How to express your opinion in English

http://www.engvid.com/ Participate confidently in personal, professional, or academic discussions. Learn how to use a variety of phrases to express your opinion on various subjects. This lesson is a must for those who want to speak or write about important issues. Take the quiz on this lesson here: http://www.engvid.com/how-to-express-your-opinion-in-english/

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, my name is Rebecca, and in today’s lesson I’ll show you how to express your opinion in English. Now, this is important whether you’re participating in a conversation, a debate, or a discussion, or whether you’re writing a report, or an evaluation, or proposal, you’re still going to need various types of phrases and expressions to express your view. So let’s look at what some of these expressions are. Okay?

So, here are some of the most common ones. Now, the one at the top is probably the strongest, and the one down here is the weakest. So let’s go through them. You could say: "I think the government should keep university free." for example. Or: "I believe…" Next one: "I feel…" Or: "I suppose the government should keep university free." Now, you see with my body language, here, it’s a little bit weaker. So you say: "I suppose the government should keep university free." But this kind of body language kind of suggests that you’re not very sure, but you think so. All right? Last one is very weak, but you could use it if you have… If you believe it a little bit. Okay? In that position. "I guess the government should keep university free." Right? It’s weak, but it’s acceptable. All right? Again, these are the stronger options.

Here are some other expressions: "In my opinion, we should accept their offer." Or: "In my view, we should accept their offer." Okay? So you could also use any of these, in my opinion. Now, remember: here, we don’t need any kind of punctuation after: "I think". It just goes directly: "I think the government should keep university free." But here, we do have a comma. Okay? So: "In my opinion," - comma - or: "In my view," - comma -, that’s important when you’re writing. Okay?

Next one: "From my viewpoint," or: "From my point of view," or: "From my perspective, it’s time to make a decision." Okay? Again, with each of these, remember: there is a comma after that expression. Okay?

Next one: "According to me, the Prime Minister should resign." Okay? Or: "It seems to me that you should take the job." All right? So these are some other expressions.

Now, that’s a lot of expressions so what you want to do is to choose the expressions that you like. Perhaps these could be this… The sort of translation of the expressions that you use in your own language because you probably like those expressions. So learn a few of them correctly, rather than trying to learn all of them and getting them mixed up. Okay? So you don’t want to say: "From my opinion," or something like that. So it’s better to learn a few of them and use them correctly. All right?

If you’d like some more practice with this, you can go to our website: www.engvid.com and there you can do a quiz on this subject and also watch English learning videos on lots of other topics in English. Okay? Thanks very much for watching, and good luck with your English.