New Year's resolutions

Hi, everybody. It’s Molly here, and welcome to another video for the British Council’s LearnEnglish Teens website and their YouTube channel.

In today’s video, I wanted to talk about New Year’s resolutions because 2017 is over, we are now entering 2018 and, for a lot of people, this is the time of year when they like to make goals and plan about the future.

I’m one of those people and so today I wanted to share with you four of my New Year’s resolutions for 2018.

My first New Year’s resolution is to do with exercise. I, personally, have never been somebody that’s enjoyed exercise. Er, I go on a lot of walks, but apart from that I don’t really do any regular exercise, and that’s something that I would like to change. So, one thing that I want to try and do is to follow the podcast ‘Couch to 5K’, which is released by the NHS, and basically what that is is, it’s a programme that takes you from absolutely beginner, no skills at all in running, to by the end of the programme being able to run five kilometres, which sounds amazing! I would love to be able to run five kilometres.

My second New Year’s resolution is to do with food, specifically with cooking. I used to be somebody who loved cooking. I cooked a lot. I really liked trying new things. I found cooking to be relaxing. For the past four months, I’ve been in Spain at university, which was amazing, but my cooking really wasn’t. So, I really want to make an effort to try and cook more things. I want to cook healthy things. I want to cook, as much as possible, vegan and vegetarian things. And, yeah, I just want to try some new recipes and fall back in love with cooking.

My third New Year’s resolution is to do with Spanish. I’m studying history and Spanish at university and I’m currently on my year abroad, so from September until December I was in Spain studying at university, and in March I will be heading to Argentina to work for the British Council. So, obviously, through living in Spanish-speaking countries, my Spanish is going to improve, but I really want to take matters into my own hands and just try and do some more things in my day-to-day life that’s gonna help me get better at Spanish. So, I want to watch more Spanish TV shows and films, I want to read more Spanish books, I want to listen to podcasts in Spanish, and one thing that I really want to do is I want to try and do some translation. While I was at university in Spain, I took a class which was an introduction to translation. I found this course super interesting, so what I want to do is to translate things that I’m interested in, so I’d like to pick articles that I find that are interesting, I want to translate bits of my favourite books and poems that I like, er, songs that I like and things like that.

My fourth and final resolution is something that I’m actually already doing, because I think it’s important to acknowledge the good things that you do, and, if they work, keep doing them. So that for me is journaling,  specifically to document my year abroad. So, I’ve been keeping a journal for years and years and years and years now. I think maybe in 2012 or something I maybe started. So, I have loads and loads of notebooks like this. And what I do is I just ... journal, just write down things that I want to remember. And I have been good at keeping up with this so far on my year abroad. And I really do want to continue with that because I think it will be something really, really cool that I can look back on in the future.

So, yeah. There you have it. They are my four New Year’s resolutions for 2018. Exercise, cooking, Spanish and journaling. Erm, I really hope I can keep up with them. Er, maybe I’ll make a video later, at the end of 2017 [2018], of how, how they’ve gone. Who knows? That could be something that I do. Erm, but I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you in the next video. Bye!