(pop music)
- Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to English With Lucy.
I've got a slightly different video for you today.
It's something I've had a lot of questions about recently,
and I'm going to talk to you about how I became fluent
in a second language.
So, many of you will already know,
but I'm sure many of you don't know,
I am fluent in Spanish.
If you would like to hear me speak Spanish,
then you can click up here.
I filmed a video speaking in Spanish,
talking about the different,
funny mistakes that I made
whilst I was learning the language.
Now, the reason I am telling you this story in English,
rather than in Spanish,
is because I think it would be a really good opportunity
for you guys to practise your listening,
and I also want you to feel more motivate
with your language learning journey.
Now, I will warn you,
I was very lucky in my situation.
So, I don't want you to think,
"Oh God, Lucy is fluent
"because she had this, this, and this.
"And she's so lucky, and the situation was perfect."
No, I want to just show you and inspire you
and kind of demonstrate
that you can get to a really good level of fluency
in a language that is not your mother tongue.
And I have one thing to say before we get started.
You can sign up for a free audio book
and 30-day free trial on audible.com.
The link is in the description box.
Videos like these are subtitled,
and would be really, really helpful for you
if you want to improve your listening,
understanding, and pronunciation in English.
But if you want to take it a step further,
try an audiobook.
It's something that can be really, really helpful,
and I've had fabulous feedback from all the
Lucifers that have tried it already.
So, here it is,
my journey to fluency in Spanish.
Now, please not that fluency, to me,
does not mean 100% accuracy.
Fluency to me means
that you can speak without thinking.
It is almost as easy as your native tongue.
I dream in Spanish.
I have had relationships in Spanish.
I can make jokes in Spanish.
So, really, I consider myself to be fluent.
You might not agree with that.
I do know that there are some issues with my pronunciation
like (speaks in Spanish).
I could do it,
but sometimes don't put it into the words,
so sometimes I confuse my (speaks in Spanish)
with my (speaks in Spanish).
So, please bear with me.
Right, so let's start the journey as it were.
I grew up in a really, really small village
in the County of Bedfordshire in England.
And
languages were never a big thing at my school.
So, typically, English children
will have to study French at school
from the age of 10,
and then I think you are allowed to give it up
at the age of 14,
or 13, 14.
So, really, you only have to do
three years of language.
This is in state school, not private school.
It's different.
I started off in a state school,
and then I went to a private school for four years,
and then I went back to state.
And I had been studying French,
and I hated it.
I love the French language,
but I found it really, really hard to learn.
I was in a class of 40 children.
And French kind of had the reputation of being
the most boring class ever,
so I kind of went along with that.
And then when I move to my next school,
suddenly, they told me I had to learn two languages.
So, I would continue with French,
and then I could choose Spanish or German.
I asked everyone, and I asked which one is the easiest,
and they told me Spanish was.
So, I joined this class.
It was about 25 girls, because it was a girl school.
I was at the very bottom of the bottom class,
because they'd had a couple of years,
you know, Spanish experience, and I had never...
I'd never even been to Spain at this point.
So, I sat there in all of the classes,
really bored, really unenthusiastic.
I didn't want to learn Spanish.
I couldn't wait to give it up.
I could not wait to stop Spanish.
And I knew that at the age of 16, I would be able to.
I went to every class, I sat there.
I was like...
(speaks in Spanish)
And yeah,
to my surprise, I suddenly found myself
understanding things.
While some of the other students were struggling with
the grammar,
it really made sense to me,
but I didn't want it to make sense.
So, is sat there bored,
but then I couldn't stop thinking outside of Spanish class.
Cool, that present tense
really make sense.
Oh, I'm a poet, and I didn't even realise it.
Anyway, so, I decided,
well, maybe I could get quite a good grade
in the end of year exam
if I actually study something.
So, I started really putting the work in.
And then I found the class to be a bit slow,
so I asked to be moved up to the top level,
and they lat me.
And in the end, I got the highest grade possible
in my exam, age 16.
But I really put the work in,
and I remember, I've always used to have a bath every night,
well, I still do,
but I remember very, very clearly having a bath
and just speaking to myself in Spanish in the bath.
And I would love to hear
what I was saying back then.
But then I decided to carry it on to A level.
And A level is last two years of school, of high school,
and you have to get your A levels
to then go to university.
