Fluency Secrets They Don’t Teach You in School

Real Life English Mini Course: Video #3  | Exclusive for Members. Please DON’T share!

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Transcript for Video

Hey what’s happenin’ guys?

For those who don’t know me, my name is Trevor.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the last two videos by Ethan and Justin.

In this video you’re going to learn fluency secrets they don’t teach you in school.

But first, let’s review the first two videos.

In the first video, Ethan introduced the left-brain right-brain theory from Nobel Prize winning Dr. Sperry, that says that learning first with our right brain, the imaginative and creative side, is a much more effective way to learn languages.

When you focus on having fun with English, it’ll give you the foundation to learn more of the left-brain parts of the language like grammar, rules, and syntax.

Unfortunately, most traditional English teaching methods do the exact opposite. They start by teaching rules and structure which, as you may have experienced, does not lead to effective language learning.

In the second video, Justin went a little deeper into the left-brain/right-brain theory as well as talking about how successful language learners make English a part of their everyday life to develop lifelong fluency.

By learning to make English into a habit you like doing, you no longer have to study, you just have fun and play with the language

So if you haven’t watched those two videos yet, go watch them now by clicking the links in your email. [Revolutionary Insights For Lifelong Fluency  andPowerful Secrets for Fast Fluency]

In this video you’re going to learn some secret tips to speaking like a native that you’ll never learn in school.

But first, let me tell you a story to help you understand…

My first language learning experience was probably similar to yours. I took three years of Spanish in high school and didn’t learn much at all.

The classes were all focused on grammar and did nothing to excite my imagination. We never learned about the culture, we never watched movies or listened to music, and we never listened to native speakers. We barely even spoke in Spanish.

While I did learn some vocab and how to conjugate verbs, I had no idea how to actually SPEAK the language. In my three years of studying Spanish at high school, I never ONCE heard a native Spanish speaker, except when I was on the soccer field.

I remember having some Spanish speakers in my class who would laugh at some of the stuff that was being taught. They would laugh and say, “Nobody talks like that, it’s way too formal.”

I was lucky enough to learn about the Real Life English methodology before learning Portuguese so I didn’t waste my time.

So remember, it’s good to learn the formal parts of a language, but for most people, they rarely even need to use them.

It’s more important to learn the parts of the language that you’re going to use the most.

One of the problems with so many English schools and courses is that they teach you English so that you can pass a test and get a certificate. They don’t teach you how people actually speak it EVERY DAY.

If you want to learn English to read books or to write scientific papers, that’s fine. Keep learning textbook English.

Textbooks can only teach you so much.

If, however, the reason you want to learn English is to connect and make friends with native speakers, and to enjoy the huge amount of English media in the world, then it’s important to focus on the way English is ACTUALLY spoken.

For example, all the textbooks in the world are not going to help you understand this simple sentence, “Hey bro, cruise over to Josh’s pad, it’s a total rager!”

To translate this into textbook English, it means, “Hello friend, come to Josh’s house, there’s a great party happening.”

Learning to talk like natives speakers is  going to make it easier to connect with them, AND it’s more fun. You’ll learn to express yourself in new and exciting ways.

If you really want to understand the culture, if you really want to connect with natives, stop learning from a textbook and start learning the way people actually talk—from native speakers in movies, podcasts, TV shows, radio, and more.

But when most people think about improving their English, they think they need to focus on improving their grammar, instead of the colloquial aspects of the language.

As if speaking perfect grammar will help you connect with people. “Wow man, I really admire your correct use of the present perfect. Let me buy you a beer.”

Think about how you really speak in your native language and how much you don’t focus on grammar.

People aren’t robots, we’re not computers. We don’t speak with the perfect structure that you learn in textbooks.

Native speakers don’t focus on the grammar rules, why should you?

Native speakers naturally learn the grammar rules through constant interaction with the language.

While grammar is important, it’s limited. Grammar tries to map the way language is spoken, but it’s always behind.

For example, grammar says that you’re supposed to say, “Chad and I do podcasts,” and that “Me and Chad do podcasts,” is incorrect. But THIS is how people SPEAK.

