify which pages have the slashes, it's right there in the upper right corner or the upper left corner.

05:36
So you can very quickly identify where you have information. Right, and then what I do on the actual page is very simple. When I find something that's relevant, I'll do one of two things. I'll either bracket. So I'll bracket off a paragraph, we'll try to. So for those who are watching online, because we struggle with the pin, so again, I'm just bracketing on the outside a paragraph that I think is relevant.

06:06
I'm not writing commentary about it, I'm not writing down why I think it's important. I'm not putting a lot of notes down, I trust my brain. And when it sees that bracketed paragraphs later, it'll know why. The other thing I'll do is underline. So like, here, I'm underlining if there's like a name or something that seems important, or a sentence, I particularly like or it's a sentence in the middle of a paragraph,

06:26
I don't want to bracket a whole line once get the sentence, I'll underline it. That's really about it. Now, there's two other exceptional things I will do with corner marking. Since I know why I'm taking notes. I know why I'm taking the notes, if there is a passage that I think is just a home run perfect type of thing I'm looking for, it's not background, on example, but like, this is what I'm looking for. I'll put a star. And for those watching at home will see that I drew a perfectly symmetrical star there and are impressed by my graphic design skills. And then I'll often then star the corner.

AISSIE ENGLISH 1 - WARTS AND ALL

Detailed Script
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7pvNMxf3xxqY7UTtQmUHXv...

Good Are you more than welcome to Ozzie English I am your host Pete. And my objective here is to teach you guys the English spoken down under. So whether you want to sound like a fading camozzi or you just want to understand what the flippin hell were on about when we're having a yarn, you've come to the right place. So sit back, grab a cuppa and enjoy Ozzy English. Let's go

You're more welcome to this episode of Ozzy English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn. You guessed it, Australian English. So, guys, I hope you've been having a good week. I've been recovering almost back to 100% after being a little under the weather, being a little sick, having a sore throat or cough losing my voice a little bit and having a croaky voice. But yeah, we're we're back at it. I've just been taking it easy. For the last, I don't know, a week or so. Doing a bit of work here and there. But also trying to give myself a bit of a break, have a rest, everything like that much to the envy of my wife. She is away at work every day during the week. And she's always like, man, all you do is just you know, sit around at home enjoying your life. Like, yeah, a little bit. Anyway, guys, I hope you've all been having a great week, I've heard that the COVID is sort of back with a bit of a vengeance in Australia. So if you're down under if you're in Australia, I hope you're avoiding COVID I hope you're up to date with your vaccines. And yeah, I just I hope you are healthy, well wise, happy.

And looking forward to Christmas. It's already the 22nd of November where I'm recording this episode. So it time flies Time flies. Alright guys, before we get into today's episode, don't forget if you want access to the transcripts for these episodes, be sure to sign up for the premium podcast at Ozzie english.com.au forward slash podcast, you will get access to the transcripts obviously, the bonus episodes, you'll get the premium podcast player so that you can read and listen at the same time whether on your phone, tablet, or computer, it is a great resource for improving your Australian English. So go check that out Ozzy english.com.au forward slash podcast. Now let's get into the question of the day the q&a question and answer. So this one comes from Sam. And Sam wants to know what is the meaning of that though, when you put it at the ends of sentences in informal English. So I'm trying to think of a sort of good example off the top of my head. It's Thursday, and I should be at school. I wanted to go to the beach though. I wanted to go to the beach, though. It's Thursday, and I should be at school I wanted to go to the beach. Though, though. You could also say this, as it's Thursday, and I should be at school though. I wanted to go to the beach.

So what does though mean here, here the word though is used as a conjunction, right? It's similar to however, or but and we introduce something opposed to something else and we qualify it. And we use vo in order to do that. So the example here where I say it's Thursday, and I should be at school, and I'm connecting it to the phrase, I wanted to go to the beach, right. So these are two things that are kind of opposed to one another, going to school and going to the beach or wanting to go to the beach. We can use it though, to show that they are opposed to one another right? It's Thursday, and I should be at school. Otherwise I wouldn't be at school. I'm normally at school on Thursdays. However, I wanted to go to the beach, though. I wanted to go to the beach. So we can use it. If we have say two clauses like that, that we want to put into the same sentence. So they're just separated with a comma. It's Thursday, and I should be at school though. I wanted to go to the beach.

