Hello, I’m Hilary and you’re listening to an Adept English podcast, designed to help
you learn to speak English fluently. I love the English language, and I help hundreds
of thousands of listeners speak English every month. Listen to this podcast today and see
how your fluency improves.
Hi there and welcome to this latest podcast from Adept English. Now you want to become
fluent in English, don’t you? Well, let’s talk today about one of the great enemies
of fluency, something which stops fluency from happening. And that thing is ‘translating’.
If you want to speak English fluently, you must stop translating as soon as possible!
That’s what today’s podcast is about. And don’t forget - if you would like to
support Adept English, so that more and more people can find us and learn English with
us, then follow us, subscribe to our channel or our podcast, recommend us to other people,
star rate us or even better, write a review for us. You can practise your English that
way. That’s really helpful for Adept English.
So the way that we are introduced to languages - we translate. We’re learning a foreign
language, we learn a new word - and what do we do? We immediately learn alongside that
foreign language word the equivalent word in our own language. We all do it. We all
learn language like that to begin with. We translate. And in order to have somewhere
to start, in order to understand grammar, or to start to, some translating is necessary
at the beginning. But after a time, that way of learning has to stop. We have to stop translating.
We have to start thinking in the language we’re trying to learn. For you, that’s
starting to think in English.
So the biggest thing you can do to help that happen? Well, that’s something that you’re
already doing if you’re listening to this podcast. You have to listen to lots of spoken
material in the language that you’re trying to learn. So here we are, doing this. Adept
English is very happy to provide you with that material.
But what else can you do? Well, how about ‘talking to yourself in English’ as the
next step? Get into the habit of thinking how you would respond to certain questions
in English? So you might ask yourself ‘What am I doing today? What’s my schedule today?’
And then you might formulate your answer - put together an answer. Well, that’s thinking
in English. You might say ‘Well, I’ve got some work to do this morning - for me
that’s completing a podcast. Then, I’ve got some of my other work to do. Erm...I’ll
have lunch, then in the afternoon, I need to go and do a bit of shopping. And then I’ll
come back and do some cleaning in the house, especially the bathroom - that needs it! Then...er
well, this evening, I’ll be cooking dinner for three people. Hmmm - that’s my schedule
for today’. And importantly when you’re doing this, unless there’s a word that you
absolutely can’t get by without and you don’t know it - you’re not going to use
the dictionary, you’re not going to use Google Translate. You’re going to get by
on the vocabulary that you already know. So you’re talking to yourself with words you
already know. No translation will be needed that way.
You can vary the question - you could say to yourself, just as someone else might ask
you ‘What did you get up to at the weekend?’ This is just a conversational way of asking
what you did the previous weekend. ‘What did you get up to?’ It’s the sort of Monday
morning conversation that people commonly have at work. So you might say ‘Well, I
stayed in on Friday evening and I watched TV, because I was really tired. But I had
a couple of gin and tonics and I cuddled up with my cats - and there’s this series on
Netflix that I’m really enjoying (substitute whatever title you fancy here!). Then on Saturday
morning, I went for a run - and I came home and made some soup. In the afternoon, I did
a bit of gardening. And on Saturday evening, I went out and saw some friends - in a socially
distanced way, of course! Then on Sunday, I drove to see another friend for lunch whom
I haven’t seen in a while. And I was back home by the evening. I like to have a quiet
one on a Sunday, and get ready for work the next day.’
Notice there how you can vary the verb tenses? If you ask yourself what you’re doing today
- that’s fine practice at the present tense. But if you ask yourself about the weekend
that’s just gone, or what did I do yesterday, then of course your answe is going to be in
the past, so you get to practise past tenses. It’s a good to work on your tenses. You
could also do future tense as well. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Or ‘What are
you doing next week?’ or ‘What will you get up to next weekend?’ ‘Next week, I’m
going to take a few days off work and I’m going to stay with a friend. She lives in
London, so I think we’ll go and visit a couple of exhibitions. We’ve booked tickets
for a couple of things. And I think she’ll want to go to a restaurant, one that we’ve
been to before - that she particularly likes. Then I’ll come home on the Thursday, because
I’ve got to be back at work by then. But it’ll be a nice couple of days. I’m looking
forward to it - and I’ll feel better for work on Thursday, when I’ll have taken some
time off.’ So there we are - some practice at future tenses by talking about your next
week. You can even get the future perfect tense in there! ‘I will feel better because
I will have taken some time off’. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing - whether it’s
something interesting or it’s something which is normal, ‘business-as-usual’ for
you. You’re not really having to entertain anyone with your answer - you’re just speaking
to yourself. So you can test yourself - how can I say what I want to say? See if you can
find the words for what you’ve been doing or what you’re planning to do.
And what you’ll notice is, that if you’re not using the dictionary, but you don’t
know the word for something, you just ‘go a different way around’. You just find another
way of saying it.
I try to do this on a Monday, when I’m driving to the station, the railway station where
I catch the train to London. And because my focus at the moment is on learning French,
it might sound a bit like this. This is typical of my Monday self-talk.
Uh. Qu’est-ce que je fais maintenant? Er, je suis dans ma voiture. Er.. je vais à la
gare pour prendre le train à Londres. Qu’est-ce que je dois faire aujourd’hui? Wwuhh - j’ai
beaucoup de clients. J’aurrai faim, Peut-etre je dois arreter a Waterloo pour acheter de
la nourriture. Mmm - quelques choses a manger?m Qu’est-ce que je veux manger, aujourd’hui?
Mm - pas de chocolat pare que c’est mauvais pour ma sante. Je dois manger une salade peut-etre,
ou peut-etre un sandwich. Ce serait une journee longue aujourd’hui, je pense. Tant pis!
So that’s me, talking to myself in French. You get the picture or you might if you understand
French? It’s quite simple French, but it’s me just talking to myself about my day. If
you’re a French speaker, you’ll probably hear all kinds of errors in there I’m sure.
I haven’t checked, I’m not going to look them up - it’s important that you allow
yourself to make errors. Do it ‘off the cuff’, if you like - that means, without
preparation. You’re only talking to yourself after all. And you’ll notice that there
are things you want to say, but you don’t know the words or you can’t remember the
exact words - so your brain has to find a different way around. I’ve written down
what I said there for the transcript - but what’s really important - I didn’t pre-prepare
it. It’s just as it came out. So it’s important that you allow yourself that freedom
and it’s fine to make mistakes. My conversation with myself on my way to the train station
on a Monday tends to be similar. You get the idea.
Just practise, practise English by turning that internal dialogue, your internal thoughts
into the language that you’re learning. So ‘What am I doing today?’, ‘Who am
I going to see?’, ‘How do I feel about it?’, ‘What am I doing right now?’ And
‘What am I going to be doing, later in the day? You can get a long way learning English,
just practising on your own.
If you would like more English conversation, then don’t forget our Course One, Activate
Your Listening. There are plenty of English conversations to listen to on this course.
You’ll hear us talking about what shopping to buy. You’ll hear my daughters talking
about education. And all of it is explained to you, all the vocabulary is covered, in
English - no translating! So yes, Course One, Activate Your Listening. Still good stuff.
Anyway, hope that gets you into the habit of talking to yourself, at least once a week
in English, about your day.
That’s the end of this podcast – I hope you enjoyed it. You can listen to hundreds
more podcasts and learn more about our approach to language learning with our FREE English
language course available at adeptenglish.com. If you’re serious about your English language
learning and you want to go further and progress faster we have English courses ready to download
at adeptenglish.com today.