I did three A levels.
I did biology, chemistry, and
Spanish.
So, from then on,
I decided that I loved Spanish.
And I didn't just love Spanish,
I also decided that Spanish men
were incredibly good looking and sexy.
Sexy.
Really, they were really attractive.
So I started (speaks in Spanish).
I started putting in a lot of effort.
I was really lucky at my high school.
I moved to a state school,
and I was are lucky because
nobody wanted to study languages.
So, I think there were 200 people in my year.
One person studied German,
two people studied French,
and three people studied Spanish.
No one did,
but it was great for me
because I had a really, really small class
with an amazing teacher.
She was called Ms. Flores,
and she was Irish even though her surname was Flores.
She was so inspirational and
pushed me hard in a good way.
And so, after one year of studying Spanish,
I then decided I want to take this to the next level.
So, after one more year of studying Spanish,
I mean I wouldn't have been even at B one level.
It was very, very little, the amount we were doing.
But I decided I want to take this to the next level.
I was working at a pub,
and I was saving up all my money,
and I managed to buy flights
and a Spanish course in Seville.
Now, I don't really know why I picked Seville.
I think it's because my first Spanish teacher
had said that she'd been to Seville and it was nice.
So I thought, "Oh, I'll go to Seville then."
I had no idea that Seville has a very thick
Andalusian accent.
So I go there with my standard school girl Spanish,
and I didn't understand a blood word.
(laughs)
But anyway, I did week at a school
called CLIC.
It's in the International House Chain of Schools.
It was really, really good.
If you want to do an intensive Spanish course,
I would definitely do it there.
And I stayed with a host family.
And I met lots of Spanish people.
And eventually, I met a couple of Spanish guys
that I then became friends with.
So, it was a bit crazy.
I was 17, running around Seville,
going on mopeds
and staying out far too late.
Making it to class,
because I wanted to learn my Spanish.
So, I went first time in August,
which was very, very hot.
I saved up all my money again, after the trip in August,
and I went in October for another week.
And then I went again in April.
So, I was still 17 at this point.
And a guys that I have been friends with for a while,
I met him again out there and,
basically, we fell in love.
We felt pretty hard in love, actually.
We were together for four years.
I won't say his name,
because I'd like to respect his privacy.
But yes, I felt very much in love with a Spanish man,
and luckily, this man didn't speak such good English.
So, our whole relationship was in Spanish.
And we use to WhatsApp together all day long.
I would go out there and see him as often as I could.
I became so close with his family,
and we ended up living together in London.
We lived together in Seville.
We lived together in London again.
And that really was a driving force
in my journey to fluency.
And I would say after about a year of being with him,
I felt completely fluent.
I felt that Spanish was just my natural language.
Because we were living together,
I would go to work and speak in English,
but my home life was always in Spanish.
So, that was a really big motivation.
But, you might be thinking,
"Great Lucy, I'm so happy for you
"that you managed to fined a Spanish boyfriend.
"But how can I apply this to my language learning?"
Well, I've got some tips for you.
The first tip is copying mouth movements.
So, when my ex-boyfriend would speak,
I would always watch his mouth,
and the shapes that it made.
And I started to realise that
the sounds and the shapes were different.
So, in English, we would say the letter D.
(sounding out letter D)
But in Spanish, they would say (sounding out letter D).
So it would be like a flatter shape.
And I notice this watching him.
Because he's from the south of Spain,
he would say, instead of (speaks in Spanish),
he would say (speaks in Spanish).
Instead of saying things like (speaks in Spanish),
he would say (speaks in Spanish).
So, I started really, really copying the sounds he made,
rather than just the words.
Another thing I experienced was
complete immersion.
So, I was thrown into Spain at the deep end.
I mean I had to communicate
because he was someone I wanted to communicate with.
So, when you're looking to learn a foreign language,
really make sure that the motivation is there.
"I want to pass my exam,
"so that I an never study English again."
is not gonna make you fluent.
You really have to think,
"why do I want to learn this language?"
And then work towards that.
Mine was I want to be able to communicate fluently,
and comfortably, and expressed myself to my boyfriend.
So, that was my motivation,
and oh my god, I worked hard towards that goal.
Now, another thing, which you guys can also do
is never let anything slip.
