 Hi, students! It's Shayna, your teacher from espressoenglish.net, and today I want to talk to you about a phrase that I've seen some students use, and that phrase is, according to me, to express their opinion. Can we use this in English? Hmm. Well, according to is often used to talk about opinions or talk about something someone said. So if your friend Jim recommended a restaurant to you, you could tell your family, according to Jim, this is a good restaurant. According to Jim just means Jim said, or Jim has the opinion that this is a good restaurant. So we use according to him, according to her, according to my best friend. We can also say according to, and then talk about something that is not a person, like an article. According to this article, the unemployment rate is going up, meaning this article says the unemployment rate is going up. But what about according to me? Can you use that to express your own opinion? No, it's really not used in that way in English. I don't know if it's wrong, but nobody ever says it, so therefore it does not sound natural. So what are some phrases you can use instead to express your own opinion? You can say, in my opinion, from my point of view, personally, I think, or as far as I'm concerned, these are all good sentence openers to show that you are about to express your own opinion. But don't say according to me. It doesn't sound natural, it just sounds strange, and people might understand you, but it's just it's a little bit weird. So I hope I've taught you some good alternatives, and if you'd like to learn more useful and practical English phrases, come and join my everyday English speaking course. According to my students, this is one of the best courses at Espresso English. In fact, it is the most popular course there. My students say it is very warm and friendly, brilliant, and practical. I've gotten so many wonderful comments about this course, and I hope that you will join it and benefit from it as well. You can click on the link in the video or in the description for more information, as well as some free sample lessons.