- How to practise English speaking alone?
(dynamic music)
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls!
Hello!
I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com,
here to help you master the English language
with less stress, less hustle,
and fewer of those damn headaches.
Very common, if not slightly misguided question,
how to practise English speaking alone?
Now, the misconception here is that you are
somehow at a disadvantage if you don't have
people around you to practise speaking English with.
But really that's not true at all
and indeed these four ideas
that I'm gonna share with you in today's video
can and should also be used by people
who do use English in day to day life,
whether it's in business or because you live
in an English speaking country, whatever.
These things I'm gonna share with you today,
you should be doing them at regular intervals
throughout the day by yourself anyway.
Okay, that out of the way, four ways
to practise speaking English alone.
The first is quite simply shadowing.
Shadowing is a brilliant exercise for building
what I call the physical aspect of fluency.
It's not a creative conversation practise,
technique, exercise, whatever it is
you want to call it.
It's not gonna help you to speak English
quickly on the fly in conversation
with a group of people bent to going
back and forth and all that stuff.
Shadowing is gonna help you to get
your mouth moving as it should.
It's gonna help you to train those muscles
to move in the way that they should be moving
when you speak English.
It's gonna get you noticing the rhythm,
the intonation, the tone of English,
where we put the pauses, the gaps
between chunks and phrases and words,
where we speed up for effect,
where we slow down to emphasise a point.
Shadowing is all about getting yourself attuned
to those rhythms and the sounds of English.
Number two, quite simply talk to yourself.
My grandmother always used to say
that talking to yourself
is the first sign of madness.
Well, my grandmother was as crazy as they come
so I guess it takes one to know one.
But don't worry, we're not talking about having
full-on conversations with yourself
looking like some kind of crazy person.
No, we're simply talking about practising
saying the language that you've already
inputted into your head, assuming
that you've done the learning stage right.
And remember, to get good at speaking English
two things have to happen,
constant repetitive learning
with constant repetitive practise.
Input, output, repeat.
Assuming that you've done the input stage right,
you should already have lots of bits of English
in your noggin ready to go.
You just need to get good at saying.
Well, throughout the day practise
saying those things.
Practise the pronunciation.
Get good at just making those sounds
and pronouncing those phrases, expressions,
chunks, whatever it is that they are.
For example.
In next week's Extraordinary English Speakers lesson,
we see the phrase never heard of it
that means quite simply you have no knowledge
of a certain thing that someone is talking about.
Practise saying that at regular intervals
throughout the day.
Never heard of it.
You want to get to the point
where when you say never,
heard of it just flows out from that.
So, where you're not thinking
about each individual word
and putting it together like that.
Also, practise saying in different ways
to give it different emotions, different meanings.
Say it as if you were really irritated.
Huh?
Never heard of it.
Say it as if you were intrigued.
Oh, never heard of it.
Say it as though you were surprised.
Wow!
Never heard of it.
Say it as though you are in the middle
of an argument with your wife
and you're really angry about something.
Never heard of it!
You get the idea.
Just practise saying these things
throughout the day.
Number three.
This one is gonna make you laugh
and yes, it does sound a little bit silly.
Fantasise in English.
This is gonna sound odd
but when I'm walking around
or I'm running, or I'm on my bike,
usually when I'm doing some kind
of physical activity, some kind of exercise,
in my head I'm fantasising about things.
You know, when you're walking down the road
listening to your favourite rock song,
or whatever music it is that you like,
and in your mind you're there on stage
singing that song in front of 10,000 people
and they're all cheering you on
and you're like a rock super star god.
It's exciting.
You get goosebumps and you're like, "Yeah!
"I'm amazing!"
Well, do the same thing in English.
Walk down the road and have conversations
using the language that you know.
Again, it's gonna sound weird
but when I first started to learn Japanese
from a very very early stage, the conversations
in my head started to switch to Japanese.
It wasn't even really a conscious thing.
But even when all I could say in the language
was hello and count to 10,
I did mention myself walking down the road
and then bumping into this cute Japanese girl
and launching into conversation.
(speaks Japanese)
It sounds ridiculous and it is
but it just gets you used to organising
and thinking about the English
you're gonna use in conversation in your head.
This fantasising about chatting in English,
by the way, when done right is also
a fantastic way to train yourself
to stop translating from your native language
to English in your head and think
directly in English to speak English
in a much more natural fluent kind of way.
This is the topic of my book
Think English Speak English.
How to stop performing mental gymnastics
when you speak English.
This book goes into detail about why
you are stuck thinking in your native language
and how that makes it difficult
to speak English fluently and naturally
and importantly, it also shows you
step by simple step how to train yourself
to think directly in English,
as native English speakers do,
to speak English, as native English speakers do.
There's a link in the description
or head over to it, ThinkEnglishSpeakEnglish.com.
It's available on Kindle.
You can read the first bit for free and, as always,
it comes with a complete audio version
to download and listen to, to your heart's content.
Number four.
This one is a little bit more advanced
and a little bit more uncomfortable.
But get your iPhone, your Android,
your smartphone or camera,
whatever it is that you use,
and film yourself speaking about something
you want to get good at speaking about in English.
This is a fantastic way to, first of all,
organise the English that you've got in your head
and say it in the way that you want to say it
to communicate the things that you want to communicate.
But it's also a fantastic way
to build awareness of your own speaking
so that you can watch this recording back,
notice your own imperfections,
the things that you don't say well
and the things that you don't know how to say.
We can then use a technique called
retroactive learning to fill in those gaps.
More on that in a future video.
And of course, my Extraordinary English Speakers members
can and should also submit those recordings
to me for critique so that I can watch through them
and point out all of your mistakes
and imperfections, and then you can take
that information and fix those problems.
So there we go then.
Four ways that you can practise
English speaking alone: shadowing,
talk to yourself, fantasise in English,
and record yourself and review.
Look, the first thing you've got to realise here
is that none of these practise exercises
are going to work if you are not learning
and putting the English you need into your head first.
Somebody left rather sucky comment
on my video yesterday saying,
"Oh, so basically you've just got
"to practise practise practise.
"Bah! I already knew that."
Which was a pretty stupid thing to say
because the point of the video
that I did yesterday was to say
that you need these two stages.
Input, output, repeat.
It's not a case of just practise practise practise.
You need to put the right stuff into here
first, before you can practise that.
Just practising isn't that useful
because well, for example,
if I practised practised practised my French,
I wouldn't get very far because the only French
that I remember from school is "Hello, my little.
Not exactly the kind of thing
that's gonna get me very far in, for example,
a conversation with French speakers,
regardless of how much I've
practised practised practised that.
Two things have to happen.
Input, output, repeat.
Only when you get that balance right
is your English really going to improve.
So don't think you can just do
these practise exercises
and get really really good at English
and skip the hard intensive study part
'cause it don't work like that.
And that, ladies and gentlemen is me,
Julian Northbrook, your beloved host
signing off for another video.
If you've found these four practise ideas helpful,
go ahead, give this video a nice big old thumbs-up.
If you've thought they were crap, whatever,
your problem, not mine.
Go ahead, bash that thumbs-down button now.
If you are new to the channel, subscribe.
And regardless, I will see you,
ladies and gentlemen, in tomorrow's video.
Thank you and goodbye.