And when I say never let anything slip,
it means don't think,
"Oh god, I don't know that word.
"tomorrow I'll search it."
because you won't.
I've got a video about learning vocabulary
which you can see right here.
But basically, every time I heard my ex-boyfriend say
a phrase or an expression that I didn't understand,
I would stop him and ask him to explain it to me.
And if he couldn't,
I would write it down and I would search it later,
and I was meticulous with that.
You aren't just going to pick up
all of the words and phrases,
because some of them are idiomatic,
they don't make sense.
I remember having a really hard time
with the word (speaks in Spanish).
Like (speaks in Spanish).
And I was like (speaks in Spanish),
what does that mean?
And I remember that he couldn't explain to me,
and I just went on quest, on a road to discovery.
I needed to find out what (speaks in Spanish) meant
and when I should us it.
And I did in the end.
So, yey!
Go me!
Another thing I did was
I wasn't afraid to ask people to repeat things.
And I actually found that people were really kind to me.
And when I ask them to repeat things
or I didn't understand a joke,
they would slow down and explain it to me.
And if they were rude about it,
I didn't want them in my life anyway.
So, another thing I did was
I always watched Spanish YouTubers.
I loved Hola Soy German,
and I also loved Auron Play.
I just find him so funny.
He does prank videos,
and he just basically makes fun of people,
and he's very, very funny.
And I also love El Rubius
who is a gamer.
I just would have them on in the background,
and always listening to that chitter chatter.
I also watched the Spanish news every single morning.
That really helped me as well.
And I read Harry Potter in Spanish
because I love the Harry Potter books in English,
so it was really interesting to read it in Spanish.
And that's just something that you have to remember.
You need to be interested.
You need to have a motivation.
So for me, reading a book about economics in Spanish
would not motivate me at all to learn the language,
and I probably wouldn't finish it.
I probably wouldn't start it actually.
Yeah, so choose things that are really relevant to you.
If you like photography,
but you also want to learn a language,
find somebody doing photography tutorials
in English,
and there we have it.
You've made your own lesson for yourself.
Now, I want to talk to you about a coupe of things
that I love and I wouldn't have
without speaking a second language fluently.
And the first one is I have two personalities.
Honestly, everybody says it.
In English,
I'm not really very vulgar
around...
In English, I'm more professional,
and I think I'm more...
I'm slightly more polite,
especially at the way I speak.
But in Spanish,
because I kind of learned my Spanish from somebody
who said swear words,
and used lots of slang phrases,
and had a thick accent,
well, it kind of developed my Spanish personality as well.
I mean is not forced at ll.
It's just the way I naturally am,
but it's great to have kind of
two sides to me as well.
The second thing is two sets of humours.
And this is great because
English jokes do not translate into Spanish,
and Spanish jokes do not translate into English.
So, English, I make people laugh using puns,
and play on words, and things like that.
And in Spanish, I have to think of other things.
In Spanish, we tell more anecdotes.
We like to make people laugh about
our experiences and things like that.
That's just my interpretation,
but it's great to have different funny stories
that I can tell to different groups of people
that just don't translate.
Also being fluent in the second language has
really opened up my mind.
It's made me much more confident.
Nowadays, if I hear somebody speaking on a train in Spanish,
I'll immediately go up to them and say...
(speaks in Spanish)
And then I'll ask them, "Oh my God, where are you from?"
and that's something that I would not do otherwise.
And just the final thing is that
I really, really enjoy speaking Spanish.
And if you can get to a level
where you enjoy speaking that language,
everything is just going to fly.
You are going to have so much fun.
So yes, guys, this is quite a long video.
I hope that it's motivated you
and inspired you a little bit.
Yes, I had a boyfriend who spoke the language
that I was wanting to learn,
but you don't have to do that.
It might not be possible.
And you certainly shouldn't look for one
just to learn English.
I was very lucky,
but take little bits of information from my story
an apply it to your own story,
which might be starting.
It might have already started.
You might be close to finishing.
And just do the best that you can do
with your situation and your time.
That's it for today's video.
Don't forget to sign up for your audiobook at audible.com
The link is in the description,
and don't forget to connect with me
on all of my social media.
I've got my Instagram and my Facebook,
and I will see you soon for another lesson.
(lips smack)
(pop music)