For many of us, one of the goals of achieving fluency in a language
is to be able to think in that language.
When I became fluent in Spanish, I realized that I no longer was thinking in English.
I was thinking only in Spanish and coming up with words and ideas by using Spanish.
But if you don't have a lot of opportunities to interact with native English speakers, you
may be wondering how you can achieve fluency in English.
Today we're going to talk about how to start thinking in English.
Thinking in English is really going to be something that's going to help you feel more
fluent and more confident when you have the opportunity to speak English, whether that's
when interacting with native speakers, being interviewed in English for a job interview,
or to enter a university or graduate program, or just when talking with somebody online
and interacting with people using your favorite language, English.
I'm going to share some of my tips and suggestions to help you start thinking in English, but
first I want to talk about where this question comes from.
I receive emails and comments almost every day where people say, when I try to speak
English, I feel like I forget my words.
I don't feel like the words are coming or I feel like I start translating
from my native language.
How can I learn to think in English?
This is what I call an "access problem" and this can also be a problem for you even if
you're living in English and you're speaking in English every single day.
What happens is that you know that you have the vocabulary somewhere in your memory bank,
somewhere in this wonderful computer of our brain, but you're not able to access this
information because it's not readily available.
Now, I want to assure you this happens to native speakers as well.
There are times when the words just don't flow out of my mouth.
I know it's hard to believe, but it is true.
There are times I just don't feel articulate, where I'm having trouble accessing the vocabulary
that I know that I have.
So there are some things you can do in order to prepare your brain to access the information
so that when you need to use it in order to write fluently or to speak fluently and English,
it's more available.
Let's talk about my suggestions.
So first I want to talk about writing in English because this is something
that's accessible to anybody, anywhere.
Like I said, a lot of people say, well, the solution to speaking English more fluently
is to speak more English, but if you don't have the opportunity,
you may be feeling a little frustrated.
Something that is available to you is the ability to write in English.
You can write on anything.
You can write on a napkin, on a piece of paper, in a notebook, on your computer or typing
into an app on your phone.
Writing is something that you can do from just about anywhere.
You're probably asking me, well, Kim, what should I be talking about?
What should I be writing about?
When I think about writing in English, I think about writing academic papers, or I think
about writing emails or quick text messages to my friends.
What should I be doing in order to improve my fluency?
What should I be doing in order to start thinking in English so that the ideas start flowing?
Now, I want to encourage you.
This is also something that people do when they want to become better writers, regardless
of the language, regardless of whether they're native speakers.
What you need to do is challenge yourself to access the language.
And the way you're going to start accessing all that vocabulary you've spent years acquiring
is that you're going to need to give yourself some sort of prompts.
I encourage you to search Google for "journaling prompts" and come up with lists of questions
that you can start writing about.
And what you want to do is sit down and set a timer on your phone, maybe five or 10 minutes,
and you're just going to force yourself to write in English for those five or 10 minutes.
It may seem challenging at first, but the more you do it, and the more you practice
as much as you can, hopefully on a daily basis, you're going to start accessing more vocabulary.
If you don't have the vocabulary, you're going to start finding other ways to use it.
I encourage you to review my video on how to "use your words" in order to
sound more fluent when speaking English.
That will help you.
You just need to access that vocabulary, start searching for the vocabulary or another way
to express it.
So look for journaling prompts - that's a really great way to get started.
Another thing that's really helpful to help get ideas flowing and help you start thinking
in English is to write lists.
You can search Google for things to write lists about.
Lots of people have suggestions because this is a great way to access your creative power.
And you can make lists about your bucket list, for example, and talk about all the things
you want to achieve in your life.
You can write a list of places that you want to visit and maybe describe the reasons why.
You can describe all of the foods you've ever tasted and
give some sort of details about it.
That will help you access vocabulary related to food and related to descriptions.
Maybe you can write a list about every person that you've ever dated or every friend you've
ever had, and then try to write some descriptions about them.
Write something about their personality or things that they did.
All of this is going to help you access that kind of vocabulary that you need,
just through writing.
Like I said earlier, you probably want to set a timer so that
you don't feel overwhelmed or exhausted.
Set a timer for five or 10 minutes and then you can increase it gradually as you feel
that it's easier to access your vocabulary.
Another tip I have for you in order to improve your writing is just to keep a journal.
What I mean by keep a journal is write about your daily experiences.
You can write one page, two pages, three pages, or even more,
just writing about what happened to you that day.
This was a suggestion that was given to me when I moved to Argentina
in order to study there.
They said, if you really want to become fluent in Spanish, you should keep a journal about
your experiences in Argentina, but write it in Spanish.
This definitely helped me start accessing the vocabulary I already had, but I wasn't
able to produce regularly.
I did write for quite a long time in Spanish and even today I tend to write a little bit
in both languages because sometimes it's just easier to express ideas from another culture
in the language that you learned them in.
So you can definitely get started journaling.
