ENGLISH CHALLENGE - DAY 2

all right I think we are live let me check what is up naturals are we live tell me in the comments if we are live or am I talking to myself let me check how are you today are you there all right we are alive we are alive hello today is day two of our English challenge going on all week hope you can see February 12th which was yesterday to the 16th which is Friday so Monday through Friday is our go natural English challenge week let me move my microphone up a little bit so it's out of the picture amazing so you are here for day 2 congratulations that is amazing and awesome and I'm super excited so a big welcome and hello to you hello to everyone who is watching that means you hello so tell me in the comments that you are watching that you are here that you can hear me you can see me just type hello hi or whatever you would like as a greeting so welcome welcome welcome I'm gonna watch for your comments now for the challenge you should sign up so I think most everyone has already signed up over at gonaturalenglish.com slash challenge that is super important because when you sign up you're going to benefit more from the English challenge I'm going to send you emails that guide you through the challenge so you know exactly what's going on and you'll be able to watch the replay of the live English lesson events and at the end of this week you are going to get a prize if you are signed up and you participate in the English challenge this week so does that sound like a good deal I mean it's 100% free so if that sounds pretty good then let's do it let's get working on our English fluency this week so make sure that you've signed up I just want to take care of a couple of things here make sure that you're signed up make sure that you are watching this lesson and all the lessons on the official watch page which if you're watching this right now on YouTube make sure that you click on the link in the description let's go natural English comm slash challenge - one you can watch on the official watch page because the comments on YouTube disappear after I stop this live stream and I want to see your comments I want to be able to respond to them so make sure that you're watching and commenting on the official watch page on the go natural English website also it's very important stop whatever you're doing right now and think about is there someone in your life there's got to be at least one person maybe a friend family member colleague someone who would benefit from working on their English together with us it's gonna be fun you guys invite that person to join us you can share the gonaturalenglish.com slash challenge page to sign up you can also share the official lodge page there's no problem in sharing that but it's very good for everyone if they sign up at the challenge page because that's the way that you get a prize for your participation at the end so I want to make sure that you get that at the end and finally the last thing the last housekeeping item that I want to take care of is to ask for your support for the go natural English YouTube channel to help us to grow our community please subscribe to go natural English on YouTube that would mean a lot to me and it will help us to grow our amazing community of positive thinking really amazing English learners from all over the world that would make me really really happy if you'd subscribe and let's see how we can improve and grow and evolve our community this year awesome so if you didn't already know my name is Gabby Wallace I am an American I'm an English teacher I've been teaching English for so long now like 15 years and I did my master's degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages so I talked a little bit yesterday more about Who I am and what go natural English is so I really recommend if you didn't watch day one yet you can join the challenge and I will send you a replay of that day one lesson so I'm not going to repeat everything everything from day one I just want you to know that I told a lot of my story and a lot of what go natural English is and that you can trust me as an expert English teacher through go natural English you're going to learn how native English speakers speak how you can improve your English to sound more natural or a native like meaning the way that people speak in the real world natives and people who are fluent maybe they didn't grow up or they weren't born speaking English but the way that people speak when you're in an English environment we want you to feel confident and powerful in any English speaking environment so that's why I'm here to help you and everything that we do here at go natural English is to help you to improve your fluency and your confidence in any english-speaking environment whether you're learning English for your work or for travel or something related to your personal interests or maybe you have a family member who speaks English or maybe you'd like to go study abroad in an english-speaking country whatever your motivation is you're in the right place and I want you to feel like you're in a safe place we talked yesterday about making mistakes and how we're changing the way we think of mistakes they're no longer bad mistakes are good opportunities to learn so I know that at least one person wrote in the comments on the official watch page yesterday that the main idea from day one was that mistakes are an opportunity to improve so let's make more mistakes okay amazing so about the challenge if you're just joining us right now for the first time this is for you if you're new to go natural English so if you haven't really heard of go natural English before you've just watched one or two videos you're in the right place this