G'day, you mob.
How's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and
everyone wanting to learn Australian English.
Today, I have a special video for you where myself and my friend Charlie from the British
English Podcast are going to be breaking down our nine top tips for building
fluency in English.
Let's get after it.
Okay, guys. So, first up, we should probably define what fluency is.
And this is a bit of a tricky one because there are many different ways of defining what
fluency is. But for the sake of this video, let's just define it as being
able to communicate efficiently, clearly and effectively in
your target language.
Okay. So, being able to put phrases together easily, being able to understand other people
speaking English and having that sort of effortless communication.
Remember, your goal should be C.O.P, communication
over perfection.
So, number one, before we really talk about speaking, one of the most important
things for becoming fluent in a language or improving your fluency in a
language is working on listening comprehension.
If you can't understand what people are saying, then however good you are
speaking, it kind of becomes useless, right.
Because you can't reply after someone's asked something of you or they've said something to you.
So, it's crucial that you understand what other people are saying.
So, what are the best ways of levelling up your listening comprehension in English or any other
language for that matter? Well, we mentioned these in another video that you'll be able to check
out, breaking down our top tips for listening comprehension.
But basically, the takeaway is find resources at your level or a
little bit above and make sure that you have a transcript or the ability to read what
people are saying. So, if you are listening to podcasts, find a transcript so that
you can verify what you're hearing is what's actually being said.
If you're watching TV shows or movies, find subtitles or subtitle
transcripts again so you can verify that what you think you hear is what's being said,
okay, and then repeat, repeat, repeat.
You heard it, guys, repeat, repeat from Pete.
So, top tip number two is especially for those of you who
love watching YouTube videos.
Mhm, I'm talking about you.
Yeah. If you watch a lot of videos, listen to a lot of podcasts or
even read a lot of books, this is wonderful, it
is, but.
There's always a but.
Most of the time, this style of learning is categorised as passive
learning. The opposite of that is active learning.
We need both in our study schedule and it's about balance.
Active learning is such things as speaking classes, taking quizzes,
writing assignments, or getting creative with your study notes.
Anything that enables the mode of creating generally means you are in the active
stage of learning. So, think about what you are doing day-to-day and find a healthy
balance between the two.
Because unless you want to just be able to understand the language but
not use it yourself, you need to be getting as active as possible.
So, enjoy content online as a passive learner, but every time you do
find a way to turn it into an active exercise.
Ideally you want content that challenges you to think for yourself after
consuming it. So, yeah, be aware of the passive and active styles of learning a language
and keep a healthy balance between the two.
Back to you, Pete. All right.
Point number three, pronunciation.
As I went over in point number one, you need to be able to understand what people are saying to
you. Now, I'm talking about you being able to speak and people being
able to easily understand what you're saying.
And this comes by working on your pronunciation so that you can communicate
clearly and effectively.
It's kind of like nutrition and working out at the gym.
Right. You can study a lot of English, but if you don't work on your pronunciation and people find
it difficult to understand you, it's kind of all for nothing.
The same way that if you don't eat healthily whilst going to the gym and trying to work out on your
fitness, your kind of fighting against yourself.
Now, when I say pronunciation, I don't necessarily mean accent, right.
You can model yourself on any accent you want, but ideally you just want to
work on pronouncing things clearly and effectively so that people can
understand you.
Okay. So, it doesn't matter if you're going after an American accent, a British accent, an
Australian accent, a New Zealand accent, whatever it is, just make sure that whatever accent
that you're working on when you're working on your pronunciation, that the goal is to be able to
communicate effectively so that people can understand you.
And we're going to cover this a little bit more in another video about how to speak English
confidently. But before we finish this point, I have a few questions for you to ask
yourself when it comes to working on your pronunciation.
Firstly, are you practising your pronunciation?
Do you have a plan for how to improve your pronunciation?
Which areas of your pronunciation are your weak spots?
For instance, do you have trouble with the "th", the /th/ and /v/ sound in English?
In order to improve, you can do things like get a tutor to give you feedback on
your pronunciation and the areas that you're having trouble with, as well as how to overcome those
issues so that you can speak clearly and confidently in English with good
pronunciation. Ultimately, working on your pronunciation is going to allow you to
build your fluency in English, sound more natural when speaking with other people in
English and as a result, build your confidence when speaking English.
