- Are you struggling to find time to improve your English?
Here is my bare minimum average
of just 16 minutes a day study routine.
(upbeat music)
Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com,
here to help you master the English language faster,
less stress, less hassle,
and fewer of those goddamn headaches.
Recently, one of my Extraordinary English Speakers members
asked me how much time they should spend on lessons.
My answer to them: Be flexible.
Sometimes you're gonna have plenty of time
in which to sit back, relax, take it slow.
The problems, however,
come in not when you have lots of time
but when you have no time at all.
What in those situations is one to do?
That is what this video is all about.
I'm gonna share with you my bare minimum
English study routine that you can do
in just an average of 16 minutes a day.
I say an average of 16 minutes a day
because it's actually different depending on the day,
but we'll get into that in a moment.
Now, I'll come to the study routine, the logic behind it,
why it works and all that good stuff in a moment,
but let me just point out right here right now
that I am using
my Extraordinary English Speakers' weekly lessons
as an example for explaining this.
Many of you here are EES members and hello to you,
but even if you're not,
well, you can and should apply the same logic
to whatever materials it is that you are using
or of course, you can just join us in the inside.
Link in the description.
First and foremost, if you didn't watch this video,
check it out because this really is the base to this
because this study routine that I'm gonna give you here
is not perfect.
It is not the ideal.
It is a bare minimum.
However, if you are super busy and just don't have any time,
this will give you the maximum result
for a very, very proportionally tiny amount of time.
Very briefly, for the benefit of non-EES members,
let me just walk you through
what each EES lesson consists of
so that we're all on the same page
and so that if you are not a member
and you decide not to become a member,
you can find your own materials
that are similar and apply the same process to them.
Now, each weekly EES lesson
starts with a conversation-based story,
and there's lesson notes in the transcript of that
and an audio version of it, an MP3 file which you download
and it is about three minutes long.
Then in addition to that, there is the main lesson.
This is a 30-minute video, which also comes,
we have a downloadable audio version.
Again, for your MP3 players
so that you can listen, review, on the go.
And in the main lesson, I take that conversational story
which forms the core of the whole lesson
and I explain in excruciating detail
all the culture points,
the talking points, the discussions points,
and I take all the language from the conversation
and I break it down phrase by phrase,
expression by expression, chunk by chunk.
And I explain to you the usage and the meaning of each one,
why the speaker is using this particular phrase,
this particular expression in this situation,
the nuances behind what people are saying
in the conversation,
so that you can then steal that language and recycle it
and use it yourself in your own conversations.
That's the main lesson
and the story that makes the core of it.
Then we have a whole set of exercises
that we apply to that, such as dictation,
where I dictate the story to you,
you listen very carefully, write the whole thing down.
This is amazing for improving your listening ability.
We have awareness building exercises.
We use shadowing to perfect your pronunciation,
your rhythm, your intonation, and get you actually saying
the language in the conversation.
Then we record a video of ourselves
talking about a similar situation,
recycling and reusing the same language,
and then that is submitted to me for critique and feedback.
In this bare minimum study routine, however,
we're just gonna cut all of those exercises.
Forget them.
Dictation, forget it.
Shadowing, forget it.
Recording yourself, using the language,
and submitting to me for critique, forget it.
We don't need them.
As I talked about in this video,
those things are just details, tactics.
Yes, they are extremely effective exercises.
Yes, doing dictation will help you
to improve your listening skills faster.
Yes, shadowing will help you to improve
your pronunciation, your rhythm, your intonation faster.
Yes, recording yourself and submitting to me
for critique will help you improve much, much faster.
But they are still only details, tactics.
What is important is not those things
but the underlying strategy.
And this bare minimum study routine
cuts away all of those extra things
that are effective, but not essential
and leaves just the underlying strategy
so you can get the biggest bang for your buck,
a disproportionate amount of result
for a very small amount of time invested.
So we are just going to be using that main lesson
and the story MP3.
So this is a seven-day one week routine.
What we're gonna do is on day one,
take not the story itself, forget about that for now,
but instead, take the main lesson.
And in day one, you are just going to watch the video
of the lesson of me explaining all the talking points,
the culture points, all the phrases and expressions,
et cetera, et cetera.
If you really, really don't have time to watch the video
and you can't even use your smartphone,
say, on the train or on your way to work,
then just download the audio version
and just listen to it whilst you're walking,
whilst you're cleaning or whatever it is that you're doing.
It is better to watch the video version first
'cause you get that extra visual input,
but if it's a case of you really can't find the time
to watch a video, listen to the audio
whilst you're doing something else.
That's day one, and that is gonna take you 30 minutes.
Next, on day two and three,
all we are going to do is take the audio version
of this conversational story
and we are going to listen to it a couple of times.
