How to Speak English 100% Naturally WITHOUT Translating in Your Head

[Music] so a a lot of Learners tell me that they feel frustrated when they actually get the opportunity to speak because they freeze up so like the ideas in their head aren't flowing out in a natural way like they would in their native language does this still happen to you when you speak English no I never freeze up but I I would add that if I'm giving a presentation or if I'm on this podcast maybe sometimes I need a moment to think but I'm not freezing up I'm just thinking like I would do in my native language but I think freezing up is more related to uh translation right like you're translating in your head so I never freeze up I would say these days and how is that I think with time I started to think in English and I think it's all about the way your brain is wired you know to process vocabulary what does that mean how your brain is wired yeah like a wire is like a literally a wire is like this rigid hard string made of metal that used to connect a machine you know and and it can maybe conduct electricity or data for that machine piece of machine but this is more figurative so the way your brain is wired it's how how things are connected in your mind right and how you process information in this case I'm saying that my brain and the brain of fluent speakers are wired or they process data differently I think we understand vocabulary and when we see words and we hear words um it we take that differently your process we process that differently that makes perfect sense how is it that your brain is wired to process information English the same way that you would in Portuguese in your native language I think there's two important things to highlight to really make that difference clear uh the first thing is that I am thinking directly in English I'm not thinking in Portuguese and which is my native language and translating my my thoughts to English they're coming to me directly in English and I think this is because of input I just started to associate words and images and things I'm seeing with the sounds in English so I know that this is a like a pencil because I've seen this enough and I've looked at it enough and already thinking like pencil pencil you know so I think that helps so input would be the first thing that I would need to say is very important and the second thing is the way you see words appearing together is important so we call that collocations when words they come up uh together in sentences more frequently than uh normal right and I'm not thinking about words individually they often come in word chunks of in terms of sound they sound very much like a sound unit I can give you one example of a cocation like make a decision make a decision right that sounds just like a single word you know maybe uh if you're more like a basic level learner and you hear that You' be like what is that word make a decision but those are three words uh and make is the verb that very often will accompany decision you know so I think that is the way you know that you start seeing vocabulary once you you have this mindset shift you be like huh you know it's like Lego bricks even like in another podcast we talked about about that right uh how words are more like Lego bricks that they go together so that gives you a leg up or an advantage when you're speaking because you're not trying to think of individual words or you're not translating your head but rather you have chunks of information that go together that when you want to express an idea you're putting chunks together the right chunks together rather than trying to have to think about every single word which can cause you to freeze up or just to speak slowly robotic unnaturally so I thought a really nice way we could approach this topic today is to look actually at the mistakes that most Learners make when it comes to learning vocabulary and you've already actually hinted at some of them so we'll come back to some of these ideas that we're talking about but a big thing that we believe here at real life English is that you shouldn't just learn English it's not something that you should just study as a school subject but it's something that you need to live in fact live it is a foundational component of our real life way methodology which is our unique way of teaching English so I thought a really fun way for us to approach this living it today would be with a book that I believe both of us are big fans of which is Harry Potter Harry Potter definitely my favorite fiction book I would say uh it's perfect for kids adults um if you're learning a new language there's always a version of Harry Potter the the first one for example I think is perfect because it introduces you to the story and also uh it was made for kids right like really young kids too so the vocabulary will be perfect for you to learn there as well yeah in fact it's nice that you say that because it's I think one of the first books I read in German and it was the first book I read in Spanish so the native language of it or the original language is English but even if you're learning another language the translations are really well done in most languages so it can be a great resource to depend on for language Learners so and in fact actually I even thought of this because right now I'm reading like a version of Harry Potter basically a Super Fan in Brazil made a Brazilian version of it so it even takes a lot of things from Brazilian culture and and politics and uh social social issues and things like this and the first book is called and um it's really nice because it takes some of the things that we love about Harry Potter but it's totally Brazilian so it's one I'd recommend to you if you're if you're wanting something that's kind of close to home but gives you those Harry Potter Vibes and it's been phenomenal for me to pick up a lot of new vocabulary collocations in Portuguese I've heard you mention it a few times already need to pick that up have a Kindle so mus you just download that there you go so the excert that I got for us to learn with today is from the first chapter and it's actually the first description that we hear of Dumbledore of if you haven't uh read Harry Potter it's one of the most iconic characters in the books and so let me just jump into it and then we'll take a look at some common vocabulary learning mistakes with some examples from it nothing like this man had ever been seen on privet drive he was tall thin and very old Jud by the silver of his hair and beard which both were long enough to tuck into his belt he was wearing long robes a purple cloak that swept the ground and high heeled buckled boots his blue eyes were light bright and sparkling behind Half Moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked as though it had been broken at least twice this man's name was alvus Dumbledore nice epic right and this is a good example because there's several pieces of ADV advaned vocabulary here to look at what most Learners would do what they would approach this with even for myself the first time I was reading in German and which I think was my first experience reading in a foreign language what I did was taking notes of individual words and adding their translation for example to a space repetition system or maybe if you just take physical notes you would do word translation and uh of course there's are a lot of advanced vocabularies here we saw like tuck swept crooked these are Advanced words and if you're not using the real life English app yet this is a really great way for you to learn some of the co collocations and vocabulary that we're going to be talking about today and to never forget them with vocabulary flash cards that way when you do get a conversation you have them readily available to you and we have all sorts of nice features to help you to make them a part of your active vocabulary so check that out for free in the Apple app app store Google Play Store or by clicking the link in the description of this podcast so many Learners approach vocabulary by memorizing long lists or by reading something like this and looking up every single individual word and translating it but the problem