sujan prodhan

What Funny Stories Can Teach You About English-speaking Societies

Language learning is not only about learning the words and rules of English, but it requires you to be familiar with the culture of English speakers too.

In some conversations, you might understand all the words but still fail to comprehend what they are saying.Reading humorous stories can help your English with this, as well as in other ways:

• You will learn to identify satire. Funny stories are often satirical stories which use humor to criticize a person or a society. This might help you gain valuable information about the problems of a community and will make you understand the English context to words, phrases and ideas.

• You will understand parodies. Aparody is an imitation of an existing story or artwork which makes fun of the original work. It helps you gain a quick understanding of the popular and important literature of a culture and their flaws in a single book.

• You learn inside jokes. Every culture has its unique, secret code.People learn them through experience and it is impossible for an outsider to understand them in any way. Humor is often based on these secret jokes and they help you peek inside the mind of a community. In fact, even the internet has its own inside jokes.

• They teach you about history. Satire, parody and inside jokes are all based on events that happened in the past. Very often funny stories are about these events themselves.Learning about them helps you gain valuable information about a community’s history and how they developed. (The last book on the list below is a perfect example.)

• They teach you how to use and recognize puns. Puns are words which mean two things at once in a sentence. They are not always obvious to a beginner and they are generally learned by reading or listening to many examples. This article talks the use of puns in English.

• They are often social commentaries. This point is a summary of all the points above. In essence, humorous stories in English can help you gain a better understanding of past events,current context and the society of English speakers in general, to help you have actual conversations with native speakers in the world.

FluentU is a great resource to use alongside funny short stories if you want to achieve this goal of having actual English conversations. FluentU takes entertaining, real-world videos—like interviews, commercials, comedy sketches, funny vlogs, movie trailers and more—and turns them into personalized language lessons.prodhan.jw.lt