So, pronunciation is very important.
God I look a bit weird in the camera today, don't know what it is.
My nose is so bent.
Look at that. Look at that. Can't remember what I was meant to be talking about.
Oh, yeah, to do with pronunciation, if you want to improve your pronunciation, then
don't be afraid to talk out loud to yourself like I was just doing
then. If you don't want to sound like a complete psycho all the time
like I do, then practising internal dialogue is a
legitimate alternative.
But seriously, this is one of the biggest differences between
polyglots and people who only speak one language, maybe you can
say monoglots.
Polyglots talk to themselves all the time out loud for pronunciation purposes
because it seriously helps internalise sentence structure, the
grammar, as well as intonation, rhythm and cadence of a language.
So, whenever you get the chance or some time to yourself, like when you go
to the toilet perhaps, have a chat with yourself in English, become the
commentator of your life, and you could narrate what you're doing.
You could do this internally perhaps, probably best to, you could say, oh,
I'm going to the supermarket.
I'm entering the supermarket right now.
I'm grabbing the trolley.
I want an apple.
I'm going to go get an apple.
I've got the best apple of the bunch in front of me.
I'm tempted to eat this apple right now, but
yeah, I'm afraid of being judged before I buy it.
And then you could introspect on top of that instead of just narrating, you could sort of,
you know, play with your imagination.
You could think beyond it.
So, you could think about where apples come from.
You can answer it in your head.
Wonder where Apple's come from?
And if I was an apple, would I prefer to be a bright green one
or a red one?
Is there racism within the apple kingdom?
I hope not.
Do you get the idea?
It's fun, it's free, so next time you see someone talking to themselves on the train
about apple racism, you don't need to assume they're crazy because they
could be just simply learning a 2nd language just like you.
Unless you're on the subway in New York.
Probably best not to assume everyone's learning a 2nd language there.
You could land yourself in a bit of trouble there.
Yeah. Maybe not in there.
Maybe not. Okay, point number five, focus on vocab
expressions and your most common phrases, things that you want to say or that
you say in your native language all the time.
When it comes to learning English, like with any language, you don't have to learn every single
word, every single phrase, every single expression that can be imagined in that language.
Ideally, you want to focus on the stuff, the language, the vocab, the expressions that
you want to use, that you already use in your native language on a daily basis to
communicate. So, how can you do this?
Obviously, you can get a tutor and ask them for natural ways to phrase things.
You might want to learn how to better order food or maybe how to give your
opinion, those sorts of things.
You can use websites like 'Reverso' and 'Tatoeba' where they effectively
mine common phrases in different languages and you can find how
they're being used and then just put them into your repertoire so that when you're
speaking with someone, you can just whip out that phrase.
The other thing is to find content like we were going over in point one
where you are able to read what you're listening to on podcasts, audio books,
TV shows and movies, and then take the phrases, take the vocab that
you hear being used and that you think you want to use or will use in
daily, everyday English.
And then lastly, there is a process called Building Your Islands.
I'll go over this in other videos and we will have covered this a bit more deeply in the listening
comprehension video and how to improve that.
But basically, you want to build vocab islands around
topics that you're talking about on a regular basis, your family, your job, your
passions. You want to focus on these things more than just anything and everything
in English that you don't already know.
Are you ready for top tip number six?
This one is clever.
It's a very clever one.
And I definitely didn't think of it myself, but I did think it would be great
for you as a language learner.
See, I was reading a self-help book and I write,
desperate.
Called 'Atomic Habits', which teaches you how to become aware of your
everyday behaviours and implement new successful habits
and let go of the unwanted ones.
So, this tip is to build a lot of small positive behaviours, to
gradually create a learning routine that feels like you're just going
about your usual day.
But in fact, that now includes these atomic habits of
learning English.
Now, most people know what a habit is and have been told that
creating good habits is, well, good.
But what we're often not told is how to do it or at least
how to do it in a realistic way.
So, this book, 'Atomic Habits' breaks things down into bite size,
understandable information so that you can follow the instructions step by step
and indeed create good habits.
So really, this top tip is to read the book 'Atomic Habits', to ensure you
create a daily study routine.
But to example one technique from this book, I'll talk about
habit stacking.
Habit stacking. So, what you do is you bring your awareness to a habit that you
do already. So, for me, one is that
when I go to the toilet, I go on Tik-Tok.
