G'day, you mob.
How's it going? My name is Pete, and this is Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and
everyone wanting to learn Australian English.
Today, I have a very special episode for you where myself and Charlie from the
British English podcast, we are going to be breaking down our top tips for how to speak
English confidently, for how to build confidence when speaking English.
So, let's get into it.
All right. So, the first tip here is preparation.
Like with studying an exam, it is much more effective to prepare ahead of time
than just cram a few days before the exam, which was pretty much what I always did.
But, you know, do what I say, not what I do.
So, make sure that you're studying on a regular basis, that you're preparing yourself on a
regular basis. There's no secret formula for getting better at a language like with
getting better with any other kind of hobby or activity, you just have to put in the
time and improve things.
So, confidence comes with being able to communicate effectively and clearly
in English.
There are two aspects to communication, sending and receiving information
i.e., speaking and listening.
Therefore, in order to prepare your English and to build confidence, it's incredibly
important that you work on both listening skills and speaking skills
together. It's not enough to just have one of these that are levelled up like crazy and the other
one all the way down here.
They both need to be on par at a good level.
So, ask yourself these questions; What's your current plan for improving your speaking
and listening comprehension in English?
How long do you want to spend studying each day where it's still going to be fun, but also
effective? Which topics do you need to understand and speak about on a regular basis?
Which areas or topics in your English listening and speaking are the
weakest and need the most work?
What kind of content can you consume in order to build up the vocab that you need to understand
and to use in these topics?
Lastly, as we went over in the 'How to Build Your Fluency' episode, make sure that once you've
asked yourself these questions and you start to structure a study plan for yourself, aim to
make it fun and to make it last a long time.
Okay, you want to build a habit and it takes about 60 days to do so.
That's when you're going to get the real results.
So, the next tip we have for you is moving away from the logistics of your
studies and structure of your scheduling.
And instead, we're going to look inwards, we're going to get the
Tibetan bowls out and do some chanting and ask
you, are you everything that you imagined you could be?
Okay, I won't go that far.
But I do want to ask you why you think you lack confidence in your English
? Is that lack of confidence warranted?
Meaning, is it logical or fair to have that lack of confidence?
I mean, considering you can understand this video means you have already achieved a
huge amount of success in your language learning journey.
So, why don't you give yourself enough credit for what you've achieved with your
English? And I'm guessing because you're watching this video, you only focus on what
you still want to achieve.
Am I right? Well, when I finished reading psychology at university,
I found great pleasure in a practise and way of being called
mindfulness. So, much so that I started creating mindfulness
workshops for eight-year-old kids, as I believed it would be planting a seed of
happiness in anyone and everyone who adopted mindfulness into their daily
lives. And to do it at a young age would be the answer to
, you know, the world's problems.
Ironically, I wasn't patient enough to see this idea through,
and I also wanted to see a bit more of the world whilst young.
Hence, I started teaching English and travelling around the world, starting in South
America. But I still have a huge respect for this way of being
and thinking.
Now, 10 years ago, I would have assumed I'd need to explain what mindfulness is.
But in the last four or five years, I've seen more mindfulness and meditation apps come out
than I can count up to in French.
Let's see.
Un, duex, trois...
21 apparently.
So, more than 21 meditation and mindfulness apps have
launched in the last 4 or 5 years.
But if you still don't know of this eastern and largely Buddhist practise,
the idea is to train yourself to stop thinking in the future
or the past and to start appreciating the now.
Which really calms our internal dialogue and allows us to be much more
content with life rather than focussing on the things we don't have in life
yet. That thing we did wrong in the past.
The worry that you're not good enough for the thing in the future.
All of these anxieties become less intense, and this is why mindfulness, if
done right, is something we can use towards gaining confidence in speaking a
foreign language.
Personally, it really helped me feel more grounded in life, meaning well
balanced and kind of more sensible, less erratic in my decision
making, I'd say.
Now, I said, if done right earlier, because mainstream media has gotten
on the bandwagon with this approach and have created all these easy to
access apps, which is good and bad.
It's good because it means people who take to mindfulness smoothly and easily
and they get it, or people who have already been introduced to mindfulness
before can really benefit from a wide array of resources all on
their phone. But most people I've seen download an app, listen
to a couple of guided meditations or mindfulness sessions, and then they give up because
it ironically hasn't grabbed their attention and they go away thinking,
yeah, I've tried that approach, but it's not for me.
