I speak very, very fast in English, but make a lot of mistakes. What should I do to improve? Hello,
I'm Dr. Julian Northbrook from Doingenglish.com, and this is a question which popped up on Quora
fairly recently. I speak very, very fast in English, but make a lot of mistakes,
what should I do? Well, the brutally honest, blunt, probably not what you want to hear,
answer to this question is, slow the fuck down. There's this myth that native speakers of English
speak english very, very fast. And therefore, if you want to sound fluent in the language,
you've got to speak it like a teenager driving a car down country lanes at maniacs speeds.
But when you're talking like this, trying to impress people by speaking very, very fast,
far from making you sound better in English, it actually just makes you sound really confusing.
Now, there are a couple of reasons why people may speak too fast in English. First of all,
everybody has their own natural rate of speech. Mine is perhaps slightly above most people. For
the most part, I do tend to speak fairly fast. Another fairly innocent reason is because your
first language, Italian is a great example of this, may have a fairly high average rate of
speech, higher than that of English, and therefore you naturally transfer that over to your English.
Another, still kind of innocent, very misguided reason is because you are
afraid of making mistakes. And therefore you, whether consciously or more often subconsciously,
speak faster in an attempt to mask those mistakes. It's almost like the faster you speak,
the less time people have to notice your mistakes. So you speak as fast as you can.
It's kind of akin to somebody who can't spell writing with terrible handwriting
to hide the fact that they can't spell. But terrible is still terrible.
The other, and to be frank, fairly obnoxious reason is because you somehow makes you
sound better at English, and you're trying really hard to impress people. But this is
basically just a type of masturbation, in that it feels good for you,
but not really for anybody else. When you're trying far too hard to sound fluent in English,
and speaking very, very fast as a result, you're only thinking about yourself.
You want other people to think you sound fluent, and therefore you're doing everything that you can
to try and give them that impression. But because you're only thinking about yourself, and you're
not thinking about them and what is the best clearest way to communicate something to them,
all you're actually doing is making yourself very hard to understand and look quite, quite stupid.
Now this is not necessarily to criticize or put people down, but it is to say that you've got
weird beliefs about English and how it should be spoken if you somehow think that speaking very,
very fast is a good thing. What you should actually be doing instead
is focusing on the clarity of your speech, on the quality of your speaking. Yes, if you, um, eh,
wait a minute, um, are speaking, um, like, um, yeah, um, just a second, um, this
all the time, that's a problem. But that is very, very disfluent. But speaking like this
all the time and trying to speak really, really fast is also a kind of disfluency
because it's not how people speak. Native speakers are not speaking really, really fast. Sometimes,
to non-natives, they sound like they're speaking fast. But what they're actually doing is chunking
and articulating their speech well. And that's what you should be learning to do too.
You should also be working on the naturalness side of things because true proficiency in a
language is a balance of the fluency side, which is all about smooth, efficient brain processing.
And by the way, if you're trying really hard to speak really, really fast,
yes, you will make a lot more mistakes for the very simple fact that you are putting too much
burden on the processor. It's like you're trying to force it to do something it's not designed to
do. And therefore it's having to take all of his energy and its processing power away from
you actually making any sense and putting it into just making that move, math... See,
I can't even do it. Making that mouth move fast enough to do what you're trying to force it to do.
You need to work on the fluency side of things, which again, does not mean speaking fast. It
means speaking in an articulate, clear kind of way. Yes, when we're excited, sometimes
we do speed up. But when I really, really want to make a point, I'm going to really slow down
and make sure that you've understood. It also means working on the naturalness side of things,
or what we call native-like selection, that is speaking in high-frequency native-like chunks
of English. And, of course, the confidence side of things is really, really important as well.
So, if you work on those three areas, slow down and focus on the quality of your speech, that will
do wonders for the quality of your english that just trying to speak very, very fast, could never
do. Now, to go further with this and learn more about how to do these things head over to
doingenglish.com/freetraining and study the one hour free training that I put together.
It's going to teach you the nuts and bolts of doing all these things that I just talked about.
Right. With that, guys, this is me, Dr. Julian Northbrook,
signing out from another video. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.