is very lucky timing because I only do an English challenge very rarely maybe once or twice a year so congratulations you are very lucky you've joined us at the right time if you are about at the intermediate level in English maybe a little advanced or maybe kind of a high beginner intermediate is a broad term but you are in the right place go natural English is like a bridge from intermediate to advanced from your old textbook to the real world to more modern ways of communication the way people really talk in the real world the challenge is from Monday through Friday so we just really started and we're covering topics like the go national English method and techniques for learning English quickly fluently in a fun way that you can actually enjoy and we're covering things like grammar vocabulary pronunciation and today listening listening skills which I know that you want to know about you guys always ask me a lot about how to improve your listening and your understanding of fast English speakers so that's what it's about the challenge is happening every day this week online so you don't need to go anywhere in fact you can watch from your cell phone from your whatever you have your iPad your laptop your computer you can watch pretty much from anywhere with an internet connection which is pretty awesome and we're doing it every day at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time which is New York time or Boston time and we're doing it because I love to help people to communicate better in English is my native language and as I mentioned I studied my master's degree in teaching English as a second language and I just want to bring what I've learned my expertise my experience and my passion for learning and teaching languages to you so that's why we're doing it to reach more people who like you you want to improve your communication and your fluency and your confidence in English why English because you know it's the language of the world the language of travel international business information technology medicine research in science and much much more so although I love learning other languages I know how useful English can be and I want to share my technique in my method the go natural English way to help you to get where you want to go faster so how can you benefit from the challenge well every day this week not every forever and ever only this week okay every day come and participate in the lessons and by participate you can do that in several different ways you can watch just like you're doing now watch and listen you can repeat after me if I ask you to repeat something or you just want to repeat what I'm saying you can answer the questions that I asked you by typing in your answer in the comments which if you're watching on the watch page the official watch page on go natural English you can comment below the video so you can actually participate actively you don't have to just watch although if you want to just watch that is fine too but you'll benefit the most from participating so I would like to know can you tell me by answering outloud and in the comments are you ready to improve your listening skills in English yes or yes I think you have just one option because this is the place to improve your English skills and today we're gonna talk about some listening techniques I'm gonna share some examples with you and I'll even share from inside the English fluency formula ebook which is for sale but I want to share a little bit with you for free and tomorrow is Valentine's Day so definitely come back tomorrow because we're gonna be talking about vocabulary and native speaker idioms and slang and how we can talk about things that we really love because of course the theme for Valentine's Day is love and we're gonna be sharing our love of English learning together tomorrow so I want to share a little story with you about when I was learning Spanish so I thought like maybe you thought as well the best way maybe the only way to learn a new language like English is to go to a formal school I went to a university and I signed up for a Spanish language class did you take an English class in high school or in your university if you went to university you can tell me in the comments well I went to two years of Spanish class at my university and after two years I was starting to get a little tired of just going to my class my traditional language class at the University and studying my traditional textbook and learning from my very nice Spanish teacher who was actually American but teaching me Spanish which was also her second language we had to learn long lists of vocabulary individual words and I remember specifically I don't know why I remember this I think I got so frustrated that day and that's why I remember it but this list of vocabulary was a list of animal names like hippopotamus and rhinoceros and I started thinking to myself when am I ever going to need to talk about hippopotamuses or rhinoceroses how about never so I got angry actually that this textbook and this curriculum were wasting my time making me learn things for the test for the class just because they were in the textbook words that I've it after about let's see 10 years no more than 10 years of speaking Spanish I have never once used those words in a real life conversation and I know it's the same in a lot of English classes you have to memorize individual words that are not helpful for your vocabulary or your listening skills because you really don't really hear those words ever in real life conversations and I knew that I had a problem when after two years of studying Spanish I went into a local Spanish supermarket a bodega that was owned by some people from the Dominican Republic