Business Terms: Roaming charges fall in EU

We face many challenges in the course of business meetings and negotiations. We are unsure many times if we use the proper structure or phrase that can express our thoughts. The best way to eliminate this uncertainty is to learn from the natives. In Business Terms section you can listen to short talks, interviews etc. and by completing the tasks you can practice the most relevant terms appearing in the video.

Today let’s see a BBC interview about mobile roaming charges. Click here to see the video.

After watching the video, try to complete these sentences. (Probably you have to see the video more times to do this task, but don’t give it up.)

1. Mobile companies have a reduction by around … per cent in the … prices.
2. There are reductions in …
3. This has been going on since …
4. This only covers …
5. You may actually face …
6. The companies have been quite vocal against …
7. They lost an appeal before …

WALK in English

Get A Job: Typical job interview questions

Today we start a new series entitled Get A Job. It is going to provide you with useful information about how to prepare for a job interview.

Now read about typical questions on a job interview you must prepare for.

Most of the questions sound quite embarrassing. That’s why you have to deal with them and make an effort to find out the good answers in advance.

What are good answers like? The key is to be honest and self-reflective. No one is interested in the millionth slightly narcissist and cheesy answer. Real self-confidence can’t be imitated by nicely put words. Show who you are, that’s much more interesting.

So, here are the questions to prepare for:

Tell us about yourself.

What do you know about us?

Why are you interested in working here?

Why should we hire you?

Why did you leave or are planning to leave your last job? 

Give us an example of where you have succeeded at…

Give us an example of where you have failed at …

WALK in English

A drop in the ocean: New company, new life

Just imagine that you have the chance to work with and be one of the people who solve technical challenges on a daily basis. They build something day by day that has never been done before. They are excited, passionate and capable of working creatively on technical hurdles. Knowledge-sharing is not only a slogan there, but a part of their daily routine. 

Just follow the link and see the video.

Now imagine you can go there. AppNexus is looking to hire experienced programmers, engineers and developers to work full time in New York City and Paris.  Follow this link.
If you are interested in any open positions at the company, please contact Tommi Hurme directly and indicate which job you are interested in applying for. For US-based positions they will sponsor a H-1 visa. 

If you feel fear and worry about your level of English and this is the reason (or pretext) for not applying, I must say: forget it. You have the motivation, you want to change the way your life unfolds, we can do it together. Come to Walk English Coaching and you're going to be ready to go in 1,5 months. English is not a purpose, it's a tool. And you can acquire it. 


WALK further.

Why do we need feedback?

Feedback accelerates learning and is essential for controlling anything. Only by relying on them we can reach our purposes. That’s the main message of the article published on BBC website in February 2013. Here you can read the shortened version of it.

 Cybernetics is the name given to the study of feedback, and systems that use feedback, in all their forms. The term comes from the Greek word for "to steer", and inspiration for some of the early work on cybernetics sprang from automatic guiding systems developed during World War II for guns or radar antennae. Around the middle of the twentieth century cybernetics became an intellectual movement across many different disciplines.  

A key message of cybernetics is that you can't control something unless you have feedback – and that means measurement of the outcomes.  

The flip side of this dictum is the promise that with feedback, you can control anything. The human brain seems to be the arch embodiment of this cybernetic principle. With the right feedback, individuals have been known to control things as unlikely as their own heart rate, or learn to shrink and expand their pupils at will. It even seems possible to control the firing of individual brain cells.  

But enhanced feedback methods can accelerate learning about more mundane behaviours. For example, if you are learning to take basketball shots, augmented feedback in the form of "You were 3 inches off to the left" can help you learn faster and reach a higher skill level quicker.  

Thanks to feedback we develop more complex responses to the environment. Feedback allows animals like us to follow a purpose. 

Think of your everyday experiments. Let’s take the time optimisation in the morning as an example: What time do I have to get up the latest if I want to reach the bus that takes me to the gym for opening? After the first rough estimation, let’s say, I decide to get up 80 minutes earlier than the gym opens. What factors can I monitor in order to evaluate my decision? First of all I have to check if I manage to catch the bus after the morning preparations. If I can, I have to measure the time I spend with waiting and try to reduce it to minimal but at the same time I have to pay attention to the risk coming from early bus arrivals. So I have to note down the changes of the following:

- time of leaving the flat
- successfully reaching the bus (yes/no)
- time spent with waiting for the bus

(I assume that the speed of morning preparation and the time I spend on walking to the bus station is constant. However, these assumptions require further consideration.)

The answers in my notebook are the feedback that will help me find the optimal time to leave.

Later I’ll report my results.

WALK in English

A drop in the ocean: Another Aspect of Love

I think I’ve already mentioned TED.com where good and even better thinkers share their ideas. One of my personal favourites is Margaret Heffernan’s speech in which she is speaking about conflicts and claims that good disagreement is essential to progress. Moreover, after introducing the details of a successful cooperation between a physician and a statistician, she is saying that a well-based rational criticism and the endeavour to reach it is a form of love.

If you have time, watch the video. Subtitles will help you to understand the story and her thoughts. If you are short of time, read my favourite part of her speech:

So what does that kind of constructive conflict require? Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them. That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.

And the more I've thought about this, the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love. Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy and time if you don't really care.

WALK inEnglish

A drop in the ocean: The way you see the world

Has it ever happened to you that after visiting your astrologist, participating in a training or being heavily affected by an incredibly revealing speech you started seeing the world working in just the same way as you had been said? 

What happened then? Probably you told your friend about your astonishing revelation. And how about his reactions? Could you infect him with your enthusiasm? If yes, you must have a great charisma. If not, let’s see one possible part of the explanation.

Tremendous amount of theories aim to describe the process of new information acquisition and information storage. A key term in relation to learning is schema. In Wikipedia you find the following:

A schema describes an organized pattern of thought or behaviour. Schemata (= schemas) influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions to the schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit. Schemata have a tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory information.

So why might it have happened that your friend did not have the AHA experience when hearing your story? It’s quite likely that you had had a more detailed explanation than the one you were giving to him therefore you had more proofs to reset your structure of beliefs and ideas than him. And it’s also possible that he is more critical to acquiring new information.

Observe yourself: Do you tend to neglect things that contradict your schemas or you feel free to distort them to fit the events? If I say that the more complex your worldview is, the wider range of things can be accepted and explained by your schemas, do you agree with me?


WALK in English.

Study and learn

Many of my students face the problem that they don't know when to use study and when to use learn.

In this short blog post I'd like show some important meanings of these verbs based on Cambridge Dictionary Online.

to study

to learn about a subject, especially in an educational course or by reading books 

Next term we shall study plants and how they grow.

She's been studying for her doctorate for three years already.

to examine something very carefully

I want time to study this contract thoroughly before signing it.

Researchers have been studying how people under stress make decisions.

study (noun) – based on Oxford Dictionaries

a room used or designed for reading, writing, or academic work.

He was carefully reading the contract in his study when the woman opened the door.

to learn

to get knowledge or skill in a new subject or activity

"Can you drive?" "I'm learning." 

I've learned a lot about computers since I started work here.

to start to understand that you must change the way you behave

She'll have to learn that she can't have everything she wants.

to be told facts or information that you did not know

We were all shocked to learn of his death.

I later learnt (that) the message had never arrived.

I only learnt about the accident later.

WALK in English.