6 ways to stop repeating yourself and add variety to your English

This is a guest post by Gabriel Clark. He is an online English teacher for clarkandmiller.com, which provides high quality Skype English lessons plus complete personlised support for English learners. Gabriel is from Brighton in the UK and has taught English in England, Russia, Turkey and Bulgaria. Feel free to send him an email!

Do you ever feel that you have to repeat yourself all the time when you speak English? Do you get bored of saying “thank you, thank you, thank you”?

When you don’t understand something, do you always say “I don’t understand”… or do you know more interesting phrases?

A lot of the ‘standard’ phrases you learn at school can actually make you sound very automatic — like a robot. Most native English speakers have lots of different ways of saying these phrases, and many of us don’t even use the standard “Hello, how are you?” phrases.

So look at the classic ‘standard’ phrases below (the robot phrases) and have a look at the colourful alternative phrases … the human phrases.