Hi everyone. It's Jennifer here with a special English lesson. I'd like to share some useful words and phrases
along with some thoughts that you can reflect on and hopefully apply to your English Studies.
In another video, you met my husband and you learned that he is an executive recruiter for a firm in Boston.
He's been in his current position for about seven years,
but he's been recruiting for more like ten years.
We spent the first five years of our marriage in Moscow, Russia and then moved together to the U.S.
I asked my husband to recall those early years in America and talk about how he
felt about his English when he first came to this country.
I've been in the U.S. since 2001.
That makes it 17 years.
Yes, I spoke English when I came. I studied English at a university, but it was my
second language. I majored in French.
It was hard.
I had to
practice quite a lot.
And I would always construct
conversations in my head
around different kinds of situations. One of them
was a job interview, a potential job interview.
I was looking for a job, and I would imagine those conversations in my head...
what kinds of questions I would be asked and
what kind of answers I would give.
So I would... probably before my first real job interview, had probably had 25-30 mock-up interviews in my head before.
One strategy that my husband used as a language learner was to talk aloud to himself or to talk in his head.
He did this to practice his English for a specific
situation, like a job interview.
He mentioned a mock-up interview, which is a situation that's made to seem real for training purposes.
"Mock-up interview" is clear, but I hear "mock interview" more often.
So if you're getting ready for a job interview, you can ask a friend to help you by doing a mock interview.
Your friend can ask questions as the potential employer, and you can practice giving your answers.
My husband is doing very well now, but success hardly ever comes fast and easily.
I'll let him talk about working his way up to his current position.
No, we arrived in Boston right after September 11. The economy was in recession.
It was hard to find a job.
So my first job in the U.S.
was a
grocery clerk at a local grocery store, a
minimum-wage job that would pay me seven dollars fifteen cents an hour and
was extremely boring, but you've got to do what you got to do you got to put the food on the table.
And you just, as they say here, you check your ego at the door and you take any job that will allow you to provide.
Before I landed a full-time job, I had two
temp jobs.
One of them was a typesetter
at a local printing company and the other one was an interpreter at a local hospital.
My first full-time job was with the local
custodial bank and
I was
processing dividends in interest payments. It's called corporate actions, and I used to work the night shift from
4:00 a.m. til 12:00 noon.
I did this for two and a half years.
The difference between a full-time job and a temp job is that a full-time job gives you
so-called benefits, which basically comes down to health insurance and
401k contribution.
My first full-time job was what we call an entry-level job.
This is a kind of a job that anyone would get fresh out of college.
You cannot support your family on the salary that
they would pay you.
It was less than $40,000 a year.
To put things in perspective, at that time we rented a one-bedroom apartment
in Boston and
the price was $1,700 a month
with parking.
"To put things into perspective" is to understand a situation more fully. You no longer have a limited view.
My husband explained how we came to the U.S. at a really bad time to start a job search.
Initially, he could only find a minimum wage job at a grocery store.
That means that his employer paid him the lowest wages possible in the state of Massachusetts.
The sad thing was that I was earning even less at one of my jobs.
I could only find a part-time job as a teacher. So to make ends meet,
I also babysat for
$6 an hour.
"To make ends meet" means to earn just enough to survive.
My husband used another good expression with a similar meaning: to put food on the table.
It basically means that you earn enough to feed yourself and meet your basic needs.
You might not be able to find your dream job right away,
so most of us take what work we can get when we simply need to make ends meet and put food on the table.
My husband also had two jobs for a while. He worked the night shift.
Do you remember the hours he worked?
It was 4:00 a.m. till 12:00 noon.
Would you be willing to work the night shift?
I would hate it. I prefer the day shift. I need to work in the daytime.
I prefer regular business hours or what some call normal business hours.
That's usually 9:00 to 5:00.
There are different types of jobs one can get. A temp job is a temporary position.
A full-time position has a salary and it comes with benefits like health insurance and a retirement savings plan.
My husband explained the low salary of an entry-level job. It can be less than
$40,000 a year.
