Hey Bob,

Imagine you're learning English.

You come across the word "belter" for the first time.

You reach for the dictionary, flick all the way to B, and discover the meaning…

Something absolutely stunning, amazing, incredible.

Brilliant! New word learned.

Time to use it.

So you try…

Someone hands you your dropped keys. "Thank you for doing the belter!"

You watch a news report about a rescue mission. "Look, isn't that a belter?"

On and on it goes…

It never quite lands.

Eventually, you give up and go back to using "great" — a word you actually know how to use.

Here's the thing…

The mistake wasn't learning the word.

It was learning the word by itself.

See…

Words rarely exist in isolation.

A staggering amount of what we say isn't cleverly constructed in the moment. We're not choosing prepositions and verb tenses on the fly.

We're rolling out phrases we've used thousands of times before — and just adapting them a bit.

Think about it…

"You'll never believe what happened yesterday…"

Did you make any grammatical decisions when you said that?

Nope.

You just spoke the phrase that was lodged in your brain.

So here's the rule:

Learn phrases, not words.

Instead of memorising "belter," learn: "Today is going to be an absolute belter."

When you think in phrases, you speak in phrases.

Longer. More flowing. More fluent.

And if you sound more fluent?

You feel more confident.

In fact, you could say this is an absolute belter of a language tip :)

Chat soon,

Olly