But really, I challenge those people and that kind of thought, as this approach to
life has been around for ages, for millennia.
But social media that has only been around, what, 15 years, if that,
and the fast pace of life that most of us have been encouraged to take really is
a million miles away from mindfulness.
So, it's no wonder most people don't get it straight away.
And I want to stress, this isn't a quick fix.
You're not going to sit down and have one session and be cured.
It's not like an injection, it's not a vaccine against anxiety.
But as having more confidence when speaking a foreign language is such a
fundamental to reaching the level that you probably want to get to.
I highly recommend taking mindfulness based cognitive therapy
seriously, especially if you find yourself lacking confidence when
speaking. Now I'll leave a link in the description box below to a book that helped me
better understand mindfulness.
And I will also be creating guided mindfulness sessions directly
related to learning English soon.
So, join my email list on the BritishEnglishPodcast.com, if you are interested
in hearing about that one day in the future.
Number three, like with meditation, as Charlie went over.
It may sound a little strange, but having a positive mindset is incredibly important here
when it comes to things like making mistakes in English.
So many of my students tell me about not wanting to speak or second guessing themselves when
they are speaking because they're afraid of making mistakes.
Look, I know it's easier said than done, but one of the biggest things that you need to do is build
a positive mindset around making mistakes and instead of viewing them
negatively, like, oh, my God, that's embarrassing, I wasn't perfect.
You need to view it as more, wow, I've just made a mistake and I'm going to use this to learn
something and improve myself.
Remember my acronym, COP, C.O.P, Communication Over
Perfection. No one expects nor wants you to be perfect.
They simply want to be able to understand and communicate with you.
Remember, if you can understand this video and you can follow things, your English is probably at a
level where the majority of the mistakes you're making won't affect
communication. They're going to be minor things like verb conjugation or
pronunciation. If someone needs to verify what you've said or they're not quite sure, they'll
just ask you to repeat yourself.
And even myself as a native English speaker, I make errors all the time, I've probably made some in
this video and people often ask me to repeat myself as well.
And it's probably the same thing for you in your native language.
So, the most important thing here is have a positive mindset and also realistic
expectations.
You're not trying to be a spy.
Your English doesn't need to be perfect 100% of the time, no one's is.
So, be nicer to yourself and try and view mistakes as steppingstones
towards improvement.
And going on from Pete's point about accepting mistakes as a learning
experience. You want to find somebody or many people to practise your
language skills with, be it a language tutor or language partner.
And isolate specific topics to build your vocabulary islands.
If you haven't heard us talk about these islands before, it is
a metaphor of your knowledge base regarding different topics.
You might have an island that is so big it rivals the height of Mount
Everest, in regards to your work related language, be it niched
to an industry or in general, corporate business English.
But if you swim away from that island, do you have any other islands around to save you or
are you going to drown?
I hope you don't drown and you have an island that you can swim to if we were
to talk about sports.
How big is your island on sports vocabulary or wildlife
or scientific research, TV series, describing a book, all of these things.
Do you have the vocabulary to support these kind of topics?
And you want to be building vocabulary to support all of these types of
conversations.
So, find a language partner or tutor and take turns talking about a
single area of interest or personal topic for about 1 minute
without stopping.
Challenge yourself to that.
And then you could even quiz one another on a specific topic for around 5
minutes, where you ask your partner as many questions as possible
around that topic.
And then have open discussions where you work, not just on your islands of
vocabulary, but also how to link them together and keep
transitioning between all of these different topics.
You can check out our video up here or in the description box on how to
build English fluency to learn more about building your islands of
vocabulary. But going back to practising with a language partner, pay attention to where you
or your partner has trouble and keep working on improving one another's fluency
around these weak spots.
You could even record the conversations you have, especially if you're doing it online and review
them later and ask yourself, where could you have made improvements?
Where are you doing well, though?
You got to remember that. And how are you progressing generally?
Then when it comes to speaking with people elsewhere in the real world, you'll be able to do so with
much greater confidence, knowing that you are able to handle yourself in a lot
of different topics.
All right. Point number five, pronunciation.
Now, we've talked a little bit about this in the previous videos on how to improve your listening
comprehension and your fluency in English.
But pronunciation is incredibly important when it comes to confidence, when it comes to
speaking confidence.
Why is that the case?
A big part of why a lot of the students I've had in the past lack confidence when speaking
English is because they worry that people aren't going to understand them or they're worried that
people are going to ask them to repeat themselves and then it's going to be embarrassing or an
awkward situation.
