- Let's rap a little more
about advanced English conversation
but not before we roll that intro.
(upbeat, energetic music)
- Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening,
depending on what part of this big wide world of ours
you happen to be in right now.
I'm Julian Northbrook, this is Doing English.
This video is somewhat of a continuation
of yesterday's video and indeed I'm actually gonna
take one of the points that I discussed
in yesterday's video, check it here if you missed it,
and go a little bit deeper into it.
Partly because I feel it warrants more depth
than what I gave it in that video
'cause I had a lot to talk about in that video
and I talked about it quite quickly.
But also partly because I don't want people
to misunderstand what I said yesterday.
I wanna clarify a couple of points.
If you wanna be advanced when you speak English.
If you wanna have advanced English conversation,
or have English conversations at an advanced level,
however you wanna say it,
simply learning advanced English isn't gonna do it for you.
This is not to say that learning new words,
new phrases, new expressions,
difficult, not so commonly used words,
or what have you, little interesting snippets of language,
phrases, expressions, slang, idioms, chunks, whatever.
This is not to say that learning more stuff is a bad thing.
Hell no, it's a good thing, it's always a good thing.
And you should always be aiming to learn more,
and more, and more, and more, and more,
always learning new, new, new.
But also paying attention to the old, old, old as well.
The point that I wanted to make in yesterday's video,
and what I really wanna make in today's video
is that learning new stuff is great,
but you have to repeat the old stuff too.
Not only that, but learning difficult, advanced language,
difficult words, phrases and expressions
that people have never heard of before,
hard grammar, or, I don't know, however you wanna put it.
Learning those things is fine,
but don't think that that is enough, 'cause it's not.
Rather what is most important is not learning
more advanced stuff, but having
an advanced command of the basic, fundamentals of language.
Being able to take that basic, simple,
easy to understand language, and execute your English.
Speak in clever ways, in advanced ways.
That is you can take the phrases and expressions
and the words and the language that you've already got,
and use them in conversation at a very high level.
If you can do this, you will
be very powerful in conversation,
and you will have very effective conversations.
But knowing a lot of difficult words
and difficult rules, and hard stuff and then,
kind of just bodging that today when you speak
in a way that is really disfluent,
and badly structured, and not clear or concise,
or even interesting at all,
isn't gonna make you seem like an advanced speaker,
it's just gonna make you seem like somebody
who's memorised a lot of crap,
and doesn't actually know how to use that crap well.
Perfect example of this, I once had a student,
right back in the day, we're going back years,
and years, and years, and years here.
And he was a very, very clever guy.
He had a perfect score on the TOEIC test.
That is hard.
Most native speakers can't get a perfect score
on the TOEIC test, which says a lot
about it, but hey, whatever.
He had a perfect score on the TOEIC test.
He'd graduated from one of the top universities in Japan.
He was a very, very clever guy.
He knew words that I couldn't even fathom the meaning of.
He would take these difficult words that he knew,
and he would put them together in insanely
long, complex, grammatical structures
to explain the simplest, and most basic of things.
Although he knew the meaning of all this stuff
that he had in his head, the way
that he put it together, was so convoluted
that you really couldn't actually understand
a word of what he wanted to say.
Again, when it came down to it,
most of the time, the things
that he was actually saying weren't even that complex.
They were actually quite simple, basic, everyday things
but he'd focus first and foremost
on these big, complicated words
and that is how he spoke.
I mean to say something simple and something basic, like
wow, it's raining today, he would come out with something
like, we're seeing unfavourable atmospheric conditions
and severe levels of precipitation today.
What?
Come again?
And that is how he structured and put together
every single sentence that he used.
This is a really, really extreme case, I know.
But a lot of people fall into this trap.
Into believing that in order to sound sophisticated,
in order to sound clever, this is how you've gotta speak.
You've gotta use these difficult words,
these difficult constructions,
and that really, really isn't the case.
It actually just makes you sound kind of odd.
Again, what is important is not
that you have a basic command of advanced English,
but that you have an advanced command
of basic English first and foremost.
Once you've got that solid command
of the fundamentals, then you can start
to play around with that, and you an start
to add difficult words, and difficult phrases,
and difficult expressions to it
in order to play with the language
to have fun with it.
For example, you can go from, wow, it's raining,
to, wow, that's some precipitation I can see out there.
You see how that works?
You've gotta get the base right first.
It's like building a house.
You know, what you're really excited about
is the tiles you're gonna use on the roof
and what colour you're gonna paint the walls,
and the fancy trimmings that you're gonna put
around your windows, and what kind of wood
your door's made out of, and things like that.
That's stuff's all well and good though,
but if you just skip the foundation of the house,
you put a shitty foundation in there
and you bang the rest of the house up
so you can skip straight to the trimmings,
well it doesn't matter how good your house looks,
'cause as soon as the wind blows
the whole thing is just gonna collapse in on itself.
This is exactly the same for you and your English.
You don't want your English collapsing in on itself
with the slightest puff of wind because you've skipped
that foundation of the fundamentals
in order to just stick the trimmings on there.
Now this is what we are gonna be covering in
Small Talk Superhero: Mastering the Art
of Advanced English Conversation,
live in London on June the 9th.
We are gonna go deep into conversational technique.
How native speakers speak in conversation
in these clever ways.
We're gonna start looking at these
advanced conversation techniques
that you can then use with the language that you've got
to get this very strong foundation,
and then we can start looking at how you can start
adding the trimmings to that to make it all cool
and all fancy.
You can go out there, have your conversations,
sound interesting, be interesting,
and dare I say, have a lot more fun
speaking English at the same time.
Again, it's gonna be live in London,
June 9th, 1:00 p.m. until 3:30.
People who come along are gonna get a manual
for the day and then to take home with them.
That manual's gonna have all the notes
from everything I talk about,
as well as examples of language
and samples of dialogues and conversations
and basically as much as I can cram into it.
You're also gonna get a complete recording
of the event to take home if you want it,
edited anyway, you'll get it.
As well as a 30-minute follow up call with me on Skype.
At the time of recording, which I will admit
is a couple of days before I'll be publishing this,
there are three places left, and if you wanna grab one,
head over to SmallTalkSuperhero.com
or click on the link in the description.
Got a question about English conversation
whether basic or advanced or otherwise?
Ask in the comments and I will do my best
to cover as many of them as I can
in a future video.
That then is it from me, Julian Northbrook
signing off from another video.
If you found this useful, go ahead, give it a thumbs up.
If you thought it was crap,
God knows why you watched all the way to the end,
but go ahead and hit that thumbs down button now.
If you're new to this channel, subscribe.
And regardless, I will see you,
same time, same place tomorrow, good-bye.
(upbeat, energetic music)
If you missed yesterday's video
where I gave you five tips for more advanced
English conversation, you can
and should check that video here.
If you want more information about Small Talk Superhero
or to register, just click on the button here.