That's a single sentence, but it's two clauses separated by a comma after the word school. It's Thursday and I should be at school comma, though I wanted to go to the beach. Otherwise, we can use two separate sentences and we can put though at the end of the second sentence or however at the end of the second sentence as well. Right? These two are synonyms and they can do the same thing. It's Thursday and I should be at school. I wanted to go to the beach though. It's Thursday and I should be at school. I wanted to go to the beach however, however, however, is used a little more formally compared to though if that makes sense. It's so funny though I could say yeah, however is used a little more formally though. Okay, anyway, hopefully you understand that Sam? Definitely start using though in your informal English. All right, smack the bird give it a punch. Give it a Kick, make the kookaburra cry out. And let's get into today's joke

Alright, so today's joke isn't a sort of question and answer joke. It's more of a few sentences. So bear with me. Okay, hopefully you enjoyed this, I noticed a lump on my finger was getting bigger. So I went to the doctor to get it looked at. He told me, it was a simple watch. And he could remove it then in there, no worries. I decided not to though, as it was starting to grow on me. They get it. And I'm glad that I got to use the word vo in that joke, you get it, it's starting to grow on me. That was the joke there. So the phrase to grow on someone, a wallet, right? A wallet is that little kind of bump, mole shaped thing that can grow on your body, usually on your hands. And it's caused by a virus so you can get them burnt off, you go to the doctor, they can use creams, or they can use things like liquid nitrogen to freeze it and it drops off. That's a wart and warts grow on you. Right? They grow on your body on the surface of your skin. They grow on you.

But we can use the phrase to grow on someone as a figurative way to mean that that person is beginning to like that thing, right? So if someone is something grows on you, you like him her it more and more than you did at first. I wasn't sure about this album when I bought it. But after a few lessons, it's really starting to grow on me, you know, or maybe you didn't like the Aussie English podcast when you first started listening to to the podcast, but after a few episodes, it started to grow on you. Or I could say it started to grow on you after a few episodes, though. So there you go. Hopefully you understand that joke. I'll do it one more time, I noticed a lump on my finger was getting bigger. So I went to the doctor to get it looked at. He told me it was a simple board. And he could remove it then in there. No worries. I decided not to though, as it was starting to grow on me. All right, so let's get into the expression of the day warts and all, warts and all. So we'll go through and break down the words in the expression first, talk a little bit about where it comes from how to use it in some examples, we'll go through a pronunciation exercise. And then a little listening comprehension exercise at the end, okay, so a wart, we've covered this. It's a small, hard, benign growth on the skin caused by a virus. In Western culture. When we have like witches in TV shows or books, you know, literature, they typically have warts on their faces, they might have a big wart on their nose. And the point is to you know, make that which really ugly, they have a wart on their nose.

And we use the word end to connect words of the same part of speech, right clauses, sentences, everything like that. So we use, we use and to join multiple things together. This is my mom and my dad, all all is used to refer to the whole quantity or extent of a particular group or thing. These are all of my friends. Today, I'm gonna play all of my guitars. So what's an all the meaning of this expression? It may not be too obvious warts and all. This means including features or qualities that are not appealing or attractive, right? So if we talk about something, having, you know, its warts and all or showing its warts and all it means that you're seeing all of the features and qualities of that thing, whether they are appealing or attractive or not. Okay, so what's in all means, including attributes that are not attractive, including all failings and shortcomings. The origin of the idiom is often attributed to Oliver Cromwell, who was Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 1600s. It is said that when it came time for the artists of Peter Lelli, to paint his portrait, Cromwell told him to render his likeness, warts and all. So I guess the whole point there is to show what Cromwell looked like, exactly as he appeared whether you got the appealing and attractive sides of him or not.

So yeah, that was what the grammars.com had to say about the origin of the expression warts and all so pretty cool. Pretty cool. Let's go through three examples of how I would use the expression warts and all in day to day life. All right, example number one. My wife's learning to drive at the moment and we're thinking about buying a second car so that each of us have a car. It can be a bit of a you know, hit and miss kind of adventure trying to find a good deal on a car. Sometimes you can find really good cars, sometimes you can find really bad ones. Sometimes the car is nice but has too many kilometers on it or there's some obvious issues that are going to cost a lot of money to fix, but sometimes you end up finding a really good deal. So there are a lot of dodgy car salesmen out there, though, you have to kind of be careful when inspecting cars, definitely make sure you get to see everything. When looking at these cars, you want to see everything warts and all, before handing over your hard earned cash, right? You don't want to buy the car with no idea about what the problems are. You want to see everything warts and all show me all the problems as well as all the appealing features, everything that's good about the car, but also show me what's bad about it so that I'm not going to get a sudden surprise after I leave. Alright, example number two. So when you first start dating someone, usually everything is amazing, right? It's all kittens, flowers, rainbows, as you fall in love with this person that you're getting to know and starting a relationship with.

