Hi, there. I'm Drew Badger, the English Fluency Guide. In this video, we're going to cover
some more English Fluency training. People enjoyed that previous video and said they
would like more of that, so here we are. In that video, I was talking more specifically
about the big problems that people have with communication is they're really focusing on
everything but actually developing fluency. Most people think or most learners think,
and this is usually because teachers tell them this, that you have to learn more and
more and that's how you become fluent. What you really do is you develop fluency, which
just means you can do something automatically. It's through the repetition and the practice
with a limited amount of vocabulary. If you could practice with everything you
know, then you would be an even better speaker, but the truth is you only need to be able
to speak a little bit or... I guess I should say, "Know a little bit," so know a pretty
basic amount of vocabulary and grammar, but know how to use it well. I'll just give a
quick... Let me see if I got my eraser over here. If you think about a target of the things
that you should be learning over here or the things you should be doing to become a confident
speaker if speaking well is your thing. Some people actually don't care about becoming
good speakers and that's, okay. Maybe you just want to pass some tests to get a job
or you just want to maybe watch some movies, something like that. That's just fine.
There's things that are all important to learning English or whatever language it is. It could
be grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation, or whatever. I'm not writing these perfectly
and it's not like vocabulary is more important than grammar. It's just the one thing you
have to do to actually become a confident speaker is to practice so that you develop
fluency, just to make that clear. Anyway, let's talk a little bit more about that. The
most dangerous thing in fluency, I like to tell speakers, or the most dangerous number
in fluency is one. That means that there's only one connection between something you
know, like some kind of vocabulary and something else in your mind.
What people often do when they're learning in a classroom is they know a translation
of something. If I'm a Japanese learner, for example, trying to learn English, I might
know the Japanese word for something and then I'm trying to learn the English word and I
make essentially one connection here. This becomes dangerous when I'm trying to speak,
and if I can't remember the translation, then I'm screwed. I'm in the conversation and I
can't think of a better way to explain that or I don't remember the translation, whatever
that is. The mind works best... You've probably seen pictures of the mind, people illustrate
it like this. It's a network of a whole bunch of different dots all connected together like
this. It's almost like you have a system just like the regular internet.
Now, the internet doesn't work with just one connection. You have connections to all different
places, and each of these places connect with others. It makes it a very strong network
because if one piece of it goes away, it's easily connected to other parts of it. That
system is very strong, and that's the opposite of this traditional way of learning. It's
not your fault if you learn this way. This is just the way most teachers teach because
they're trying to give you as much vocabulary as possible, not really developing fluency.
This video is really specifically for people who want to actually speak.
In that previous video, I talked about what you should be doing, which is actually practicing
making connections in your mind. Let me talk a little bit about how we do that, just going
a little bit further from that video. If you think about dimensions of something, the different
ways you can make connections between some vocabulary. In that last video, I talked about
a cat and a pencil, and maybe ... I don't know... something else. I think I also wrote
to people and was talking about a cat and a dog, that kind of thing.
If I just say here, just because it's easy to write, we have a pig here and a gate. I'm
just thinking of random words like this. Now, your job as someone who's practicing this
is to think about these in different dimensions. Now, a dimension is something like this. This
is height, this is width, and then we have depth as well. I could have a flat square,
but if I want to make a cube I'm going to add depth to that, so different dimensions.
This is why we call this 3D, so three dimensions. This dimension, this dimension, and this dimension,
here as well. It's the same thing with fluency. The mind
is trying to make connections. It's not just between two things, but other things as well.
The more connections you can make between these two words, the easier it will be to
use them both when you're in a conversation. The different dimensions you can do for these...
there is just simple compare and contrast. I could just make a simple sentence like,
"The pig and the gate." I'm just talking about two different things, making this very simple.
You want to get fast at doing this. Anytime you see two words like this, your brain will
immediately start making connections because that's what our brains naturally do.
What you don't want to do is let your brain try to make connections between translations
in your native language. You want to build these connections all in English. Good job
for watching this video in English. The one dimension here is just describing these two
things or comparing them, talking about something simple like, "Pig or gate. Or pig and gate.
Or the pig is big, but the gate is small." Again, I'm just making some very simple sentences
about this, but I'm trying to do that as quickly as possible. This is a great way to practice
by yourself like I was saying in that previous video.
Another dimension of this is you can start to play with the grammar or you can make stories
or something like that. We might take the grammar dimension of this by saying, "The
pig was at the gate. Or the pig is at the gate now." I'm just practicing making different
situations, but I'm comparing them or closely contrasting them to make it easier for me
to say these different sentences in different tenses. Another thing I'll just remind you
quickly about. When you're trying to think about grammar, don't think about the rules
specific. What you should be thinking about is the situation. That means that I'm thinking
about, "Okay, if something is happening in the future, and I associate or I connect..."
Again, this idea about connecting, I'm thinking about the way natives make connections in
conversations, or they are talking about the future, and then the words that they use to
describe that. I'm sorry if that sounded a little confusing.
Let me make that a bit easier to understand. As an example, if I'm talking with my daughter,
she's understanding first, the situation of me talking about something in the future.
She knows I'm talking about, "Tomorrow, something will happen." She understands the bigger picture
of tomorrow. Then she moves down to the specific words like, "Will or going to," and she makes
that association. She's not thinking about the grammar rules, she's understanding the
grammar rules from the context. Does that make sense? It's the same idea with this.