If you have a family or you're planning on having a family, it can be very difficult to put food on the table earning that much,
especially in an expensive city like Boston.
I'll let him explain how he eventually moved out of that entry-level position and began to earn more.
I did recruiting in Russia and I liked it. I did it for two to two and a half years.
So after working for for a couple years at a local bank,
I came to the conclusion that that was not a
long-term career for me. I did not like it at all.
I wanted something that
would give me a
better opportunity to make more money, and I went into a hundred percent commission business.
You basically eat what you kill.
No salary.
Pure Commission. If you close a deal, your company gets paid. You get a percentage of that.
It was very scary when my husband moved to a job that was 100 percent commission based.
There was no guarantee of a salary.
When you work on commission, you have to make a sale in order to get paid.
At the time, our first child was born, so there was a lot of pressure on my husband to succeed.
Thankfully, he became good at the job. He closed deals and his compensation did more than put food on the table.
I asked him to talk about the challenges of being in a new line of work.
The initial challenge was that
it was a completely different line of work from what I was accustomed to at a bank. It required a lot of cold calling.
Picking up a phone and calling total strangers and
it was difficult
psychologically because you would deal with great deal of rejection.
But also my English had to be
taken to the next level.
I was...uh
I needed to convince people
to look into the opportunities that I was presenting them with.
I needed to position myself as an expert on a matter. I needed to position myself
as an authority and
it it would it would require a lot of convincing.
Initially, I would write scripts and I would read off of those scripts, but eventually as time went on.
It became second nature.
Note these expressions. Cold calling is making phone calls to strangers in order to make a sales pitch.
So you're trying to sell a product or a service.
If you take something to the next level, then you raise the standard. You try to improve it.
My husband had to take his English to the next level.
If you position yourself as something such as an expert or an authority, then you present yourself a certain way.
You know, it's not just the language that a foreigner has to get used to. It's also the work culture.
My husband began his professional career in Moscow, Russia, which had a different work environment.
The biggest difference between a Russian and American company is the number of performance reviews done by
American companies.
The two biggest things that
are really appreciated when you work for an American company are perseverance and
in a positive attitude,
especially in sales.
There are down days. There are up days. As they say, the highs are high; the lows are low.
And sometimes those deals just do not go through and
it hurts. It hurts to the point that you literally want to cry. You want to go
back to your home.
But what you do is maybe you take a walk on the street, come back and get back, get back into cold calling...
And...
as they say, it's a numbers game. The more phone calls you place, the better chance that you will land a deal.
In almost any line of work, there are ups and downs. We can also talk about highs and lows. We've all gone through them.
Hopefully, my husband's story will remind you that it's okay to feel bad on those down days.
But as he said, the key is perseverance.
Don't give up and keep trying. Hold on to a positive attitude.
Tip number one: embrace the culture.
In everyday life, there are a lot of
cultural references
that would not make sense to you unless you know the origins of
certain expressions.
Tip number two is try to spend as much time as you can with native speakers.
Yeah, tip number three is
never stop learning. I've been here for 17 years. I don't know the word --
I look it up in a dictionary. I find myself in a situation
in which I don't know what to say...sometimes it happens.
Later on
I would replay that very same situation in my head and I would think, "Okay. What would I say?" and
I would..
I would come up with the words
that would articulate my thoughts. So next time I'm in a very similar situation, I would know what to say.
I watch a lot of
YouTube videos.
I read a lot of news and I try to apply all those learnings in my everyday
interaction with my colleagues, with my clients, with my candidates.
Never stop learning.
So you've heard my husband speak at length. He doesn't rush and he doesn't fear mistakes in English.
I hope that's a useful model for you.
Don't feel pressured to speak as fast as possible in English. That will probably lead to more mistakes and less accurate pronunciation.
The goal is to speak clearly and be understood.
I'm going to end here.
Hopefully. now you have some new words and expressions to put into use. If you'd like to choose one or two of those words or
expressions and create your own examples, share them in the comments. I'll offer corrections as time allows.
Well, that's all for now. Please remember to like this video and subscribe. As always, thanks for watching and happy studies!
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