Hey, there! Do you want to speak English like a native?
Most learners inevitably answer YES to this. Now, it is not necessary that you speak like
a native. What is really important is that you speak clearly and people can understand you.
But whether you want to speak like a native or just for it to be easy
for anyone to understand you, today’s video will help you to reach your goal FAST and for FREE!
My guest today is Idahosa Ness, creator of the Mimic Method, a unique and revolutionary
technique for learning language. Idahosa, welcome to the show!
Thank you! Thanks for having me.
Now this may sound too good to be true, but if you watch until the end,
you will learn that this technique does make it possible for anyone to speak English or another
language clearly and accurately. So let’s get started.
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For you, if you wanted to, I don't know, if you got an acting gig and you had to play a british person
could you like instantly you think pick up a british accent just by, you know, listening
to someone speaking british english or is it something you need to study a bit to actually pick up?
I would need to practice it, that's what I do with these other things I don't
I don't instantly pick up, I didn't instantly pick up european portuguese. In fact, for a while I
was just speaking brazilian portuguese while I was here, and then at one point I'm... "Alright, I'm gonna
be here, so let me just make a european portuguese course." And then I just spent a weekend listening
to a bunch of audio and then doing all the stuff I do in my process, and then once I brought my
conscious attention to what was going on there, then it's not too difficult for me to start
making the switch. But before I do that it'll always be kind of that. So, if I did it for
british english which I never did, I'd imagine it would be the same thing where I would just take
whichever accent I'm trying to imitate, and then I would just decode it. My whole thing is based on
movement, you know, I say language is movement first and foremost. So, the question I'm really asking is
how is this british guy here moving his mouth differently when he's saying the sentence. And
once I can trace the exact path of his tongue and lips and everything else, then I just have to
copy it. And that's not hard I just didn't know what it was until I looked at it closely .
There is a ton more for you to learn with Idahosa and other incredible teachers and experts.
You can get the full interviews from Beyond Borders anywhere you listen to podcasts! However,
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you can get a transcript for the full episode and learn all of the important vocabulary,
and more! Plus, many learners like you tell me that they are frustrated that they don’t have anyone to
practice what they are learning with. Well, on the RealLife App you can have conversations
in English with people from all around the world at the touch of a button, and discover
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simply click the link up here or down in the description below.
You know, you might heard it,
there's a man in a park kind of on the ground in the middle of night searching in (under a street lamp)
searching for something, and the cop comes, "Hey, what are you doing?" And he said, "Hey, yeah, lost
my keys" the drunk guy, "So, I lost my keys" so the cop gets on the ground too, and they're searching
around for the keys and they can't find it under the street lamp, and then the cop says,
"Are you sure you dropped your keys here?" He's like, "No no, I dropped it over there in the parking
lot" and he's like, "Well why are you searching over here then?" It's because this is where the light is."
Right, so, that so to make the draw the analogy here why do people study language through reading and
writing? Because that's where the light is. That's where they feel comfortable. That's
where you can very precisely see the letters, and have that kind of measure of certainty,
but what you and I are doing right now, we're not looking at any letters, right? What you and I are
doing is we're moving our mouths generating sound effects with it, perceiving those sound effects
with our ears, and then going back and forth in rapid time. There's no visual processing really
going on of letters, I'm though I am looking at your face in this case which is also very
important. And we teach that as well. So, the point is that you just have to look at what conversation
is, it so happens to be that, you know, we've been speaking we've been communicating for God knows
how long in oral communication, and then, you know, only 10 000 years ago or something like that
someone came up with the first writing system, and only like in the past hundred or so years did a
large population of people become literate in the first place, most people are illiterate all the
time for all human history. So, we have a brand new technology that's been spanned all over and
it's great, don't get me wrong, we use literature it's very powerful it really did a lot of things
for us, but what people really care about the reason why people pay money to learn languages
99% of the time it's not because they want to, you know, read (Charles) Baudelaire in french and
you know, so it's because they want to have a conversation like which we're doing right now. So,
people just confound those two things reading and writing is just a different activity, you
know, it's like imagine say, "I want to learn french" cool, and then and then you start you know playing
golf and then, "What are you doing?" like "I'm learning french" like "You're playing golf"
it's a different thing, you know, so um there's this there's yeah obviously there's a connecting point
where reading and writing is based on conversation and speaking, but it's not the same thing. So, if you
learn this one you're learning something else, but even more even worse because they mix you might
actually be sabotaging, you know, my expertise is in pronunciation and accent correction.