However, over time, over the months and years that follow, if you stay together, you start to see the less than desirable features of that person, right, their true colors can come out, you get to see all the things that aren't necessarily attractive or desirable. There's always going to be a few things that end up you know, appearing later on that you're kind of like i If I'd known about that earlier, who knows. So you just have to kind of accept the person for who they are, though. warts and all. So before deciding to stick it out for the rest of your life. Hopefully, you get to see all the sides of the other person that you're in a relationship with everything warts and all, all the good, all the bad or the ugly. You want to get to know them warts and all. And then you can decide, You know what, screw this, I'm not marrying this person. Alright, example number three, maybe you're looking for a new house, right? You're wanting to buy your own place or rent your own place for you and your family. This was the position that we were in a few years ago when we were trying to buy the house that we're currently in. So we looked at a heap of different houses in the area that we were interested in living in and we eventually found this one the one that we really wanted though, the one that we wanted to end up buying we liked it a lot but it was a little too expensive.

So the one that we did purchase was one that came at a really good price right it did have a few issues but we were comfortable once we saw the warts and all right once we saw all the undesirable unappealing sides of this house because of the price because of location everything like that we decided you know what, it's a bit of a steal it's a good deal so we're gonna get it even though we've seen warts and all everything about this house and there are a few features we didn't necessarily find ideal so hopefully now guys you understand the expression warts and all this means including features or qualities that aren't appealing or attractive, right warts and all so as usual let's get into a little pronunciation exercise guys this is where I'm going to read out some words and phrases and you can work on your Australian accent by listening and repeating after me okay so you're ready to go let's do it

Transcript: How To Speak Fluently In English - Part 2

00:00
This will help you get thinking more like a native speaker about vocabulary because what we want to do is get you focusing on something rather than trying to you know, we look at one way a brick could be used and then we go to some other object. All right.

00:14
So aarC just popping in, look at that. Keep up the good work. Here we go. So yeah, everyone take your take your time and and give me just any kind of use, you can put it right in the chat, how could you use a break? All right, just think try to try to be a little bit of creative you can think about this as a creativity. Let's say you can build something, okay.

00:39
So even if we have only one brick, I mean, obviously, if we had many bricks, we could probably build a wall. But yeah, we could build something, we can make something that's true, it could be the like the first piece of a wall, we could throw it for sure. You could use it as a weapon, if you wanted to throw it as something.

00:59
Yeah, it could be a bridge. Yeah, maybe like even a bridge, a small bridge for a mouse or something like that. So if we put, I don't know something under here, and then we have our brick like that it could be a little bridge over some, some water, something like that. So we can probably think of, I don't know, 3040 different uses as a supporter shirt.

01:20
So you could put something on top of it, you could sit on it. That's right, you could use it as a chair very good. So we could also again, we could put things on top of it or we could put the brick on other things like using it as a paperweight a paperweight. So things maybe if it's a windy day, we put the brick on paper to stop it from blowing away.

01:41
I don't know, maybe we throw it in some water to make a loud splash just to hear the sound of that. Alright, I don't want to spend too much time in the video going over all the different ways you could use a brick. But the point is, if you think a little bit about it, you spend just a little bit of time thinking you can probably think of some pretty creative uses for brick.

02:04
Okay. And then we also have maybe there we could have different kinds of bricks, you could have like a Lego brick where you're, you know, you got your little pieces in there, you're connecting it to something, or it could be maybe made out of plastic or something a different kind of brick, or it could be a different color.

02:20
Maybe you just use it as a decoration or something. Alright, so why am I bringing up this example? The point of this is really just to show you the difference between what learners are doing so what teachers are usually doing in classes, and what natives are doing. Alright, so I was walking, walking my older daughter ARIA to school today.

02:42
And while we were walking, she said, Dad, what does harsh mean, harsh? The word harsh. Alright, let's see. Do you think pay attention at native English mouth can help you with pronunciation? Yes, if you obviously if you're if you're watching what people do, but listening is more important. And it's better to listen to, like 10 Different people speaking than to try to watch one person's mouth, if that makes sense.

03:12
So ARIA, my older daughter asked, What does Harsch mean? And I said, Oh, where did you hear that? And she's Oh, I was watching a show, boss, baby. Maybe you've heard of this show, Boss Baby. So there are actually a lot of complicated words and expressions. It's really a show for adults, but because it's a cartoon kids like to watch it. But she's learning lots of interesting vocabulary. And so one of the words that she learned was harsh.

03:42
So she's asked what's harsh mean? And so I said, Okay, where did you hear that you're watching Boss Baby, what's happening in the scene or in the show when you hear something, or someone use the word harsh. So I think like one character, and these are no babies or whatever. I didn't, I didn't see the show. But just listening to her talk about it. So one character is kind of like yelling at yelling at this other character.

04:11
Maybe we won't, we'll give them like an angry face. And the other character says like Don't be be so harsh. So this is one example of this. So don't be so harsh. So what's happening here is okay, if we imagine the scene, we can think about one character as being angry at another character. And they're saying some some harsh words. some harsh words to the other character. And you can start to understand what harsh means are kind of one one example of what harsh means.