The key here really isn't to shy away from those situations
because ultimately that just leads to you speaking less English.
The key here is to keep working on your pronunciation.
It's something that you're going to have to do for a very long time.
It's something that I do in both French and Portuguese.
It just never ends.
It's kind of like going to the gym, you can't just do a 12-week transformation where you
work out and you eat healthily for 12 weeks and then you just get to keep the body that you get at
the end of that and your fitness for the rest of time.
For the rest of your life, you pretty much have to keep going to the gym and eating well.
It's the same with pronunciation in a foreign language.
It's something that you need to pay attention to and practise on a regular basis
so that communication becomes effortless and easy.
And you're going to build that confidence because you're not going to second guess yourself.
You're not going to be worried the people won't understand you.
So, ask yourself questions like, what areas of your pronunciation are weakest
and can be improved?
Are there any specific sounds that you have the most difficulty either hearing or producing
? Say, minimal pairs like the vowel sounds /i/ and /e/ or maybe the
consonant sound /θ/ the "T-H" sound, right.
And /ð/.
How are you practising your pronunciation?
Do you have a plan?
Do you have a tutor? Are you getting feedback?
Remember, your goal here doesn't need to be to sound like a native speaker or to develop some
perfect accent. You're not a spy.
Your goal here should be to be able to communicate clearly and effectively.
And when you focus on it like this, what's going to happen is you're going to build a lot of
confidence and no longer be second guessing yourself when approaching people and wanting to use
your English. Lastly, tip number six, to build your confidence in English is
to find speaking practise groups.
Now, before COVID, the platform meetup was really popular
and I'm sure they will be again when life returns to the way it was.
And in fact, a lot of meetup groups have continued with virtual
sessions, meaning that even those who aren't in a big city can hop on
a virtual meetup and enjoy speaking with people for free.
It's also a safe space for practising your English, as everyone
there is there to do the same thing.
You'll meet native English speakers learning foreign languages and non-native
speakers learning English, and thus experience a wide range of accents,
dialects and cultural backgrounds.
They're also a great way to practise self-introductions, small-talk and having
conversations with strangers.
And learning how to smoothly say your goodbyes at the end of the night, which
natives still struggle with every single time we leave a party.
I also want to quickly highlight how to use language meet ups really effectively.
So, point one, this is what I didn't do the first time I went to one in Germany, and it is to
go early.
Get started before there's a large crowd and things won't feel so overwhelming
when you enter the group.
Number two is to aim to introduce yourself to a new person or group, maybe a
table, every 10 to 15 minutes, and work your way
around the room. The next thing I want to say is probably a bit more important.
I want you to aim not to be as interesting as possible,
but instead to be as interested as possible.
So, don't try to impress people by talking about yourself or telling people
loads of interesting stories.
Just ask questions of other people and be curious about their
answers. And then when they ask you questions, you can then
go to town on practising your English.
But don't shove your English down their face.
Nobody wants that and nobody will come back to you for more.
Many people think, oh, I'm here to practise English or a language, I need
to talk at people as much as possible.
But yeah, as I said, no one likes that.
And you'll find better relationships and thus more time to
converse with people in the long run if you have good manners and show
a genuine interest in other people.
Lastly, aim to meet up at the next week's language meet up with the
people you met and liked in the previous one.
Make it as much a social event as it is a language practise event.
And remember, these are all going on virtually even during lockdown.
But tell you what, though, although I think meet ups are a safer space to build your confidence,
an alternative app that has blown up recently is clubhouse,
which my students are using to feel connected.
Build their confidence speaking to multiple people at once, and at the
same time build those islands of vocabulary due to the ease of
choosing what type of room they choose.
And room meaning conversation topic.
So, definitely check out clubhouse.
As of this recording, I think you need an invite from someone directly who
already has the app, but I'm sure it won't be long before everyone can download it.
So, find people to practise with, practise those specific topics and
figure out ways to link between all of these islands.
Go island hopping. It can be a lot of fun.
All right, guys. So, there are our six tips for how to improve confidence when
speaking English. Have we missed any?
Let us know down in the comments if you have some other tips for how to build confidence when
speaking English or any other language.
And apart from that. Thank you so much, Charlie, for joining me in today's episode.
Go and check out his podcast, the British English podcast.
And until next time, all the best, See ya.