So, when I hear people mispronouncing things in a target in another language I'd say about half the
time their mispronunciation is purely due to the fact that they're seeing the word in their head,
and if they weren't seeing the word in their head they would have naturally pronounced it correctly, so it's an interference.
Imagine like a google spreadsheet and you have these columns
characters, actions, settings, descriptors and connectors. And basically the ideas of the way the
mind processes reality is through narrative, so if I have my characters, these are the elements of a
narrative so I have my characters so I have maybe, I have written in english the words that I know, so
I'm learning a brand new language I'll do this and I'm like, "Okay, what's the word I,
you, you know, mailman, dog" things that are relevant to me, or whatever, and then actions
is, "Okay, what... run, talk, speak, eat" settings are places "park, house, room" time "yesterday, tomorrow". And
if I see all those there and then I would start kind of constructing sentences and telling stories
using those elements, so usually people collect and categorize their vocabulary
according to like the same class, like these are a bunch of verbs and these are a bunch of nouns,
or just all in like one single list, I'll take a context that's relevant
to me like going to the store and then say, "Okay, in this context what are the character words that
are relevant?"a shopkeeper, you know, the customer, what are the actions relevant? Buy,
sell, you know, ask, right? And then I would if you... So, you can use it in various different ways, but
one simple way is just to have a visual reference of the words that I know I know, so that if I'm
practicing with someone I can kind of "What can I say with my limited vocabulary? Oh, well, I have this, I
can string together this and this and make, make a story.
What do you actually want to do with
this language? So, to give an example of the student, not too long ago he was in Mexico and
he had some kind of, you know, infestation of ins... some kind of insect or whatever, and...
So, he had to call the exterminator, right? So, I, "Cool, so you're gonna have an experience when
exterminator comes to your house, what's gonna happen? What would you... if it was America what
kind of interaction would you have with him? You'd explain to him this, right?" So, we had a spreadsheet
up and I had him talking in English and he's like, "Oh, I'd ask him this" and then I'm putting in these
vocabulary words in the respective columns of characters, actions, settings, like exterminator
you know, roach, you know, whatever, like all that kind of stuff and you keep talking you
populate it and then it's like, "Cool, which of these words you know, which ones you don't? And then, you
go, "Okay, I don't know this one" was look him up "All right, great, now practice making, you know, practice
you know, role play and do that scene using these words" So, the idea is you think what am I...
You think ahead of time, "What am I gonna need to accomplish what I think I need to accomplish?"
but perhaps even better is you go and you actually live the experience, and then you didn't have
something like, "Oh, I wish I had the word for airbnb, I wish I had the word for this, right?" So coming off
of that experience and reflecting back on it then you say, "Okay, I needed these words" So, the key the
key idea here is relevance. And it's like, what's relevant can only be relevant personally to you.
So, one of the things I try to cultivate in people is to cultivate a sensibility of relevance.
So, I'm listening to someone speaking the same intermediary level someone speaking I'm only
catching 50% of the things he's saying, and there's these words that are I'm hearing
but I don't know what they mean. But if you pay attention there's a hierarchy where
"Yeah, I don't know that word, I don't know that way, I don't know that word, I don't know that
word, but I feel like I know that word because I've heard it a hundred times before in different
contexts" like it's like it's ready to come out the oven, you know, so that's the word I'm going
to interrupt the guy and say, "Hey, what does that word mean?" but I'm not going to interrupt him on
every other word because that would be way too, you know, interruptive. So...
Cuts the communication.