and they were speaking in Spanish amongst themselves and I was trying to listen just to see if I could understand and I listened for about ten minutes and I swear I didn't I wasn't even sure if they were speaking Spanish because I understood less than 1% and I thought okay maybe it's just the Dominican Spanish that I can't understand maybe it's just totally different than the way my teacher speaks Spanish because she learned Spanish in Spain and maybe she has an accent because she's American okay let me try again so I went to the movie rental store a DVD rental store I rented a DVD that was from another spanish-speaking country and yes I'm gonna watch this movie in Spanish and see how much I understand so I put the DVD on you know I made my popcorn I was ready to have fun watching this movie in Spanish I said I'm not gonna put the subtitles on I'm just gonna see how much I can understand and I watched about 30 minutes of this movie and again the same thing happened I thought is this the right movie this can't be the right movie this this has to be a mistake this has to be an error because I I still can't understand more than one percent of what they're saying and this must not be Spanish this must be another language and I realized it was a problem with my listening skills because I had never up until that point two years of Spanish study I had never actually been immersed in an environment with native or even really fluent Spanish speakers I had spent two years in a classroom with other American beginner-to-intermediate Spanish learners and my teacher who was a good teacher there's nothing wrong with her she was a nice woman but there was only one of her and about 40 of us and that's not enough it's really not enough and that's why I had such problems with my listening skills in Spanish so I knew I had to do something at that point if I wanted to ever be fluent in Spanish to ever understand native Spanish speakers I had to change the way I was learning Spanish now can you relate to this can you tell me in the comments if you've ever felt like this if you've ever felt a little frustrated like you don't really understand what native English speakers are saying maybe you feel like you didn't get enough listening practice in your English class with your teacher or can you relate to any of this I'm just taking a look at the comments now Sarila I took English class in high school yeah Rosana thank you for your comment to Angelica thank you so much for being here this is amazing to see all of your names and although you're back it's nice to see some familiar names from yesterday wonderful so we have hundreds of comments and thousands of people watching I know there's a lot of you watching and not commenting so comments if you can I would love to see your comments your interaction is important to me too so I think we've established there's a problem with the way that we traditionally learn our listening skills the classroom environment is not the same as the real-world environment so if you want to learn English to forever be in a classroom then learn English in the classroom but if you want to learn English for travel or for conversations with other English speakers or for business negotiations presentations and much more you have to get out of the classroom and you have to try different environments different situations and good methods of learning that will help you with real-world natural English another issue maybe you've experienced something like this but in my Spanish class room we had to read a lot and we didn't actually listen or speak a lot of Spanish we didn't listen to or speak a lot of Spanish so have you experienced this where in your English classroom you just read a lot and maybe you listens to your teacher lecture a little but the teachers lecture is not really the same content that you hear in the real world well I had to read a lot in Spanish I remember really just wanting to be able to have an everyday conversation but if my teacher would have us reading literature you know 18th century Spanish literature and poetry which is beautiful don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with eighteenth-century Spanish literature however being able to read and analyze and critique old Spanish literature was not my personal goal my personal goal my desire has always been to communicate with real people to express myself to understand what others are saying real people who are alive right now and not 18th century Spanish poets who are no longer with us but I want to talk to real live people how about you do you want to talk with real live people tell me in the comments yes or yes so reading is not the same as listening because when we read like when I read in Spanish I'm imagining that the letters sound the same as in my native language everyone does this it's natural every adult learner does this because we learn that an R for example has a certain sound in English it's a in Portuguese it could be a or it could be also like herb in Japanese it could be like leh it's kind of hard to give examples without a full word but the R in Spanish could be like a row or the it could be different so we take what we already know from our maternal language and we place it on any letters that we see anything that we read because that's how we learned to process what we see those letters we learn to process them into sounds that we recognize that's how our brains have recognized patterns in our own language and maybe if you don't have enough inputs or enough exposure to English you're not used to the sounds of English and reading unfortunately is not going to help you to identify the sounds of English so your listening skills are gonna be a problem if you