- How can you make the English
you've already put in your head automatic?
(upbeat music)
Hi, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com.
I got a great question from Mary Alice.
Mary Alice asks,
"Often, I feel my brain is full of information
"but when I try to speak, to transfer it from my brain
"to my mouth and formulate a phrase, it's not easy.
"I need to take some time to structure them
"and I speak like a robot."
Now, there are kind of two points to be made here,
only one of which I'm gonna talk about
in detail in this video.
First and foremost,
have you actually learned the right language?
This is the surprisingly common problem
of people who have used textbooks
or they learned English at school or what have you,
and what they've actually filled the head with
is pretty much useless crap
and then they wonder why they don't know
the phrases and expressions that they need
when they actually have conversations.
You need to be learning the right language
and until you do that, it doesn't matter what you do,
you're not gonna be able to speak well
because you're missing the things that you actually need.
Now, Mary Alice is a Two Step Speaking member,
so I know that Mary Alice knows
exactly what she needs to learn.
So, I'm going to assume that that is not the case here,
so let's go into detail about how you can make
what you've put into your noggin automatic.
Simply put, the problem is it's not a case
of whether something is in your head or not.
It really isn't as simple as that.
And my explanation here, what I'm gonna talk about here,
is also really grossly oversimplified
but I think you will get the idea.
When you first learn something,
it goes into conscious memory, into short-term memory.
If I say to you a random number,
for example, six, eight, three, five,
and I say to you, "Tell me what that number was,"
you will go,
"Uh, uh, six,
"eight,
"three.
"What's the last one?
"Five."
You have to think about it.
It's a conscious process.
A lot of people learn a lot of English
and then they stop there.
But trying to retrieve
the phrases and expressions and the words and the rules
that you've made from conscious memory like this
doesn't really work very well.
We're always gonna be slow and awkward,
probably translating from our first language
because we've put this stuff into memory
but we haven't taken it further.
So, the simple answer to Mary Alice's question
is yes, you've got a lot of information in here
but no, you haven't truly learned it.
You've started to learn it, then you have stopped.
You've only taken it halfway.
What we need to do is we need to take this information
that we've put into conscious short-term memory
and move it to
unconscious, procedural
long-term memory.
Once it's there in long-term memory,
it becomes hard-coded as an automatic, habitual action,
and you'll just be able to pull the language
that you need out and speak without thinking consciously
about what you're speaking about.
So, how do we actually go about moving this information
from short-term conscious memory
to long-term unconscious memory where it's hard-coded?
This is the job of the hippocampus,
which, no, is not a large, ugly animal
that likes to hang around universities.
It's the bit of your brain
responsible for moving information
from short-term to long-term memory.
Well first and foremost, this is the role of practise.
Remember what I always say?
Mastering a language is a simple two-step process,
which is then repeated again and again and again.
Learn the language
and then automate that with practise.
Both of these things have to happen.
You can't just skip to the practise stage,
and this is where most people go wrong.
They say, "Well, okay, I learned English at school.
"Now I just need to practise, practise, practise,
"and I'll become fluent."
But, well actually, you learned some English at school
and whether the stuff you learned is the right stuff
for you and your conversations or not is debatable,
but you certainly didn't learn all the phrases
and expressions in the English that you'll need,
so you need to actually consciously study,
learn the language.
Put it into short-term memory first
and then practise it and automate it
via some kind of practise.
What kind of practise is well beyond this simple video.
There are many different ways that you can practise,
all good for different things and different ways.
But both of these things have to happen.
First, you put the language into short-term memory,
then you practise it and hard-code it
in long-term unconscious memory.
Not sure what to learn,
or indeed, how to go about putting it in there?
Don't know what a good way to practises?
That's where my book, Master English Fast,
an uncommon guide to speaking extraordinary English,
comes in.
I'll show you step by simple step
what to learn, how to learn it, and then how to automate it
via a process of repetitive iterative practise.
To get your hands on a copy of this bad boy,
just click on the link in the description.
You can read the first chapter for free.
It's on Kindle,
paperback, and it comes with a complete audio version
of the book for your listening enjoyments.
That then is it from me,
Julian Northbrook, for another video.
If you're new to this channel, subscribe.
I'll see you in the next one
and until then, happy learning.
(upbeat music)
Before I go, let me very quickly refer EES members
to the March 2018 Edition
of the EES Gazette: Secrets of Structured Learning,
where we went much deeper into this topic.
We went well beyond the simple learning practise loop,
this iterative process of putting it in,
practising until it's automatic,
and really talked about how skills are acquired,
in general, not just English as a second language,
but of course, English as well.
And how you can really set up your day-to-day learning
to help your hippocampus
to do its job much more efficiently,
taking this information we put into short-term memory
and hard-coding it as an automatic, habitual process
so that we can speak English fluently
without thinking about it
but also, really do any of the other things,
the skills that we're trying to learn
in the same kind of way.
If you were an EES member
before or during March 2018,
then you should have this issue,
so go back, review it, read it a couple of times,
'cause this was an important one.
If you were not an EES member at the time
and didn't get this issue, then, well, I'm sorry.
Tough luck, for now at least, because you missed it.
I am however thinking that I'm going to rewrite this one
and publish as a Kindle book some time in the future,
not yet, but later,
so keep an eye out for it.