Exactly, there's a sensibility there that I I try to get people to cultivate of knowing when
you should select something to be like, "Oh, I'm ready to learn what this word is right now" So,
you know, in general I'm trying to cultivate people to be more active and more autonomous
in their learningM because we've... Once again we've cultivated this very very passive culture
of learning, where it's like you know, "Teach me, tell me what I need to know" but it's not working,
you gotta grab, it you gotta seize it.
Are you enjoying the interview with Idahosa?
I love interviewing the best experts to bring you insights to help you improve your English and your
life. So who else would you like me to interview? Please take a moment to pause the video and let
me know in the comments down below! We will check them out and do our best to get them on the show. Thanks!
Where does the grammar come in for you? So, if you're learning like a language that has a
very different sentence structure, for example, from English, then how would you kind of learn
that grammar so that you're actually putting these sentences together in a way that is intelligible
- for someone that you're speaking to? - So, I think that last sentence you just said which is "how do
you structure these words together in a way that's intelligible" and to demonstrate I can say
me you talk riverside video chat platform now you podcast have I guess be let us talk
now fast, right? And it was not grammatical but it was intelligible. And the reason why it was
intelligible it was because the way intelligent comprehension works is purely contextual.
It's mostly contextual which is to say, as long as the right characters and actions and settings are
co-occurring at the same time, then your mind can construct a scene in your head, right?
Like kitchen, mouse, cat, chase, right? Now, in your mind there's not a mouse chasing the cat probably,
right? Because that's not how the world works. So, this is how comprehension works and why
am I telling you all this? Because in my program it's very counter-conventional
there's a progression we follow, there's kind of four features to fluency,
sufficiency, so the way I was speaking just now was sufficient to convey the meaning to you,
right? Smoothness, am I stuttering, am I saying "i'm in ah"? Are the words disjointed? Speed, am I
taking forever and slowing it down the flow of the conversation? And then finally similarity,
right? So, I don't talk about grammar and all that kind of stuff in the way people in an academic
kind of way think about it... I don't believe in grammar, I don't believe if there's a...
I'm trying to speak as similar as I can to the brazilian, but well speaking to the portuguese
person I want to be similar to them, and they may have a different... they have different grammatical
patterns, for example, so anyways all to say the ideal is that I'm moving my body
and sounding and conveying meaning exactly how this other person is in their form, but
there's a sequence for me to get there, so first I practice that skill you mentioned before which is,
"Okay, I have vocabulary how can I just be resourceful and put them on the table to
convey my point sufficiently?" Once I have the basis of sufficiency, then I can move into
refining my grammar so to speak, so that I sound more similar, so I'm like, "me you interview talk,"
and you're like, "Yes, you and I are speaking in a interview." And if I can mimic you, I'm like...
Then next time I say it I can say it that way, I can discard the kind of more rudimentary way
of speaking, but if I didn't have that rudimentary thing as a scaffolding, when you say "You and I are
speaking" I'm like, "What?" you know, it's just too complicated. So, what happens in my experience is
people try to be grammatical prematurely and as a result they sacrifice efficience, you know, like
I said, what's that phrase "Don't let perfection be the enemy of good" so, they're letting you
know grammatical similitude be the enemy of just sufficient fast and smooth communication.
So, that it creates an analysis paralysis and all kinds of psychological things,
so that's what it is grammar grammar ideally is not even studied, it's just kind of imbibed,
because your ears and your eyes are open to the environment, and you're just mimicking all the time.
So, I highly recommend that you check out the full interview with Idahosa and try out his free Mimic
Method course for English. Both are linked in the description below. As I mentioned before,
the most important thing is not that you have an American or British accent,
rather that you speak clearly so people can understand you.
One of my recent guests, Lindsay from All Ears English, puts it perfectly when she says “Connection
NOT Perfection.” Let’s check out a clip from that interview…
Start to change your focus away from the perfection towards the connection, right? Find that moment that motivates you where
you did have a connection, you ask someone a question, you learn something about them,
and then use that as your starting point to say, "I want more of that" and less of the getting stuck
in your, you know, in your at your desk and worrying about grammar and feeling like you're doing things
wrong. Focus on that, we can choose what to focus on in any moment, so focus on that that's my ask.