hello hello hello everybody my name is Steve Fort and welcome to learn English live where I answer
your questions to help you speak English fast and we have a great question from Tiffany from Vietnam
so let's take a listen to her question hello Steve this is Tiffany I am Vietnamese originally and I'm
living now in the U.S I would like to know some secrets about learning English thank you so much
so I'm going to go all the way from five to one one being the most important secret so you stay
tuned until the end it is better to learn only from native English speakers really so before
we go into this I want to say that I have 20 years experience teaching in Canada Brazil
and France I also started my YouTube channel in 2007 so I have been making YouTube videos
teaching privately at the same time online for 15 years so from my experience and from
my research here is what I found if your basic or pre-intermediate and you have a teacher who
is a non-native speaker but they are mostly bilingual and they're a qualified teacher
then that is a better choice and I will tell you why because it's a lot easier for that teacher to
translate into your language they know what your weaknesses are because they also speak
your language they also know the cultural differences between the two languages that's
best case scenario of course there are instances when it's better to have a teacher when you're
at an advanced level who is a native speaker a qualified native speaker somebody who knows
what they're talking about in terms of grammar vocabulary pronunciation and so on and that's
because you don't want to translate anymore you want to start thinking in English because you're
going to that next level with your English so it's good to have both in both situations it
can also be negative what am I saying I can give you examples of teachers who were not qualified
to teach they were teaching ESL to basic groups in Toronto and they would point at this word here and
ask everyone all 30 of the people in the class to say sweet the case sweet the case this is a
true story and everybody said sweet the case they thought that was the way to pronounce it
and then the next day another teacher came in and said this is a suitcase all the students no on the
other hand let's be fair is that there are many schools that it's difficult because where they are
located in the world to find Qualified native speakers so sometimes they will just hire any
native speaker who does not have much grammar does not have much knowledge of how to teach
and that can be a little dangerous too if you're studying with that teacher at an advanced level
you ask a question the teacher doesn't know the answer teacher what's the present perfect what's
the difference between the present perfect and the simple past I I don't know the second secret
that a lot of people don't know and by the way in case you didn't know I need your help if you
can like this video and leave a comment it helps the YouTube algorithm so that other people can
find this video on YouTube to help them with their English so here's the next secret if I just speak
really fast then native speakers will accept me and understand me as a native speaker and that is
false and I'll tell you a true story where I was teaching a TOEFL class at night and there was a
student who wanted to come into the class and he started talking to me at break time highest if I
just want to say that I really really enjoyed the class but I really wanted to study with
you it is good right this kind of speaking is called faking fluency it's when you try
to pretend to talk like those native speakers in Hollywood movies when they're talking really fast
doesn't work don't try to fake fluency So speaking really fast oh English is an easy language that's
not going to work I have many videos to show you how you can link words and phrases together so
that you can speak English fast so it's possible but there is really no shortcut to it Point number
three my English must be perfect for people to understand me in the United States Canada
that's not true that's not true now it was interesting because I had a conversation
with a student this morning from France and we were talking about how in different countries
it's different so for example I was telling him when I was living in Paris for a year
working there that I went to a restaurant and I asked for a French Canadian poutine poutine
and I said I would like a poutine please what I'm like um Putin
Putin ah Putin that was my experience there so I understand you're worried that there are some
countries where if you don't speak their language perfectly they don't understand or they pretend
to not understand that doesn't happen here here in North America the big cities especially you
can put two or three words together and they are going to understand what you are trying to
say another secret is that you don't have to learn the phonetic alphabet to learn pronunciation wait
what no you don't have to learn the phonetic alphabet and to be honest I refuse to use it
I've tried to use it I've tried using it in different books and the phonetic alphabet has
different sounds representing it in different books different dictionaries and let me tell
you something I've had a lot of students who have come to me and yeah they they know the phonetic
alphabet but can they you use it no that's why they contacted me for pronunciation lessons so I
have developed my own way of using the alphabet you learned the first time in English not the
second phonetic alphabet learn two alphabets one's enough and so I'm going to give you an
example let's take this word here a lot of my students have difficulty saying this word
what do you think it is if you said that it's variable then you are correct but how
do you help people to remember that well you write it like this this is the loud part very
variable variable and if you like mnemonic tricks you can think of a a bull you also need to check
your mouth position and your tongue position those are two things you can't forget all immigrants and
foreigners living in the United States and Canada speak good English that is absolutely
not true and I'm going to tell you why well the reason is that many of the communities that are
around the city core they are one nationality and so people they get in a community like that
living inside North America and after work they only speak their native tongue and when they go
to the supermarket they can speak their native tongue sometimes the signs are in their language
so these people don't have so much of a chance to speak English every day I'll give you an example
I had a Brazilian student and he was living in Florida he had been living in Florida for three
years and he contacted me for English lessons Okay let's go so after the fifth class with him
I asked him a question I said why are you studying English with me if you're living in the United
States He said Steve I'm gonna be going back to Brazil in two months and I would be so embarrassed
to go back to my friends and show them that I can't speak English even after living and working
in the United States for three years this happens a lot more than you think and with my experience
I've seen people that had five years 10 years 15 20 years of living experience in the United
States and Canada and they still needed help with their English because of the reasons that I told
you there's one more reason and that's that when a lot of people come here you can speak English not
perfectly and people will understand you will they correct you if they're a nice person they will but
many people don't have time so that person who is speaking incorrectly is speaking incorrectly
all the time all the time and it becomes a habit a bad habit that many years some of my
students after asked me to help them to break to speak English correct directly so that's a
big secret that a lot of people don't know and if you are still with me I have some other secrets
I have some other secrets that a lot of people don't know about learning English and I will
be releasing that next week so make sure that you subscribe to my channel and check back on
my YouTube page even better you can subscribe for free to quizzes and other bonus videos on
my community I'll put a link below that and I hope to see you in my next video bye everybody