There's all kinds of tips about journaling, but the easiest is to just start with your
daily experiences and your daily routine, and then you can start building from there
and start philosophizing, start talking about past experiences,
things you hope to happen in the future.
Like I said, there are lots of journaling prompts, but just writing about your own experience
is a great way to get started accessing the language that you have and
being able to think in English.
So now let's talk a little bit about speaking.
Now, one of the biggest challenges for people is that they have very little opportunity
to speak English and when they do have opportunities to speak English, it often feels high pressure,
like a job interview.
So what I want to encourage you to do is to practice your speaking, even if you don't
have the opportunities to interact with native English speakers, or you can't find a conversation
club locally, or it's too much work to find a conversation partner online.
Remember, there are lots of opportunities to find language exchange partners online.
You could probably find somebody who wants to practice with you.
Even if you don't have the time to socialize with people in English, there are a lot of
different things you can do in order to maximize your time and be able to access the vocabulary
that's in your memory, but that you just don't use on a regular basis.
So something I often encourage my clients to do is to learn how to
talk about everyday processes.
So it's similar to what I mentioned about writing in a journal.
I encourage you to speak out loud to yourself and explain what you're doing as you're doing
it, as you're going through your normal everyday routine.
Go through making a cup of tea or coffee and talk through the process.
You'll probably notice that there are vocabulary words you don't quite have yet, that you may
need to either access, look up or find another way to explain.
You can talk through a recipe when you're cooking your traditional meal that you really
love or cooking your spouse's favorite meal or something that your kids really enjoy.
You can talk through making this particular recipe.
You can talk through something that you do every single day at the office and just speak
through the process so that you can describe it in English.
Remember, the things that are most familiar to us and most natural to us in our native
language are often hardest to express in our second language because
it's not vocabulary we use frequently.
We're usually thinking about it in our native language.
Another suggestion I have for you is to practice storytelling.
This is something that you can practice just deciding to tell stories about yourself, about
your childhood, about your family, about experiences you've had in the past, about things that
you know about yourself, about things that you've done recently.
You can just tell a story about this particular situation and this will encourage you to use
transition expressions, encourage you to use grammar in order to logically order the particular
story that you're telling.
The goal is to just try to tell the story in a way that makes sense, but it doesn't
really have to be perfect in any sort of way.
You can make mistakes and go back and continue to fix what you're trying to say
to make things more clear.
This is how native speakers actually tell stories.
We don't tell stories in a logical order, most of the time.
We remember details and refer back to them and then we circle back to our original point.
We may get distracted or someone asks a question and we have to come back to the story.
Don't worry about following a logical order, just try to make sure
that you tell the whole story.
Something else that can be helpful in order to start accessing this vocabulary and start
thinking in English is to practice typical questions.
You may want to practice interview questions if you find yourself using English a lot in
professional or academic situations where you need to talk about yourself and your strengths
and your weaknesses.
Or you may want to practice conversation starters or lists of questions that are good for conversation.
You can search on Google and find conversation starters, conversation questions,
and start collecting a list.
There are hundreds of thousands of potential questions you can ask and if you just try
to start talking about them, you're going to start accessing the vocabulary that you
already have in your memory and start filling in the gaps by explaining things you don't
quite have the vocabulary for.
Like I said, you do not need to interact with another person in order to start practicing
your speaking in English, in order to start thinking in English.
You can do this on your own.
You can record yourself using your cell phone or using an app on your computer or you can
just speak out loud.
I think it feels a little more normal to record yourself because you feel like you're doing
something productive, but the goal is to just access that language.
Just keep talking.
Keep using your words and order to start thinking in English.
It is really important for you to understand that perfection is not the goal.
You do not need to sound perfect.
You shouldn't be editing yourself as you're writing or as you're speaking.
You should be just trying to continue to access that vocabulary, access that language, access
that knowledge that you already have.
The goal is to avoid perfection.
The goal is to make as many mistakes as possible because then you're going to allow the vocabulary
to just flow through you.
As you become more fluent and as you start thinking in English, you're going to fix your
mistakes more automatically, but as you're starting to develop that skill, you don't
need to worry about perfection.
Even professional writers who are native speakers of English don't always edit as they write.
They write and then they go back and edit because the most important thing
is getting the ideas out.
So I hope this video has helped you feel a little more inspired to try
to start thinking in English.
I hope you try out some of my suggestions.
If you do, please be sure to leave me a comment and let me know how it's going.
Remember, your goal is to start thinking in English.
It's to move past intermediate to become advanced and even fluent in English, and that's going
to take work, that's going to take effort, but it is possible and you can do it no matter
if you have opportunities to speak with native English speakers.
Once again, I'm Kim from englishwithkim.com.
I am your guide to the essential conversation skills you need to sound more natural in English.
If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and share it with a friend.
I look forward to hearing your comments and hearing how things are going.
Have a good one.
Goodbye!