How to remember people’s names:
1. This 2-minute video by Howcast gives you 6 name-remembering strategies:
1. Calm yourself before you get introduced.
2. Make good eye contact with the person as they tell you their name.
3. Repeat their name as soon as you hear it.
4. Tell your brain to remember the name — apparently it listens!
5. Picture the person’s name written on their forehead.
6. Think of a word association to help you recall the name.
2. Ron White, champion name-rememberer, gives you four strategies in just 2 minutes:
1. Get yourself ready to receive the name.
2. Note some distinctive feature of the person’s face e.g. bushy eyebrows.
3. Pre-learn picture associations to go with all the common names e.g. Brian = brain; Ron = runner.
4. Connect the person’s name-picture to their distinctive facial feature e.g. Brian has lots of brains growing out of his bushy eyebrows!
How to tell a joke:
This 2-minute video by Howcast gives some pointers on how to tell a good joke:
1. Watch actors and comedians tell jokes for tips on timing and delivery.
2. Practise telling jokes to a friend or into a tape recorder.
3. Memorise your jokes.
4. Match your audience to your joke.
5. Tell your joke confidently and straight — without explanatory comments or laughter.
6. Act it out as you tell it if that improves it.
Watch Buddy Hackett show you how to do it!
How to listen well
This 4-minute video is a good starter video on the skill of listening.
Here is some very good listening practice: 11 short stories to train your attending skills.
It’s very hard to fully attend to what we’re hearing for more than a couple of minutes. We think we’re listening, but our mind wanders off of its own accord. We need to train it to focus.
Listening with our full attention is a type of mindfulness where we focus our thoughts only on what the other person is saying (and on the meaning and the feelings behind the words).
Andrew Ikeda prepared these 11 videos as listening exercises for his English-as-a-second-language students. But when you listen to the first couple of videos, you’ll discover how hard it is to answer all five questions correctly – even though English is probably your first language!
See how you go.
If you find the first few listening exercises challenging, then listen to all 11 videos, practising to concentrate really, really hard.
These exercises give you perfect practice for listening hard in real-life conversations.
(By the way, the answers aren’t given on Andrew’s website, as stated. To find out the answers you’re not sure of, go back and listen to the story again.)
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