Now, if you don't like this behaviour, you state that every time I
do this behaviour, I will do a new behaviour.
So for me, I want to get better at using the present perfect in
Spanish, so I could set myself a new habit of typing
out three example sentences using the present perfect after watching
maybe one minute of Tik-Tok.
I allow myself 60 seconds of that and then straight after I've got to write out or type
out these example sentences using the present perfect in Spanish.
Then after succeeding a couple of times and getting that satisfaction from completing it,
I can aim to actually remove the Tik-Tok videos
from the habit because I'm actually getting more satisfaction from creating
a new present perfect sentence in Spanish.
So, when I go to the loo, I now think, oh, it's time to practise my present perfect
in Spanish. Another example could be when I go to the gym, I
listen to music.
Fairly normal, right? Well, how about after listening to three tracks
or completing an exercise, I will complete one deck of
flashcards on 'Quizlet'.
Pretty reasonable. Now, this is just scratching the surface of the book
'Atomic Habits', so go check it out and find that way that works for you to
achieve an effortless and enjoyable daily study routine.
But yeah, that technique, habit stacking is working well for me and I
highly recommend it. All right.
Point number seven.
Now, Charlie made a really good point about building habits and the importance of
having habits so that you can improve your language gradually and steadily over
time. Now, studies have been done on habit building and it actually takes something
like 60 or more days for people to build a habit.
It takes time, about two months.
So, when studying, it's very good to try and build structure, have a daily
routine that you can adhere to, that isn't too much that it feels like a chore
and that isn't too little, like you don't really get anything done.
When you have this structure, it's good to have both short-term and long-term goals.
What are you trying to achieve today?
What are you trying to achieve this week?
And what are you trying to achieve over the next two to three months?
So, you could think about this like, am I working on my pronunciation this
week and what are my goals for the end of the week?
Next week am I working on my listening comprehension?
And again, what are my goals?
And maybe for the rest of this month, I'm working on vocab and
expressions and just overall fluency in speaking.
And how can I measure this?
And what are my goals again with improving this?
It's also good to mix things up and try and keep things interesting.
Don't just consume the same content.
Don't just study the same thing.
Change things up, give yourself a change of scenery as well.
Go outside, do it elsewhere, speak with different people, just mix it up and keep it
fun. And speaking of mixing it up, tip number eight is to get good
at improvising and saying the same thing in many different ways.
Get flexible, get comfortable with the idea of
adaptation. To get good at this, you can actually download the ebook and audio
book called 'The Six Step Exercise to Efficient Language Learning',
which I created a while back that is perfect for this tip.
It's all about paraphrasing effectively, and it's such a good way to get
active with passive reading materials, and it helps your brain
connect all those phrases that you're learning together.
So, check out the link here.
If not, it will be down in the description box and enjoy it.
Oh, and Pete
has the last top tip for you.
All right, and point number nine, guys, this is tied in with point number
three when we were talking about pronunciation and point number five, about expanding your
vocab and building your islands.
Get feedback.
This can be by finding a tutor on websites like 'italki' or 'Verbling'.
It can be by finding language partners or just asking other people who speak
English, whether they're native speakers or advanced non-native speakers, for their
advice so that you can get feedback on your weak points, your
strong points and what it is that you can do to improve.
So, you might want to ask some things like, what aspects of my pronunciation need work?
Where are there holes in my vocabulary?
And I am sort of falling down when it comes to conversations and my
fluency. Am I able to move between topics and carry a conversation well?
And if not, what can I do to improve that?
Use these people to help build your islands as well.
Again, just ask for feedback on things like the way that you form
sentences, what you're talking about, the phrases that you use, the grammar you use.
Ultimately, feedback is going to be the thing that allows you to improve
rapidly. So, just be shameless guys.
Ask as many questions of as many people as you can when it comes to improving your English.
All right, guys. So, that was it for this video.
Have we forgotten anything?
Are there any other really good points that you know and that you suggest people do when trying to
improve their fluency?
I definitely recommend that you leave those in a comment below so that we can keep chatting about
this topic, as I find it incredibly fascinating and important.
Thank you so much, Charlie, for being on this episode.
Guys, go and check out his podcast and YouTube channel, the British English podcast,
and I will see you next time.
Peace.