don't have enough input now your maternal language has sounds that are not the same as English sounds English sounds have a English ladder English words excuse me English words can have different sounds and English letters in the English words have different sounds than they would have in other languages for example stress is very different in English and in Spanish in English we say animal in Spanish you'd say animal it's a different stress and the vowels have a different sound just a small example but it's different you already know that it's very different that's why we're here because we need help so having enough inputs or exposure or materials to learn from is really really important and not just any material because if you're learning from materials that are not good for you maybe they're too advanced or maybe they're too boring and you can't stand to listen to them if you have no interest in the materials it's not gonna be as helpful as if you are interested you're motivated and they're at a good level for you so what happens if you use materials that are not good for you you're going to feel overwhelmed and frustrated just as I felt when I tried to watch that movie in Spanish and when I tried to listen to native Spanish speakers speaking in the supermarket I felt overwhelmed I felt frustrated I felt angry because I had wasted time and money and effort two years and I still couldn't understand a basic conversation or a movie so think about the way that babies learn a language now you know a lot more than a baby you've learned a lot in your lifetime but babies learn a little bit at a time and they're not expected to understand everything that they hear whereas an adults like you and me we're expected to understand everything we hear right people look at us they know we're not babies so when you can listen to English and understand everything you hear you're gonna be able to understand conversations around you like my situation at the supermarket trying to listen in to a conversation you'll be able to understand that finally you'll be able to for example watch a movie and understand what you're hearing without subtitles and enjoy that experience so much more you'll be able to ask for information maybe if you're asking for directions you want information on prices if you're looking for a hotel or if you're going shopping if you want prices or sizes or any information you'll finally be able to understand with confidence if you like listening to music you'll be able to understand music finally like a native English speaker you'll be able to understand speeches the news current events TED Talks I love watching TED Talks and if you didn't know I did a TEDx talk you can actually watch it it's a good way to practice your English because you can put the subtitles on if you like and you'll be able to also understand clips on YouTube or really any media once you can improve your listening skills you also can let go of the fear of not understanding the fear of what if I misunderstood and what if I got things wrong you can let that go because when you can finally understand what you're listening to you're gonna have confidence you're gonna feel sure of yourself and you're going to have more information than other people who don't understand and you're going to be able to make decisions faster and take more intelligent well-informed actions so it's super important to develop your listening skills so now I want to share some techniques if I can share some techniques with you will you tell me yes is it okay if I share some specific techniques for improving your listening skills I'm gonna check the comments here oh my gosh there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments I love you all thank you so much for your comments now make sure that you're commenting on the official watch page because the YouTube comments although I can see them right now like right the second they're going to disappear as soon as I stop this lesson so please make sure that you click on the link right below here and that is scription gonaturalenglish.com / challenge - one and make sure that you're commenting on the official watch page so that I can see your comments and I can respond to them and they don't just disappear okay great so I see a lot of yeses sure yes thank you Rosana and thank you someone from Thai by University I can't read in Arabic but thank you for your comments wonderful okay so I have about one two three four five techniques I'm gonna share with you and then some examples you can test your listening skills with okay actually should we do that in Reverse no let's through techniques first let's do techniques so when you're listening to English try to instead of listening to everything in one big chunk and trying to process that big chunk all at once in your mind try to listen for specific sounds and specific individual words that you already know and that you already understand so in other words start from where you are today right now start from your current level and listen carefully for individual words that you already know for example in that sentence maybe you know the word words but maybe you didn't quite hear that word I said before words individual maybe that's a new word that's okay if you don't know that word yet just listen for the words that you recognize first because it's important to start from where you are and understand what you can write now it's better to understand a little bit then to get frustrated and upset with yourself and impatience or angry with yourself because you can't understand everything right now next what you do understand in a conversation or in a lecture what you're listening to don't translate I have a whole video about this