Hi there. I'm Drew Badger the English Fluency Guide. And in this video I'm going to share
with you why you should be learning English backwards and also why I did the same thing.
And that's how I finally became fluent in Japanese.
[Japanese I’m too lazy to translate] So I can speak some Japanese... I'm still
recovering. I'm basically getting better. But what I just said is I can speak Japanese
if you have any questions we can talk about that.
I'll explain more about in this video, why I don't use Japanese in my videos and talk
about that a little bit. But first I'm becoming much better. I know a lot of people were concerned
about me, but I'm basically 100%. I'm still feeling just a tad bit weak. Maybe you can
hear it in my voice, but I'm recovering, getting much better. I did not have a coronavirus.
Hopefully I don't get it in the future. But again, my prayers go out to anybody who does
have that. And certainly for all the people who are at home right now or they're stuck
wherever they are and they can't move or they can't work or they can't go back.
So I wanted to share a bunch of great videos with you and hopefully in this one I'll make
it clear why learning backwards is a much better idea than basically learning the traditional
way. So briefly, what I said in Japanese is I know
a lot of people, maybe they want to hear my Japanese or maybe they don't believe I can
speak Japanese or not. But then I said, I want to keep it short. And writing the little
subtitles in that kind of stuff is basically a lot of trouble. So that's why I didn't want
to talk too much because a lot of people wouldn't understand me. I have many followers in Japan,
but many more outside of Japan. And very briefly, the reason I don't have
one of those typical channels where I am either a foreigner or a Japanese person that's using
Japanese in order to teach English is because it makes a deal with the devil. I call this
a deal with the devil. If you've never heard that expression before, this means to you're
trying to get something you want, but you give up everything to get that.
And in the case of language learning, whenever you're using translations to learn, you're
going to use translations to speak. So all the Japanese people who learn with me are
all learning in English. I do very little teaching outside. And when I do, do that,
I'm always taking time to explain to people that they should be learning in English and
not trying to just learn more information in Japanese. So the whole subject of this
video is learning backwards. So basically what most people do, like if
you're going to study a language like you're learning English, you're going to start learning
here. Just put the first step here is usually learning some kind of vocabulary and through
translations. I talk about this again and again and again in videos because it's so
important. And when you're trying to learn a language, this is the same mistake I made
because everybody teaches this way. Everybody learns this way. Very few people
do what I'm explaining you should do in this video. But you start learning some kind of
vocabulary. We'll put a V up here for that and then we're moving over. Maybe you're going
to learn maybe some listening. So you're trying to do kind of some basic things at the beginning,
but the vocabulary is usually a bit more formal and it's usually not a good way to learn the
language. We're going to call this a formal vocabulary.
You're can to do some reading here, writing over here as well. And then we're going to
keep moving. Usually some kind of listening and this is where we're going to get, if you
even do this in a class, this is where you do some kind of speaking, but usually this
is not going to be anything that you would want to be really doing in a class.
Most people, obviously they want to speak, but teachers are not going to take the time
to teach or have any kind of speaking practice in a class at 20 students or 30 students,
something like that, which is typical. And even if you are learning by yourself, most
people are trying to do this. So they're usually beginning with something like this, trying
to read and write, learn some kind of vocabulary. And these things are... It's not like one
week, the next week or something like that. But these are kind of the stages that you
move through when you're first trying to learn something.
And obviously these things are all connected because you have to hear something in order
to write it down. But the more important idea here is you're beginning more with reading
and writing rather than speaking. And you're also doing it more with the formal vocabulary
rather than the more conversational vocabulary that you would get when you're in real conversations.
Excuse me. Again, I'm still clearing my throat. I'm feeling much better, but that thing really
knocked me out. That's a great phrasal verb to knock someone out. K-N-O-C-K, to knock
out. So the sickness really knocked me out. So
it made me a little bit weak and I hate feeling weak. I want to be strong, especially for
my learners out there. And I know a lot of people are in some real trouble, much more
serious than I was with this coronavirus stuff going around.
Anyway, so the general idea here is you're beginning with the basic things. You're learning
some form of vocabulary, doing some listening, reading, writing, and then if you even get
the chance you're trying to do some speaking. But this creates a whole bunch of problems
for people. And this is usually what people like you out there encounter in your reading
or writing or listening or speaking. All of those things become more difficult for you.
Usually reading and writing are pretty easy for many people. But even a lot of people
mail me and they complain about having trouble reading or writing for different reasons.
But anyway, this is the typical approach. But what I did after I discovered that this
didn't work, maybe you know my story about where I am here now in Japan. So I live in
Nagasaki, Japan, and I was at a park not far from where I'm recording this video right
now. And while I was feeling really depressed, because this way of learning did not work
for me, I noticed the little children speaking in the park and I said, "Wow, they're not
doing any of these things that I'm doing. And they're certainly not doing it in this
order." So little children don't begin learning a
language with reading and writing. They don't begin learning a language with formal vocabulary.
They start here, with speaking, and they moved backwards. Now this is a very simple idea,
but it's something that I developed and really noticed and I'm certainly not the only one
doing it because many people are good speakers of second languages.