Another example of this is the way we use the word “they.” Grammar will tell you that “they” means more than one person. But English speakers commonly use they to refer to a single person when you don’t know whether they’re male or female.

So did you hear what I just said? “English speakers commonly use ‘they’ to refer to a single person when you don’t know whether THEY are male or female.” To be grammatically correct, I should have said, “when you don’t know whether he or she is male or female.”

But rarely will you hear someone speak “he or she” instead of “they,” because it’s way too formal and just doesn’t flow very well. It sounds robotic.

This is why it’s so important to have constant exposure to English to master it. The more contact you have with LISTENING to native speakers, the better your natural understanding of English grammar will be.

So, How important is grammar?

Although it is good to understand some basic grammar rules, your goal shouldn’t be to memorize all of the details.

In general, it’s better to learn grammar through context.

When you learn intuitively, you don’t have to stop and think about grammar. It’s more important to be able to say, “It doesn’t feel right when I say it that way,” than “the grammar rules say that’s not the way you say it.”

When you focus on learning first with your right brain, grammar becomes natural and relaxed.

By focusing too much on grammar, you lose your intuitive ability to communicate. You start analyzing everything you say before you say it. You start to sound like a robot.

Plus, it makes you more conscious of your mistakes and it can make you more afraid to talk.

If you’re not confident in your ability to speak English, maybe it’s because you’re too focused on using correct grammar?

To illustrate this point, I want to share with you a quote from Benny Lewis, a man who speaks 11 different languages (and is still learning more), and is creator of the famous website, Fluent in Three Months.

Benny says that grammar makes languages into a list of rules, like mathematics, which doesn’t work for language learning. He says, “language is a means of communication. When you try to put it in a box of grammar, you’re not allowing yourself the freedom to communicate freely.”

Benny believes that grammar has it’s use in a language, and it can be interesting to learn about, but it shouldn’t be the main focus when learning a language.

And focusing too much on grammar can scare you away from truly communicating in a new language. What good are the rules if you don’t put them into practice?

In TEFL terminology, this is described as the Communicative Approach, which emphasizes meaningful interaction as the best way to learn a language.

STOP focusing on the grammar rules. STOP worrying whether each sentence you speak is correct.

START focusing on COMMUNICATING in a relaxed and natural way.  The purpose of language is to communicate with other people.

Make a goal of communicating in a relaxed way in English, not speaking it perfectly.

However, speaking is only part of communication. What’s more important is your ability to LISTEN.

—

We recently held a poll in our Facebook Community asking people what one of their major problems with learning English was. The majority of the people responded that LISTENING COMPREHENSION was their biggest problem.

Now, there are two main reasons why English learners have a difficult time understanding native speakers.

First, many people don’t focus enough on DEVELOPING their listening skills, because they don’t understand how important it is.

Listening to native speakers will gradually condition your brain to the sounds, phonetics, and frequencies of the language. It’s like little, daily pieces of mini-immersion that will bring you HUGE improvements over the weeks and months if you do it every day. Even if you don’t understand most of what’s being said, you’re still learning.

Soon you’ll notice new words coming out of your mouth, listening becomes easier, and you won’t need to concentrate so hard to understand what people are saying.

If you don’t spend the majority of your English learning time LISTENING to English being spoken, then how do you expect your listening comprehension to be any good?

But, even people who spend a lot of time listening to native English speakers still have trouble understanding us, because of an important lesson they never teach in school: How Natives Really Speak.

To understand how we really speak, it’s important to learn about more subtle and dynamic aspects of the spoken language. These include, native pronunciation, discourse markers, morphing (or how we cut and mix our words together), and more.

Most teachers, schools, and courses focus on the pronunciation of TEXTBOOK English.

Basically, they don’t teach you how us native speakers REALLY pronounce our words.

Let me give you an example. Try to pay attention to this, with no subtitles.

“Did you just go to the store or where’d you go?”

Did you understand that?

If I was to speak much slower and like a robot, I would say, “Did you go to the store or where did you go?” That just sounds so wrong.

