- If you wanna improve your English speaking fast,
don't mistake activity for achievement.
Ladies, gentleman, boys and girls,
hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com.
Here with another quick two minute
English learning tip for you
and if I'm speaking fast it's because
in five minutes' time my kids are coming home
from school and I wanna be done before they get here.
One of the big, very, very common problems
that I see when talking to people about
whether I can help them to really
transform their English and use it
as a catalyst for change and doing amazing
things in their life and all that
and all that good stuff is,
that they are simply doing something which
is completely inappropriate for their goals.
That is, they are busy,
they are doing a lot to improve their English
but it really actually isn't focused
on what it is they want to achieve.
Indeed, I made this same mistake
when I was learning Japanese
and in pretty much the same way as many people do.
A good example of what I'm talking about here,
is when people are reading newspapers,
listening to the news, every single day,
and somehow then expecting
their conversational skill to improve.
Again, I did the same thing
when I was trying to improve my Japanese,
when I was really struggling to break
past the intermediate barrier.
And it is a mistake and it's a big mistake
because, you see, the English found
in newspapers is totally different
to the English that you will find in conversation.
So if you're spending all your time
studying the newspaper, listening to news broadcasts,
well, at best you're gonna get good at
understanding the newspaper
and understanding news broadcasts.
Perhaps, if you wanted to go out and actually
do a bit of broadcast announcement yourself,
you might find it helpful for that.
But if you wanna be speaking in real situations,
in conversation, whether at work,
in business, in day-to-day life
because you live in an English speaking country,
well you need to be studying things
that are giving you samples of the language
that you're actually gonna use in those situations.
I did an analysis of newspaper and news English
versus conversational English.
Guess what?
There's basically no overlap between the two
in terms of the common, high-frequency
chunks of language that appear in them.
Out of a list of 500 of the most common
chunks in these two different types of English,
only 20 of them actually appeared in both lists,
leaving a massive 480 that were unique
to each type of English.
Again, what this means,
is that if you are studying the news or newspapers,
well that's not gonna help you much with conversation.
Want to know what you should be using instead?
Head over to doingenglish.com/freetraining
and check out my free training
where I will teach you the five key changes
that you need to make in order
to improve in English fast.
And one of those is all to do with the materials
that you need to be using.
Alternatively, if you just wanna get
down and dirty, transform your English ASAP,
head over to doingenglish.com/talk
to book a free consultation with me
to talk about how we can work together
to make that English transformation
and get awesome stuff done in your life
in the English language ASAP.
This is me, Julian Northbrook,
signing out from another quick and dirty,
two minute English learning tip.
I got this done before my kids came home
from school and I'm well chuffed about that.
If you found this video useful,
give it a thumbs up, if you didn't,
give it a thumbs up anyway
and I'll see you my friend,
in the next video, bye, bye.