5 Things Native English Speakers Never Say | How to become fluent in English?

hey everybody my name is chris amerikos and welcome to another video this video is all about things that native speakers don't say [Music] i'm a native speaker from the united states all of my families from the united states i grew up here and we just speak like this right that's why they call us native speakers but this idea of a native speaker and a non-native speaker it's something really old and it's not really true about today's world in today's world english is a tool it's an instrument that doesn't belong to one country so the examples that i'm going to give you today are american english examples things that i never hear people in the united states say but maybe in your country english is mixed together with another language or it's used differently and that's okay you are a native speaker in your country and when we say that someone from the united states or the united kingdom or canada or australia or new zealand when we say that they are native speakers it doesn't mean that they're better or worse it just means they speak a special local type of english so in today's video i'm going to tell you phrases that people usually don't say if they're from the place that i'm from so let's jump right in the first phrase is a really funny phrase when i hear students say this in our speaking lessons that happen every day 24 7 sometimes i laugh because it's just a really funny mistake i hear my students sometimes say i feel myself good or i feel myself bad and this is definitely a mistake native speakers are not going to say this now there's two different reasons why they're not going to say this and i'll explain right now the first reason is that feel is when we touch but we try to understand something so it's more than just touch we touch and we feel and when we say feel myself i feel myself then the first idea that comes to mind is that i'm touching myself in a very strange way right oh i feel myself so good it sounds funny yeah it really makes us laugh now there is another reason that someone might say i feel myself or i don't feel myself for example if you are very ill if you're sick if you don't feel well maybe you're lying in bed trying to get your health back and your friend calls you and says hey let's meet and let's go play basketball you can say oh not today i don't feel myself today this means that i don't feel like the same person i'm not the person who i usually am this is different from you know my inside feelings or different from how i feel in general it means that i don't think that i am the same as i usually am i'm not going to be fun i'm not going to be in a good mood right um so this is what it means and we don't say that very often either but the thing to remember is just don't say i feel myself good just say i feel good this is about your emotions or maybe about uh your body or maybe about your health you can just say i feel bad i feel good oh where's chris why isn't he playing basketball with us today uh he doesn't feel good the second thing that native speakers never say is explain me and there's a really good reason why they don't say this first of all explain can be a transitive verb what that means is the action can go from the person speaking or from one person to another person we can send the action from one person to another person some verbs in english are not transitive we call them verbs and intransitive verbs do not send this action from one person or thing to another thing so the verb explain when we want to send the action from one thing to another we have to use the word to we have to say explain something to someone for example we could say chris explained grammar to his students this means that the action went from me to grammar to students right i explained something this is called the direct object the action goes from me the subject the person who's doing the thing from me to the thing that i'm teaching chris explained grammar explained what explain grammar to who chris explained grammar to his students so that's why if we say the phrase explain me it's wrong because explain me means that me the word me this is the direct object this gets the action you're saying to explain this person explain me oh chris he's a fun guy you know he knows something about english and why are you explaining who i am explain me no we don't explain a person we explain something to a person the third phrase that native speakers never ever say is i never didn't do that what i never didn't do that that's a mistake that's that's a lot of mistakes it sounds like sounds like mistake overload but i never didn't do that is wrong because we have two negative words here the word never is negative and the word did not not is negative so we have two negatives and english has this funny rule i know it's kind of crazy kind of like mathematics if you know what math is and you're good with numbers then this should make sense when we have two negatives and we add them together it becomes a positive so that's why we shouldn't have two negatives in one sentence if you say i never didn't do that then the english-speaking person might understand it like ah you did that because you never didn't right so that means that you did anyways if we stop focusing on the logic and the math behind the language we can just understand that when we say never we should use a positive verb and in general we should be careful about negative words and sentences because we can only have one in each part of the sentence this is called the rule of double negatives in english so we should not say i never didn't do that we should say i didn't do that or i haven't ever done that wow yes if you say that you'll sound like the most native person uh among all the natives because they probably don't speak correctly either dude okay the fourth phrase that native speakers just don't say is say me chris say me something interesting well i can't say you something interesting but i can tell you something interesting think about this the word say just means that sounds come out of our mouth they just go in every direction there's no direction but when we use the word tell we send this information in a direction so i can tell you which words you shouldn't say if you want to sound like a native speaker right that's what we're doing in this video but i can also just say it i can say it to anybody who's listening i can just say it and that's it just making sounds just making words right like for example maybe it's cold and it's cold chris said it was cold we don't know if he said it to a person in a direction of a person but he just said it right but if i'm looking right at you like this like you know i see you chris told me it was cold it's cold chris told me it was cold right so this is the difference you shouldn't say me if you tell me chris say me say me then my answer will be me because if you're saying say me i think you're telling me to say the word me say me me right it's like if i told you say the word alligator and you say alligator no no say alligator say alligator again right so this is what it means when you say say me it's not right and the fifth phrase that native speakers just don't say is how do you call this thing hmm how do you call it maybe with a cell phone but no usually people say this phrase when they want to say something different they want to ask what do you call this thing right like for example this what do you call this what do you call this i call it a drone what do you call it we don't say how do you call it right if we say how do you call it then we're using the verb call like to make a phone call and we're asking about what the device or instrument we can use to call so how do you call the drone i don't know i don't have its phone number [Laughter] bad joke so don't say how do you call say what do you call and you can also say this when you're trying to learn a word in a different language you can say what do you call drone in russian now let's not confuse these phrases with a different phrase when we're learning different languages we usually ask how do you say this thing in english like i know the english word drone but i might ask how do you say drone in french right and when i ask this question i should say how how do you say it in french we should not ask what do you say or what do you call usually we ask how do you say so those are five phrases that you shouldn't say if you want to sound like you're a native speaker and again the term native speaker is kind of strange what does it mean to be a native speaker in my opinion it doesn't mean anything when someone says that you have an accent or you don't have an accent what that person really is saying is that you speak differently from that person so i'm from the united states and i can tell you if you speak differently than a person from the united states or from the people who i know in the united states right i can tell you if you speak a little differently and if i go to your country and everybody speaks english like you then maybe i'm the one who has a strange accent right maybe i need to change my language so that i can fit in and communicate better with people in your country so the idea of being a native or non-native it's connected to this idea that only the best english speakers or only the correct english speakers come from the united kingdom or canada or united states or other english-speaking countries but today that's not true because today everybody everywhere uses english to connect with people from other places and you don't have to be from england or america for you to use english effectively so thank you so much for watching this video make sure you press like press subscribe and leave a comment down below if you have any other questions and i would love to see you when i come to your country we have a community of people learning english in almost every country around the world so if you would like more information about that you can send an email to my team support chrisamaricos.com and we'll help you get started thanks a lot for watching this video and i will see you next time bye bye

Channel: English With Kris Amerikos

Views: 8,568

Keywords: things native english speakers never say, 5 things native english speakers never say, americans would never say this, native speakers never say, words and phrases americans would never say, what not to say in english, 5 phrases english speakers never say, native english speakers don't say, english expressions native speakers dont say, things native speakers never say, phrases native speakers never use, kris amerikos, how to become fluent in english, fluent in english

Id: V_OwpaoYVT4

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021