Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com
and welcome to Doing English With Julian.
(upbeat rock music)
How to speak English like a native speaker.
It's a very good question.
But in order to answer this question,
first we need to think about how native speakers
actually use their language.
Why do native speakers sound so natural?
How do they speak so fluently?
How do native speakers sound so native-like?
For quite a long time, the answer to these questions
was actually quite a mystery to linguists.
How is it that we speak so fluently?
We believed that native speakers used
grammar rules and added items of vocabulary
to those rules to construct sentences
in their brain, on the fly as they were speaking.
But this doesn't make any sense,
because working memory, the brain's RAM
is actually very, very limited.
Therefore, in order for us to speak
at the speed that we do,
the brain would not be able to keep up.
The brain wouldn't be able to compute
the sentences we need to compute fast enough.
Not only this, but why does a phrase like
good morning, sound so natural,
but the equally grammatical pleasant first half of the day
sound strange?
Why do we say, please marry me,
instead of please become my spouse?
Why do people say hey Julian,
your ugly face needs plastic surgery
but never plastic operation?
Clearly, some of the things that we can say in English
just sound more natural than others,
regardless of whether those others
are grammatical or not.
Simply being grammatical is not enough
to sound natural.
Why is this?
Again, for a long time,
the answers to these questions confused linguists
because we believed that native speakers
speak with grammar rules
and vocabulary attached to those rules.
We now know that this is not the case,
or at least not for most of the time anyway.
Native speakers can use syntax,
that is grammar rules,
and vocabulary and create
creative utterances, expressions and sentences
with those, however
most of the time, native speakers
are actually speaking in chunks.
A chunk is a very common sequence of words
that native speakers store in memory
as a complete unit of language.
When we speak, what we are actually doing
is simply pulling these chunks out of memory
and lining them up.
These chunks may be several words long,
meaning we can speak very fluently
and very efficiently.
We no longer need rules
to process and compute our sentences.
Rather, our sentences are either completely ready made
or only need one or two bits to create them.
Not all language is a chunk, and this explains
why some things sound more natural than others.
Good morning is a chunk.
Pleasant first half of the day is not.
Plastic surgery is a chunk.
Plastic operation is not.
Would you marry me is a chunk.
Would you be my spouse is not.
What this means for you,
the English learner, is this.
If you are learning English in the way
that it is usually taught at school,
you are memorizing grammar rules
and you are memorizing lists of vocabulary
to combine with those rules.
You're actually learning in a way
that is very inefficient when it comes to speaking
and understanding the language.
You're learning in a way that is actually different
to how native speakers speak English.
Rather, a much better way to learn
is by focusing on chunks.
Learning chunks first and foremost
and aiming to learn the language in the way
that native speakers actually use it when they speak.
Put simply, good chunking skills
is the fast-track to speaking English
like a native speaker.
That is, fluently and naturally
as opposed to just grammatically.
How can you identify these chunks in language?
What are the best chunks to learn?
How do we learn these chunks?
All good questions, my friend.
Questions whose answers are revealed
in chapter six of my book,
Master English Fast,
An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English.
To get your hands on a copy of this bad boy
and start chunking your way to fluency,
just head over to MasterEnglishFast.com.
And there we have it.
That is how to speak English like a native speaker.
If you are new to this channel,
make sure that you subscribe to Doing English With Julian
to get more videos to help you speak
extraordinary English.
Thank you and goodbye.