04:48
But after she she kind of understood this, it's like okay, it's maybe kind of something maybe a little bit mean or something difficult, or something hard, hard, too hard to deal with something hard to accept something that's harsh like that. But I didn't stop here. As we're walking to school, I start giving her more examples of harsh. And so you might have, we'll just put some more examples up here. I'll just leave this. So we might have some harsh some harsh weather.

05:24
Now if you think about it, okay, we understand this meaning of harsh then, if we have harsh weather, do you think that's like good pleasant weather? Or maybe not good, pleasant weather? And a child can imagine? Oh, wow, it looks like there will be some harsh harsh weather today, there's a snow storm and lots of wind. So that's what we mean by harsh weather, harsh weather. All right, so you might have a harsh store.

05:51
Or we did have a harsh season. Again, we're still talking about similar kinds of things here. But again, the point is that we don't stop with just one example of something, we really want to make sure that you can understand that vocabulary very well. So when I'm teaching my own kids, we spend time with the vocabulary. Yeah, so bad weather, again, harsh weather, the same kind of thing.

06:14
And you understand it from the situation from the context, rather than trying to get a definition or a translation of the word. So this is why I asked my daughter, like, when did you hear that? What situation what's happening to those characters when they see that because I want her to be thinking about that.

06:32
When she's learning new things. Again, it's going to be much easier for her understand new vocabulary this way. So we got harsh weather, harsh storm, harsh conditions. All these things, they mean something that's difficult, or it's going to be bad. And again, we already have the example of harsh words, someone might use some harsh language, maybe they're cursing at someone, they're angry at someone.

Transcript: How To Speak Fluently In English - Part 1

00:00
I think we're actually live this time. I'm drew badger, the founder of English anyone.com. And welcome to another live video here on YouTube. And we'll see if we get this work in, should be coming through, clearly. All right, and making sure we're okay.

00:18
So I'll give people a moment to come in, we should be live and working right now. But the reason I wanted to make this video is because I get really one question. Actually, I get a lot of questions. But I get one particular question over and over and over again, from students. And this is how can I actually speak fluently about many different kinds of things will huddle?

00:41
So a lot of people, again, they can understand a lot of English, but they have trouble expressing themselves. And especially if the topic is new or unfamiliar or something, then they have trouble being able to speak. So I wanted to talk about this because in a video I did a couple of I think What was that last week I did on Instagram, I'd spoke with a few learners.

01:13
And one of them in particular was talking about how she's reading lots of books and taking time to improve her English. But she doesn't feel like she's actually becoming more fluent. And so fluency, again, just to make this very clear, for people, this is how well you can communicate.

01:30
It's not how much you know. And we know this because often little children, you know, four or five, six year old kids, native English speaking kids can communicate better than many adult English learners. And so the goal is not to just try to learn more and more and spend more time learning, what you really should be doing is actually focusing on vocabulary, because this is how people get fluent. It's how you got fluent in your native language.

01:56
It's how you develop mastery in anything. So I had a couple of notes, actually, there are quite a few things I want to talk about. Alright, so we got let's see here, hopefully muted issue. Hopefully, the hopefully the volume is loud enough to let's see, welcome from Germany. Nice to see everybody. I want to be quick go through a couple of different examples about this just to make the point about how you can actually speak fluently about almost anything.

02:30
But also, just to let you know, this is not like an instantaneous process. But it really actually does happen quite quickly if you start doing the right thing. So that's what we'll talk about in this video. So I wanted to talk about this. Again, I mentioned the learner at the beginning. But also just because I really want to show how natives are learning and remind you about how you learn your native language. So I had my actually before I do that, let me give you a quick a quick example of something just to kind of contrast these two ways of learning.

03:05
So the typical, we'll just call this the the ESL approach. So this is English as a second language. And then we have the EFL approach over here, which is learning English as a first language. And what most people do is they spend a lot of time trying to learn as much vocabulary as possible. So imagine each one of these is a new phrase.

03:27
So if you spend today, trying to learn 10 new phrases, or 10 new words, or whatever the EFL approach, really, you're trying to focus on one thing and learn it very deeply. Okay, this is basically the simplest contrast between these things. So children, they will often be learning something like a child will watch the same movie, you know, 100 times.

03:51
So they're, they're just naturally getting a lots and lots of review. While most English learners are trying to just and again, this, it's not really the fault of learners, part of it is your brain, just trying to get you to learn new things. And part of it is teachers that are really not spending enough time focusing on things. And so they will learn something new, and they will learn another new thing.

04:14
And then they will forget other things that that they thought they knew. So before I talk about exactly what you should be doing and give you some examples of this, I thought it would be interesting to just use a brick example to get you all thinking about something very simple, like a brick.

04:35
So just imagine I have a brick right here. I want you to write down in the comments right now just think of how many different ways you can use a brick. All right, so very simple object. You could do the same thing with a marker or you know, in a race or something like that. But how many different things could you do with a break? All right.