Hi good morning or good afternoon or even good evening - depending of course on where
you are!
For me it's good morning, and I have to say that today the weather is amazingly bad.
We're actually in the middle of a thunderstorm here in Tokyo so if it's very noisy in the
background, if you can hear the thunder and things in the video I apologise for that!
In today's lesson I'm going to answer a question from one of my YouTube viewers.
This question is from MrWarrior12345 and he asked "How to improve fluency?"
and "Does reading loudly help?"
OK, so improving fluency and about reading loudly or reading out loud.
I'm going to answer this question backwards.
So first of all, does reading loudly or does reading out loud help.
I'M going to say yes, it does.
I think different English teachers say different things and certainly when I was taking my
masters I read different things and some people said it's a waste of time and some people
said it's very useful.
I think yes, it is kind of useful.
Possibly not for reading comprehension.
Because when you're reading out loud, especially as a learner, what often happens is that you
just concentrate on saying the words correctly that you don't get the meaning.
This is definitely the case for me reading Japanese.
Still, I think it's good for just getting used to speaking and using your voice.
And I will say that if you're going to read out loud do it with a big loud voice.
Really project your voice as much as you can.
I think that is quite beneficial.
OK, how to improve fluency.
Well, first of all there is no definite answer to this, and really the only way is to just
do it, to just use English practise makes perfect as it were.
You just have to accept that in the beginning you're going to suck at speaking English.
But practise makes perfect.
Of course, fluency doesn't refer to just speaking.
It refers to all of the skills.
Reading writing listening speaking and thinking as well.
But the way I think about this is... muscle training.
Think of muscle training
Actually I am the worst person in the world to talk about muscle training because
I mean, look at me
I have no muscle whatsoever
But if you want to build muscle
If I wanted to get some muscle on my skinny arms
Lifting really light tiny weights that are too light for me are not going to help
It's useless
The reason why is because you have to stress the muscle
If I want to build muscle I need to lift weight that are heavy for me
I have to push my muscles beyond their limits
I have to apply stress and push them past what they are already capable of
And by doing that
Well, with muscle training what I actually do is create lots of tiny tears in the muscle
tissue
In the fibre
And when it heals it heals bigger and stronger
Able to now cope with that new limit
So to make it bigger again I now have to push it past that limit again
Building fluency in English kind of the same sort of thing really
You have to push yourself beyond your limits
Doing what is comfortable to you and doing what is easy to you all the time
Is not going to help you improve
You have to
Again
Break the limits and go beyond that
I always recommend a two way approach to learning English
I've made videos about this before
And maybe I'll make some more videos in the future
By a two way approach I mean
Short periods of very intense concentrated focused study or practise
Followed by much longer periods of very relaxed English use
Exposure
That might mean just chatting in English or listening to music in English or watching
TV or reading a book or whatever
But you've got these two periods
Very short intense practise follows by long periods of relaxation
And again going back to the muscle training idea
I guess it's the same really
Because you have the very short intense practise sessions where you're lifting weights and
pushing your muscles past their limits
And then you have the long relaxation period
Both of these are necessary
Well actually not a trainer or a muscle trainer or anything like that so correct me if I'm
wrong!
But both of these periods are necessary
Certainly for learning English you have these very intense periods
Where you push yourself past your limits
And then you have the longer periods of relaxation
Kind of for healing, I guess
Just to change the metaphor very slightly
Learning a musical instrument is very similar to learning a language
And actually learning anything really words on the same kind of principle
Building muscle is not learning something as such
But learning is all kind of the same
In...
What year was it?
In 1993
There was a group of researchers
A group of psychologists
Psychologists?
Scientists?
Psychologists.
I'm going to go with psychologists.
Anyway, they were researchers and they wanted to find out why some violinists became very
good violinists but others became remarkable violinists
We're talking world class professionals
So we've got these two groups of violinists
Some are good but some are remarkable
And they wanted to know what is the difference between these two groups of people?
Why does this group become so remarkable?
And they found that the group of violinists which became very good
I mean, they are good, they're professional standard
This group spent a lot of time practising
No surprise there
They spend a lot of time practising the violin
The group who became remarkable on the other hand
They also spent a lot of time practising
But actually their practise sessions where much shorter
And they didn't spend as much time practising overall as the good group
But their practise sessions were very very short very concentrated very intense focused
practise
That was the main different between the two
This group practised a lot, but their practise wasn't so intense
Whereas this group practised less but their practise was extremely intense and extremely
focused
And learning anything is really the same
And certainly learning a musical instrument and learning English is very very similar
Short intense practise sessions followed by longer relaxed exposure and usage session
In some future videos I'll teach you some specific techniques that you can use for building
fluency
Again fluency doesn't mean just speaking
It means reading or writing or listening or thinking in English or anything
Speaking as well
For speaking, one technique I recommend is of course shadowing
And I've made videos about that before
I will make some more in the future
I'll also teach you some other techniques for speaking and for these other skills
So I think that is about it for today's lesson
There doesn't seem to have been too much thunder and lightning whist I've been recording so
hopefully it's not too noisy in the background
So as always if you haven't already please subscribe to my channel
If you have a question or lesson request of your own leave a comment in the comment's
box below this video
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And I will see you in the next lesson!