But most of the time when you meet someone who's fluent in a second language, it's because
they stopped doing this and started doing this. So the formal vocabulary... One of my
troubles with learning Japanese is that I don't study enough Kanji. And so that's the
written language or one of the three written languages in Japanese. And it would be really
helpful for me if I did, I have to weigh my time and some things, it's maybe a better
use of my time to do something else rather than studying some Kanji. But I still learn
quite a bit. But the thing that was most important to me
was being able to speak, and this should be most important to you too if you're watching
my videos. So what you're really doing here is you're beginning with the spoken language
and that's two things. That's speaking itself, and that's also the casual conversational
vocabulary that people are using in everyday conversations.
So again, it's really two things and not the formal vocabulary that you're trying to learn
coming from this way of learning a language. Now, I don't want to take too much time about
this video. If you've seen some of my videos before, you know I like to look at the big
picture. Of course, I spend lots of time going into the details of how you do things like
this, like in programs like the Fluency Course, Fluent for Life, all these things that I offer.
It's all about learning backwards and then how we go through the specific pieces of that.
But I really am impressed this upon you, really want you to understand how important it is
that fluency comes from going back this way. So you practice with speaking. And just to
give a few examples of how you do this. Now that I have two little children, a one-year-old
and a four year old, I should get them in a video sometime soon. Post a comment down
if you'd like to see my daughters in a video. They're pretty funny.
But if you watch them, especially watching my older daughter Aria, who's watching movies
or TV shows or whatever, especially things that she watches again and again, she starts
copying them really quickly. And while most adults, you watch the difference between an
adult watching maybe some song on a TV show for kids or you're watching a child watch
that same TV show. It's amazing how different that approach is for the learning and the
practicing with that. Now my daughter Aria, she will be very happy
even in front of other people to be singing along. She's very happy to sing along with
something even if she doesn't know the words. Now this is really important because you can
see again, this is the opposite, the opposite, the opposite, we're going backwards here,
of what people usually do. Now, an adult trying to learn any song, even in their native language
or even especially as a native learner or a kind of learner of language usually begin
with reading the song's lyrics. You might hear the song once or twice, but
you begin by reading the lyrics, trying to memorize them, and then maybe we're going
to try to sing and get the melody and things like that over here. But the opposite is what
children do. Now, obviously they can't read and learn the vocabulary by reading something
the same way an adult could, but they're doing the opposite. They're moving from kind of
the big picture to what's the melody. And so my daughter will sing something if
she knows some words, she'll say something, she'll use those words. Or if she doesn't,
she just kind of makes up her own words just to fit in those spaces. And so what she's
doing with that is she's getting a really good sense for how the language works. Now,
isn't that interesting? So she's singing a song and she's singing [inaudible 00:10:51]
this is a time to do and [inaudible 00:10:55]. And she doesn't really get it perfect, but
because she's taking those steps to do it, we're always impressed by how quickly she
really gets good at singing certain songs. And the rest of us are trying to sing it because
we're trying to get it perfect in our head first. Isn't that interesting? So what people
typically do, this is just one example of this, but people are, again, they're learning
a language one way that doesn't really work, but everybody does it.
Remember always do what's different. If people are doing all the same thing, do the opposite.
That's the most sane smart thing you should be doing, even if you don't know exactly what
to do, do the opposite. So you don't begin by trying to read all the lyrics and understand
it. Just get a feel for the song and maybe you know some words and maybe you don't. But
moving this way and moving backwards, it helps you build your confidence much more. So you're
just speaking along in the same way that you could speak along with how I'm speaking right
now. So even if you like the way I speak or you
can find someone else, it doesn't matter. But that's what's going to help you become
a fluent speaker. I don't want to get too much into detail about this because I want
you to just understand this very simple idea of doing the opposite, going backwards rather
than doing the typical thing that everybody does.
Does that make sense? So if you've been learning this way so far, it's not your fault. This
is the same way everybody teaches, but now you are an adult and you can choose to learn
a different way. This is what I did. I stopped learning that way and I started learning a
different way and all I did was just watch what little kids were doing and this is exactly
what little kids are doing. So if you have little children, you can look
at them and see how they're learning your native language, the language you're teaching
them work. Or if they're just learning a different language and how they would watch a TV show
or something, but they're learning again in the opposite way of what most people do. Hopefully
that makes sense. If it does post a comment down below, let me know if this is helpful
for you and if you'd like me to go into more detail about this, but hopefully this makes
sense. Well, that's the end of this video. I hope
you have enjoyed it. Again, do leave a comment down below. Also, if you are not yet subscribed
to the channel, do click on the subscribe link at the end of this video and click that
little bell icon. So you get novitated... I can't remember the word. I want to say motivated
and notified, but notified but also motivated to click on the videos and see them when I
release them. I probably will be releasing more of them
during this coronavirus stuff because I know people are home and can't go out and learn
anything. But if you'd like to see this in action, how I actually take people through
these different steps because what I really do in my programs is get people to stop learning
this way and start learning that way. And I show you how to do that step by step in
programs like the Fluency Course, which you can learn more about by clicking on the link
in the upper right of this video or on the link in the description below this video.
Well that's it. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. And if you'd like to continue
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