- In this video, ladies and gentlemen,
I am going to share with you the world's
simplest method for mastering the English language.
(upbeat rock instrumental)
Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, welcome.
I am your beloved host, Julian Northbrook,
leader of the League of Extraordinary English Speakers,
best-selling author of Master English Fast,
and self-proclaimed language punk.
When I first came to Japan, I struggled with the language.
Things were easy until I hit the intermediate stage.
And until then I'd improved fast, and it felt great.
Then, everything ground to a halt.
Suddenly, things weren't working anymore.
I wasn't improving, and it got extremely frustrating.
You can hear about that story in detail
by checking out my short film, my personal story,
Forgetting That English Isn't Your First Language,
which'll be linked, I think it's up on this side.
But I struggled, is the point.
And a big part of the problem that I had was that
I was very inconsistent with what I was doing.
I was trying to do everything,
but I was never doing anything well.
I was constantly skipping from method
to method to different way of doing things.
I'd watch random shit on YouTube and expect to get better.
But I actually wasn't really doing
anything particularly effective.
For me, the solution came from doing
a master's in Applied Linguistics,
and then later moving on to a PhD in Psycholinguistics.
From that experience, I kind of understood
what I was doing wrong, and I changed my approach
to improving my own Japanese skills.
And from there, things changed rapidly.
The key point to all of this is what I call
the world's simplest method for mastering English.
Simply put, in order to master a language,
there are two plus one steps that have to be
repeated again and again and again and again.
I say two plus one, because the first step
actually isn't necessary in all situations,
that is, what I call step zero,
which is to simply notice the things that you don't know.
If you don't know that you don't know something,
then you will never be able to learn it.
If you don't know that you make a mistake in English,
a certain mistake, you will never be able to improve it.
If you don't know that something exists,
you will never be able to talk about it.
Noticing the things that you don't know is huge.
If you're not sure how to go about
noticing all the things that you
don't know about the English language,
as well as all the mistakes that you make,
check out my book, Master English Fast,
where I give you a whole load of different exercises
and different things that you can do
for noticing things about yourself,
the way you produce language, and about language in general.
The first essential step then of the two-step method
is to learn the language that you need.
This is something a lot of people get
horribly, horribly, horribly wrong.
Advertising has a lot to do with this.
We tend to hear from English conversation schools
and the like, you know, "You learned English in school,
"all you've got to do now is speak, speak, speak,
"practise, practise, practise."
And it's actually total bullshit,
because the language that you learned in school
almost definitely isn't actually
the language that you need right now, right here.
I actually did a research project
at a secondary school in Japan,
and we found that those students were actually
pretty fluent in the language that they'd learned.
However, the language that they'd learned
had no real-world utility, it just wasn't
practical for the real world.
So practising that wouldn't help them at all,
because they were already pretty good at it.
It was just useless language that
they weren't likely to use.
You need to be constantly, constantly learning new language,
learning more and more and more.
Stuffing more phrases, expressions, chunks,
bits of language, into your head.
You need to be constantly putting in more knowledge,
more information, more content,
more things to talk about, more culture.
You need to be constantly, constantly,
constantly inputting this stuff.
Do not skip the input stage, the learning stage,
actually studying the language.
Yes, that word, study, actually sitting down
and putting some hard, intensive, focused,
concentrated time into studying the English language.
The second step then which is also just as essential
as the first is to then automate that language via practise.
And that is basically it.
Mastering a language really is that simple.
Learn the language you need, automate it via practise
and actually using the language.
However, these two stages are both essential.
You can't skip to the second step.
You can't skip to just practising
and expect to get good at the language,
'cause you can't practise what ain't in here.
That in a nutshell is what I call my two-step method
for mastering the English language.
Hence the name of one of my courses,
Two Step Speaking, which at the moment is,
well, closed to new members.
I do however recommend that you grab a copy of
my book if you don't have it, Master English Fast.
In this book, we take you, we?
We, I, take you through the English
mastery process, step by simple step.
I show you everything that you need to know
in order to master the English language
as an intermediate to advanced English learner.
If you haven't got a copy yet, you should do.
Go get your hands on one.
We are actually getting low on print copies,
and I'm not saying this to pressure you
into buying one, by the way.
But it is true, we've sold two thirds of the copies
of the book that we printed back in the summer now.
And I don't know we're going to get
this printed again like this,
'cause we got it printed in a very nice kind of way.
It's printed on very high-quality paper,
it's beautiful to the touch, which sounds stupid.
But we've had loads of people email and say, like,
"I'm so impressed at how good the book feels,
"it's so nice to hold, to touch."
Because it's really high-quality production.
It was however extremely expensive,
and we can probably get the book sent out
much cheaper and with much less hassle,
but at the cost of production quality, from somebody else.
So if you want one of this first edition, high-quality,
beautiful copies of Master English Fast,
you're gonna wanna get a move on,
because they're getting low.
Again, I'm not trying to pressure you into buying it,
you either buy it or you don't,
frankly I don't give a shit, but if you don't have one,
you should get one, MasterEnglishFast.com.
That's it for me today, but before I go,
it's time to hand things over to you.
(upbeat rock instrumental)
Head down to the comments and tell us,
are you an intermediate to advanced, or above,
English learner, struggling to improve your English?
If you're finding it hard, you're not alone.
Most of us either have been or still
very much are in that situation.
So get into the comments, share your experience,
'cause I really wanna know.
Again, as I always say in my videos,
I don't often reply to comments,
and that's 'cause I just don't have the time.
But I do read most of the comments,
and the good ones I tend to use
as the base for future videos,
so if you do have questions about any of this,
what we've talked about, leave it in the comments as well.
But do tell us about your experience
struggling with good old English language.
Goodbye.