on YouTube which is actually a really popular video it got super popular in the last couple of months has millions of views so I invite you to watch it if you haven't yet don't translate because translating takes a lot of time translating takes time when you should be listening not translating so you're going to miss more of the conversation you're going to miss more of the listening material if you're trying to translate at the same time translation is difficult it's difficult and you don't need to do it at first you might feel like you have to translate because that's the way that we learned how to understand English or how to understand another language is our teacher always told us to translate from our native language to English but I'm telling you I promise you translating in the long run so over a long amount of time is not going to help you so I know other teachers might disagree with that I think that if you're a beginner a very very beginner from zero translation is okay but at your level at the high beginner intermediate and advanced level you don't need to translate it's just going to keep you from understanding more it's going to make you miss more of your listening materials so don't translate instead listen for the words that you already recognize and understand them directly from English so understand their meaning directly from English without translating so I don't need to translate Ola into hello to know that it's a greeting I know that Ola in Spanish is a greeting right so I don't need to translate that and that's just a small example but as your vocabulary grows in English and your understanding of words in English grows you don't need to translate so trust me on this it's going to be a little bit more difficult in the beginning to stop translating but over time it's going to help you to understand so much faster and to speak so much flute more fluently much faster that in the end you'll thank me I promise I swear really okay listen for the words that you already know and then listen for stressed words so what is a stressed word a stressed word is a word that is clearer a word that is stronger a word that you hear more high-pitched or you hear more of an emphasis I'm doing it now stressed words are often the most important words that carry the most information so they are the most important to listen for so if you're listening for stressed words you're going to understand the most important parts of the listening material so listen for stressed words always listen also for tone and context clues so if you're in a situation let's say you're in a group of people in an office and it's about 11:30 in the morning in the office you're at your new job everyone's speaking English at your new job and you're a little nervous because you're still learning English which is okay and it's okay to feel nervous it's normal people are talking but you're not sure what they're talking about well let's think for a minute the context let's think about the time 11:30 what are people usually thinking about by 11:30 if they're at the office well I'm always thinking about this thing but at 11:30 especially people are thinking about where to eat lunch right so you might think about that and listen for any words related with where to eat lunch that's just one small example of how you can use the environment the context and people's tones the way that they're expressing themselves like are they asking a question but where do you want to go to lunch or do you want to eat lunch with me listen for intonation or tone you can get a lot of meaning from that and the context as well final final tip for you and I'm giving you a lot of tips today the final tip is to be patient with yourself really aim for 60 to 80% understanding and if you don't understand 10 20 30 even 40 percent just be patient with yourself because it'll come it'll come with time it'll come with the right materials and learning with the right method and technique so if you're not quite at 60% listening understanding yet then probably you need to choose an easier material you might be at a more beginner level okay so I want to give you some examples can I share three examples with you and then can I share a little bit of the English fluency formula ebook with you tell me yes or yes but tell me if it's okay okay awesome I see people already commenting yes yes yes amazing okay so I'm going to share a sentence with you and I want you to write in the comments what you think I'm saying okay here we go number one did you eat yet so write what you think I said in the comments I'll say it once more did you yet okay I'm waiting write your answer in the comments doo doo doo doo doo doo doo our Jeopardy song see if you have the correct answer doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo all right all right all right I think we might have an answer I think we might have an answer there's a little delay here um yes I see oh the names are moving so fast uh I saw correct answer here yes okay Steven Galindo and I see a few other correct answers but the names are moving so fast because there's so many comments right now okay did you eat yet is correct okay are you ready for number two number two is I ate an ice cream cone right what you think I said now here's a hint this is the answer to the question did you eat yet so one more time I had an ice-cream cone so I'm speaking like I would with my friends and um speaking pretty quickly you know I don't slow down the way I talk with you but I just try to present clearly when I give a presentation on business or entrepreneurship to native english-speakers I speak like this too because I think during a presentation it's professional to speak clearly if you listen to