I'm thinking, "How can we talk about this and another connection?" Another dimension
would be using grammar to talk about the future. "The pig will be at the gate tomorrow, or
the pig was at the gate yesterday." Again, I'm thinking about, "When are we describing
this? Or what is the situation?" Usually, the past and the future, those are pretty
simple. You can make it a bit more complicated. You could think... a conditional situation
like, " If the pig is here tomorrow, then we can close the gate, or then we can open
the gate." Something like that. Again, you're thinking about, "What is the situation and
then how to natives usually do that." This is why children, they're actually... It's
almost a learning algorithm, as best as I understand them. The children are getting
lots and lots of input, understanding what the context is, but they're not really thinking
about the rules. When people can teach a child, well, what
they're really doing is making the rules understandable from the situation. They try not to teach
too many things at one time. Ideally, you have the context that you understand, and
then you're making it very simple by just giving very simple vocabulary, "The pig will
be here tomorrow. Or the pig will be at the gate." This is another way. Again, I'm talking
about a different dimension mention of this and how you practice with this, all these
different ways you can take, even just two words... You can sit for an hour and try to
think about the different connections you can.
After you make as many sentences as you can, try to think about a different dimension.
Instead of just using vocabulary to describe something in the present tense, maybe I change
it to the past. Another dimension would be if I'm talking about somebody else, like the
passive voice, or I'm talking about something like, "Was the pig?" Or if I'm going to talk
about, as an example, maybe myself. I could say, "Drew was doing something, speaking in
the third person." I don't want to get too confused here about these situations. The
point is, try to think about as many different situations as you can to make sure you're
connecting these things. This exercise here really develops your fluency
rather than trying to learn many more words that you don't really know. Another great
English expression is, "It's better to be an inch wide and a mile deep, than an inch
deep and a mile wide." This person, they're not able to talk about many words or they're
not able to use many words, but they can use the words that they know fluently, usually
to describe lots of different situations. This is how I think in Japanese. My vocabulary
is... I don't know how many words I know, but what I really do is try to get very good
at making connections between the words I know, so that I can use examples in gardening
or animals or talking about cooking or something like that, that I know better, and then use
that. I'm going to make a metaphor or a comparison or something when talking about business or
religion or something like that. Even if I don't know many words specifically
about something, or they're not really good in my active vocabulary, I can take the words
I do know and apply those in that situation. That's yet another dimension, and these dimensions
are infinite really. Hopefully, this makes sense. I wanted to just make another video.
If you'd like to know more specifically about this, you can let me know, if you have any
questions. It's really a very simple exercise. I talked again more about it in that video,
but I wanted to just give some more examples. Let's go through a few of them right now.
If I'm going to take, let's see, something a little bit more difficult. These are both
nouns here, so a person, place, or a thing. I can take, let's see, an adjective... I could
say, "Happy." Then I could take a verb, let's say, "Run."
You will be surprised when you play with this example or these exercises yourself, you will
let your mind do the hard work for you. I look at that and I can already begin making
some sentences. "I'm always happy when I'm running. Or if I want to feel happy, I run."
Again, I'm making conditional sentences. I'm changing the person I'm speaking about, like,
"My sister doesn't feel happy unless she runs." It makes it much easier for your mind just
to have a better conversation. If I'm a teacher in the classroom and I'm applying this, I
tell students they can only use these words. You can only make a sentence with this, and
a few other things. You have to use this vocabulary. In that way, the mind relaxes because students
don't think, "Wow, there are thousands of words I could use," so they can't choose what
they want to say, and then they struggled to express themselves. If you limit yourself,
it makes it a lot easier to speak. Isn't that interesting?
Anyway, let's do another example. Let's see, I'm going to... We could take a phrase. Here's
another example. The phrase is like... Oh, what's a good phrase or an idiom or something?
We could use a phrasal verb like, "Kickback." A kickback, this is a conversational way of
talking about relaxing. If you're thinking about sitting in a chair and you kick your
feet up... That's another great phrasal verb, "To kick up your feet," so put up your feet
to kick up your feet and relax. I'm going to kick back and relax. If I'm going to do
kickback and happy, "Whenever I kick back and relax, after a hard day of work, I feel
very happy." You can apply this with any vocabulary, individual words, or phrases. The point really
is to drill down here, to make your ability to use the vocabulary very strong, rather
than trying to learn another word, especially with a translation, which you don't want to
do. You want to make as many connections as possible so that it becomes easy to use these
things when you speak. After you've done this practicing... You can
do this by yourself, even if you can have nobody to practice with you. If you're practicing
this by yourself, when you get into a situation and you think, "Oh, these are the words I
know, now I have to connect those with whatever that situation is." You will be surprised
by how well your makes those connections. Anyway, hope you found that interesting. If
you'd like to learn more about how I help students make these connections and help them
learn in the right steps to become a competent speaker, you can click on the link in the
upper right of this video or on the description or the link in the description below this
video. If you'd like to continue learning with the English Fluency Guide, please do
these three simple things right now. 1. Click on this link to subscribe to my YouTube
channel for over 500 free videos. 2. Click on this link to download my #1 eBook
guide to fast fluency, FREE! And… 3. Click here to watch the most popular video
on English fluency here on YouTube!