- How can you eat a ginormous whale
that we call English?
(upbeat rock music)
- Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com
Three years ago when I sat down to write my book
Master English Fast
The An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English
Link in the description.
It seemed like such an enormous task to write a book
Master English Fast is about 220 pages long
which is about 40,000 words.
For the first two years, I sat in front of my computer
and starred at the blank screen, thinking to myself,
40,000 words, 40,000 words!
How am I going to write 40,000 words?
A book is huge! It's enormous!
How am I going to get all that writing done?
Writing a book seems like a such a huge impossible task,
but then I got to thinking
because I write a daily email,
the Doing English daily newsletter,
where everyday I send all kinds of tips, stories, anecdotes,
and ideas for mastering the English language.
A link in the description if you want to subscribe.
Each one of those emails is around 300 words long.
I write an email a day
and I've been doing that for about five years.
Well five times 365 is what?
1,825.
Sometimes I wrote more than one email in a day.
Sometimes I wrote like three.
So let's just call it 2,000 emails I've written
over a five year period
at 300 words average each.
That means that over the last five years
I've written at least 600,000 words
about learning,
speaking, mastering the English language.
To put that into perspective
that is the equivalent of 15
books like this.
This one took me just over two years to write.
In the same amount of time
that I sat worrying about
having so much writing to do.
I simultaneously wrote the equivalent
of six books like this.
The point is when you break it down like this
suddenly writing a single 40,000 word book
doesn't seem like that difficult of a task.
I mean in five years I've written 600,000 words.
I've written 15 of these fucking things.
There's a fantastic saying in English.
How do you eat a whale one bite at a time?
This is certainly true of writing a book
and it's also very very true
of mastering the English language.
We have this enormous language.
We have all these different topics we could talk about.
All these different phrases and expressions and chunks.
You know, infinite numbers of things
that we might possibly want to say.
It's so easy to get overwhelmed.
How, how do we achieve such a...
You know, a task like this?
Well, we do it the say way that we eat a whale.
One bite at a time.
So if you're struggling to speak better English.
Here's my advice to you.
Forget about how much you've done.
How much further you've got to go.
To use the whale analogy again,
forget about how much you've got to each
and concentrate on taking just one bite out of that thing
each and every day.
Do one thing that is going
to incrementally improve your English
on a daily basis
and over time the improvements are significant.
For example,
each and every day learn just three chunks of language
and over a year you've learned more than a 1,000.
All these terms combine with each other
to make more bigger chunks of language.
So by doing just this small task each day,
improving incrementally on a daily basis,
over a period of a year.
You have significantly added
to your proficiency in the language,
to your usable bank of common phrases and expressions.
Chunks of language that you can just pull out
and use in your next conversation.
And was it a big overwhelming task?
Did you have to swallow an entire whale in one go?
No.
You took one bite at a time.
Writing a book, just like English,
it's about breaking it down.
Stop looking at the massive task you've got ahead of you;
and just think about how it can be broken down
and done in increments!
If you are unsure about what you should be learning
or indeed how to go about learning it.
Get yourself a copy of my book!
Mastering English Fast
An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English.
This book will show you step by simple step,
what to learn and how to do it.
There's a link in the description.
You can read a first chapter for free.
Then it's available either on Kindle
or as a paperback copy.
Both versions come with a complete audio version of the book
for your listening enjoyment.
If you're new this channel, do subscribe!
I will see you in the next video
and in the meantime,
I am off to eat my whale.