speeches by really good speakers like ex-president Obama spoke very clearly it's not because he's speaking slowly for people who are learning English it's because it's professional to speak clearly so anyway let's see did you get what I said I see some correct answers I ate up yes okay Othman good I ate an ice cream cone good answer yes well it's not true I wish it was true I would love to eat some ice cream I would love to eat an ice cream cone but sadly I did not eat an ice cream cone today okay I have one more one more are you ready are you listening how'd you like it so this could also be a continuation of this conversation did you eat yet or did you eat yet I had an ice cream cone I ate an ice cream cone if we go very slowly and then I'll say it one more time how'd you like it what was that thing I just said write it out this is like a dictation exercise I want to see how your listening skills are if anyone can get it let's see yeah okay a lot of you got this good how did you like it excellent okay I'm gonna share a little bit of the listening chapter from the English fluency formula ebook which is an e-book that I wrote for you that includes my best tips all in one ebook it's downloadable it is a premium go natural English product so it is a paid item it's audio and text but today I'm gonna show you a little bit for free so let me bring it up on the screen actually let me ask you first is it okay for me to share this with you would you like me to share the listening portion some of the listening portion with you yes or yes okay I see some yeses amazing okay so I'm going to share that with you you should now be able to see the ebook I hope let me make sure that you can see that yes okay excellent okay and we're going to go into the chapter about listening which is here unit 7 so this is in the go natural English members area so this is a paid product as I mentioned you're not going to find this on the blog this is in the members area so the listening chapter is you know it's a little bit long I'm gonna just share a little bit with you so we're gonna start here I'm gonna read and you can improve your listening by listening to me reading right now how about that and just as a reminder before you go today before we end tomorrow we're going to be sharing our love of learning English together for Valentine's Day so make sure that you sign up for the challenge officially at gonaturalenglish.com slash challenge so that you can get all the information about each day's English challenge this week it's this week only Monday through Friday as I mentioned as I showed you let's see the English challenge week February 12th through 16th okay here we go English learners create a lot of problems for themselves when they tried to equate the spelling of a word with the way it sounds in conversation put simply English spelling does not always clearly inform us of the way a word sounds for example the Oh ugh spelling has many different pronunciations one reason for the multitude of pronunciations is that many English words are borrowed from other languages sometimes the words aren't spoken exactly as they're spelled here's an interesting example if English letters always made the same sounds then the word Ghoti or Goudy would sounds like the word fish that is because the word caught in the word COFF the letters gh make an F sound in the word women the O makes an I sound sound and in motion the TI makes a sound welcome to English I love that example I really do I'm gonna stop there I know that's just a little bit of inside the listening chapter of the English fluency formula but I didn't realize that I've been talking for so long today and I really had so much fun with you guys so I want to thank you so much for coming today to the English challenge and I just want to ask you once more if you join us late make sure that you sign up officially for the challenge at gonaturalenglish.com slash challenge the link is also in the description of the if you're watching us on YouTube it's in the description below and share this with your friends the whole points of English challenge week is to help everyone to improve their English this week people like you people like your friends your family members your colleagues maybe even people that you don't like but you think that they want to improve their English I don't know it could be really anyone you could share this on your social media you could share it with your best friend you could share it with your old English class buddy your classmate and make sure that you're subscribed to go natural English get on the train get on the bus get on the wagon get on the subscriber wagon be part of our amazing community on YouTube because I am actually releasing a new lesson each week on the YouTube channel so I don't want you to miss that you can get a notification when you subscribe and it'll get more information about the English challenge when you join it officially go natural English comm slash challenge and I forgot to even mention the best part is when you join the challenge and you participate each day you're gonna get a prize for free at the end of this week so I can't wait to tell you what it is right now it's a secret but you're going to love it so thank you so much for watching for joining me I hope you have a beautiful wonderful rest of your day and I'll see you here tomorrow on Valentine's Day to share our love of English learning together thanks again sending you love and good wishes and lots of English fluency and fun alright bye for now

Channel: Go Natural English

Views: 18,829

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Id: 6A9oMW63U08

Length: 48min 3sec (2883 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2018