When native speakers talk naturally, we don’t pronounce the words together the same way we would if we were just saying the single word.

We don’t say “did you,” we say “didja” or just “dja” or “dju.”

We don’t say “just,” we say “jus.”

We don’t say “what did,” we say “whadja” or “whadju”

So to say it again, “Did you just go to the store or where’d you go?” Didja understand that?

Here’s another example. Again, try to understand without subtitles.

“So what’re you gonna do today, man?”

Did you understand that?

To speak it in textbook English, it would sound like this, “So what are you going to do today, man?”

Oftentimes in the beginning of a sentence, native English speakers will just make an “s” noise instead of pronouncing the whole word “so.”

Instead of saying, “so what,” we say, “‘s what?”

Instead of saying, “what are you,” we say, “whaddaya” or “whatcha.”

Instead of saying, “going to,” we say, “gonna.”

Instead of saying, “today,” we say, “daday” or “t’day”

Now try and understand. “So what are you going to do today, man?”

This is called morphing the language. And not knowing how natives morph their words is one of the main reasons why people struggle with understanding native speakers.

Morphing is not difficult to learn. It’s a simple process. But almost no one teaches it.

By learning how we pronounce words, how we really speak, it won’t matter how fast someone talks to you. You’ll understand because the words won’t just mix together.

So these are two VERY BIG AND IMPORTANT THINGS you can do to drastically improve your listening comprehension in weeks: (1) Listen to native speaking media, podcasts, and online radio, and (2) Learn the dynamic rules of pronunciation and morphing.

But you won’t get this from the classroom.

And unfortunately there’s not much good information out there teaching this kind of stuff.

So that’s why we love sharing this stuff, we love teaching real life English, and from all the feedback you guys are giving us, we see that you love it, too.

So, if you’ve watched and internalized the Real Life English methodology in this mini-course, you’ve already taken a big step in the right direction.

BUT, if you want to take it to the next level, if you want to see EXACTLY how you can apply this new methodology, we’re excited to present the new Real Life English Fluency+ Course.

There’s an old saying that goes, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. But teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

Most traditional learning methods just give you fish. As soon as you’re done with the class or the course, you stop learning and start forgetting. You need to keep paying them to learn or sometimes just to maintain your current level.

However, the Real Life English Fluency+ Course will not only give you the tastiest fish you’ve ever eaten with our practical lessons that you can apply to instantly improve your English, but we’ll also teach you the secrets on how to fish, so that when the course is over, you’ll be able to teach yourself.

We say PLUS (+) because with this Fluency course, you will be learning much more than just English:

• We will teach you to speak English in a natural and fluent way, PLUS the skills and strategies you need to be a LIFELONG ENGLISH learner.

• We will teach you to listen and understand how natives speak, PLUS we will teach you the CULTURAL aspects of the language learning process.

• We will teach you how natives speakers really use the language, including pronunciation, PLUS the Real Life Application of English in the top 12 areas or themes that you guys specifically asked for: like travel, music, and social gatherings.

With the Real Life English Fluency+ Course, You’ll never study English again—you’ll LIVE it.

So I’m excited to introduce Chad. Hey Chad, get up here.

Hey guys, in the next video, I will summarize and bring together the essential lessons from the first 3 videos.

I’m also going to share my experience with teaching English and how my complete immersion into Brazilian culture forced me to learn Portuguese,

I never studied the language. I learned by living it.

The Real Life English Fluency+ Course is going to recreate that immersion experience so you can see EXACTLY how to apply the these powerful methods for lifelong fluency.

So, ask yourself these questions.

Are you studying English as a boring school subject? Or are you living it every day with the things you love doing?

Are you taking responsibility for your English or are you paying someone to do that for you?

Are you scared to speak, do you punish yourself for making mistakes? Or are you confident and celebrating the mistakes as a natural way to fluency?

So after answering these questions, reflect on your own English learning process up to this point and think about what changes you can make to revolutionize your English fluency RIGHT NOW.

So, thanks for being a part of the Real Life English Community.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, leave a comment below.

So, thanks for watching, guys.

We’ll see you in the next video.

Peace.