Thank you very much for that brilliant take of all the vowel sounds. Human beings have this inner urge to categorize everything they see or hear. So, your video addresses that desire. However, being with you for so long has taught me to get "the sounds as they fly", so to speak, without bothering too much about the whole system. But that Aristotelian approach helps to put things in perspective.

DDM 1014. Is it smart to say you're smart?

DDM 1012

If you want to be able to use a phrase or word in a free conversation, you have to own that target vocab. To be aware of it is not enough. So, how to do it? Well, listen to different native speakers using a given vocabulary item in different situations. Look for pronunciation, different meanings, collocations, some synonyms and antonyms, even origins, images, everything that you find working for you. The goal is to remove any doubts you might have about a studied item and gain certainty. You go item by item. And this way you get fluent. They call it Naturally Varied Review. Let me give you an example. In the last DDM we had the word "retch". I've already known its synonyms "vomit" and "throw up", but from the context I guessed that retch is kind of medical world. Then I look at the glossary that CS gives and the examples. I've created the image already. then I add a collocations "dry retch", "violent reching", "sound of retching", "uncontrollable reching". From that I can see that sometimes reching means you struggle to retch but you really can't bring up anything. And when you hear "gagging and retching" you kind of know what it means. All considered, I try to pick up English the way native children do, without dictionary, translations, just studying situations in which the thing occurrs. Speaking does not necessarily makes you fluent, certainty does.

DDM 1011