You can, and should, do this,
again, whilst you're walking, whilst you're on the train,
whilst you're in the car, whilst you're at home
cleaning the house or whatever it is that you are doing.
Just listen to it a couple of times for those two days.
That's gonna take you five or six minutes.
If you are in a place
where you can speak out loud
without looking like a total idiot
or if you don't mind looking like a total idiot
on the train, you can shadow whilst you're doing it.
You can repeat phrases and expressions
whilst you're listening, get your mouth moving,
but the main thing is you just expose yourself
to that language to remember the phrases and expressions
that I explained in the main lesson,
to repeat it a few times just to get that information
firmly lodged into memory.
So day one, lesson detailed explanation.
Day two, day three, just listening to the story a few times.
On day four, you are now going to listen
to that lesson, the detailed explanation again.
Now, you don't need to worry about the video version.
Just use the audio version.
Again, listen to it whilst you're in the car
or on the train going to work,
cleaning the house, whatever it is that you are doing.
As much as possible, try not to use any extra time.
Day five, day six,
we are now going to go back to the story MP3
and we're going to listen to it a few times again,
two to three times each day.
Again, just to recall
all those common phrases and expressions
to remember all the details
that was discussed in the lesson.
If you can get your mouth moving
and repeat stuff as you're listening,
if you can shadow it while you're listening, brilliant.
If you can't, forget it.
And then finally, on day seven,
we're gonna listen to the detailed lesson,
the explanation of everything one final time,
and then we are done.
So the routine goes lesson, story, story,
lesson, story, story, lesson.
30 minutes, five minutes, five minutes,
30 minutes, five minutes, five minutes, 30 minutes.
That's worth 110 minutes,
just under two hours for the whole week
or about 16 minutes a day on average.
Is this as good as doing all the exercises
that we normally do in Extraordinary English Speakers,
dictation to force your listening to improve,
the awareness building exercises,
intensive shadowing, recording yourself
using the language and submitting for critique?
No, it's not.
But again, if you don't have time to do all those things,
it is better, far, far better to do something, anything,
than it is to do nothing 'cause you don't have time
to do it perfectly.
That, I really, really need to impress upon you.
Something done is better than nothing done perfectly.
The logic behind this routine.
First, we do the lesson
because we just want to notice all the things
that's going on as quickly as possible.
And me explaining everything to you in the lesson
is what is gonna do that.
You hear all the phrases and expressions,
"Oh, I didn't know this before,"
or, "I've never heard of that chunk before."
"I didn't know this phrase could be used
"in this kind of situation before."
"I didn't know this culture point was important,"
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We notice all those things as quickly as possible
and we just dump that information into short-term memory.
This noticing of all the points that we're talking about
opens the door for learning to be able to happen.
Listening by itself is pretty ineffective
because we simply don't notice things about the language
and you will never ever, ever acquire what you don't notice.
That's simply not how the brain works.
Then in day two and three,
we are refreshing our memories
so that all this stuff that we've learned in the lesson,
we're now hearing it again, recalling it, remembering it,
and we are starting to move that information
over into long-term memory.
Then we are listening to the detailed explanation again,
repeating it on day four so that, again,
we are recalling, remembering,
but also, now, relearning and noticing new things
that we missed the first time around
because we've now listened to the story a few times as well
and we understand the language in a slightly different way,
and by relistening to the lesson,
we're relearning that information.
Then in the next two days,
we are once again simply refreshing our memories,
recalling, trying to move those phrases and expressions,
the pieces of language that you've just learned
over into long-term memory
where they are hard-coded and ready for you to use
in your own conversations.
And then on the final day, we do the lesson again,
to again, just to relearn,
to reactivate all that language you've learned,
to get more insight into the whole thing
and just to pick up all the little bits
that you might have missed the first two times.
So really, what we're doing is extremely simple.
We're dumping the language we need in our head
and then we are relearning, refreshing, repeating,
until that becomes stuck in long-term memory.
And that is about it, an absolute bare minimum
seven-day English study routine.
Now, EES members, you're done, go get on with it.
If you're not an EES member,
remember, you can and should apply this logic
to your everyday English learning anyway.
Just make sure that the materials that you are using
are of the highest quality
so that this language that you are dumping in your head
really is the language that you need,
the most useful phrases and expressions,
chunks of language that they possible can be
so that this time is not wasted
because remember, no matter what you do,
if you're learning the wrong thing, it ain't gonna help you.
If you're interested in joining us
in Extraordinary English Speakers,
just click on the link in the description
or head over to doingenglish.com/ees
for more information and the place to sign up.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
is me, Julian Northbrook, signing off from another video.
If you're completely new to this channel, do subscribe.
There's a new video from me everyday at 7:00 p.m. JST.
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If you thought it was crap and hated it,
go ahead, bash that thumbs down button now.
But either way, ma petite fleur,
I will see you in the next video.
Thank you and goodbye.