with that is often times and I believe you hinted at this is that sometimes translation doesn't work perfectly so an example I can use from the other day I was meeting with Chi who's our producer here hopefully he doesn't mind me using this example I guess if he does he he'll be editing this so he can edit it out but in Spanish and Portuguese and many Latin languages there's the same word for missed and lose and we were having a video call and I think the connection cut for a moment and so he meant to say I lost you which is like you know the connection cut so I couldn't hear you I couldn't see you anymore but he said I missed you which is like you know I I haven't seen you in a long time so I really missed you and so you know it's it's a common mistake to use Miss and lose wrong because people are translating directly from their language and when you do that then you're not having the right one so if you actually were learning instead collocations of what collocations go with Miss what collocations go with lose then you'll actually use them correctly in every situation or another example that a lot of Learners confuses make and do that there's just one word for this in many different languages and so someone might say do a cake instead of make a cake or make your homework when it's supposed to be do your homework yeah cuz both mean the same right and maybe in your native language my native language of Portuguese we say do and make for the same things it's like f it's the same verb so when you translate like you don't know which one to to use right same thing I mentioned make a decision a lot of people say do you a decision right um it's just to perform an action do you make but uh decision is always collocated with make not do and it's just something that naturally fits for me because I've heard it so many times so just natural yeah so if you're taking literally the word like and translating it as you would for any single thing then all the time right in your head you might be using one or the other because you haven't actually learned in chunks and without translating so in the short excerpt we saw some words like tuck swept crooked that if you were to just translate those then you might find different definitions of them for example if you looked up swept which is the participle of sweep then you might see that's like oh it's to clean the floor so you might be thinking that but it's not that at all because it's it's talking about how his cloak swept the ground it doesn't mean that he's cleaning the ground with his cloak with this this thing he's wearing it means that he is um it means that the cloak is dragging lightly across the the ground so we have different definitions that that sweep can be to clean with a room or can be to lightly drag across something and by just translating you might be missing missing the ball there even though I think it helps paint a picture right it becomes more visual as if it were sweeping you know the floor but it is not literally he's not intending to actually clean anything but right exactly so the second mistake I see a lot of Learners making is not applying always learning to learn grammar now always learning that's another part of our real life way methodology and you were kind of talking about earlier how our brains are wired in different ways and I think successful English Learners one way that their brain is wired is that they have this mentality of always looking for opportunities to learn and this isn't just limited to vocabulary we can also do this with many different grammatical things if you're listening to music if you're watching TV if you're reading something and I find that most Learners when it comes to grammar they think it's something that they have to study they have to sit down they have to do a textbook or do exercises online or something like this but you can find for me most grammar I've learned in languages that I've learned in my adult life so not in school I've learned more not passively but more through input and through doing things that I enjoy so one example I saw Here For example is the first sentence nothing like this man had ever been seen on private drive a lot of Learners mix up uh in on and at not knowing when to use which of those prepositions so we can see here on private drive so if someone has this mindset of always learning they're going to see that be a bit curious of like oh it's on private drive so private drive that's a street so any sort of Street whether it's a street or a way or a drive or an Avenue I should use on you could see all sorts of things like this if you're a bit curious and you're just analyzing a little bit more doing that a little bit of extra work with the things that you're consuming it's all about those patterns right and if you see them enough like it's you learn through repetition and it's more natural and you're living your English when you're doing that and you're bringing in some activation too so you're also activating by just purposefully looking for those similar patterns right those similar features in the construction of the sentences too so you can learn verb tens by doing this I myself uh learned I believe all verb tenses all 12 right uh by just doing this and in the previous episode s and I were talking about grammar and as I said I A lot of times I don't know exactly the name of the verb tense I'm using you know the name in grammar but I am using it and probably correctly uh because I just I've just seen it enough and I've analyzed it's like hm not this comes first normally okay so it sounds more natural to me now and that's the way I roll that's the way I go with uh grammar which is if you think about it that's very similar to how we learn our native language is grammar and we might refine that a bit meaning that we we polish it up or we make it better shinier more accurate when we go to school and we have to study our own language as grammar but in general we're probably learning like 80 to 95% of it just because we're listening to our parents all the time and then listening to things that we're encountering in our life and so on so you can get to a very good level of grammar definitely a functional level a level that it's going to be enough for most Learners without needing to necessarily sit down and study it in a textbook we've just really had drilled into our heads that we're supposed to learn grammar this way because it's how it was taught to us in school right yeah but if you go right now and you ask any person in your life like a friend or somebody from your family a question about Grimmer they are probably not going to know the answer it's like oh what what what verb tense are you using there right so why do you want to have that same mindset for a language that you're learning a new language right exactly don't be so hard in yourself the third mistake I often see Learners making is not considering the context enough so that's similar to what we were talking about before of how sweep was being used here so it's not talking about cleaning up the floor but it's talking about something dragging lightly MH and there's so many examples of this in in English I think in every language but one that I think about all the time with this is the verb get because get is just such a versatile verb in English uh for example we have get a head get a gift get a bite get lucky these all are being used in completely different definitions so you have to really pay attention to what's going on to the context to understand it it's not enough just to know that get often means the same as have right if you say get ahead it means to advance if you say get a gift it's receive a gift if you say get a bite it means to eat something if you say Get Lucky it means to be fortunate so none of those is it actually meaning have or even get lucky in another context could be just like to have sex right with another person exactly yeah so you really need to pay attention to the context there and this is what we were discussing too about that the same way with grammar that you you just do that little bit of extra analysis that little bit of extra curiosity about what's happening and what you're reading or what you're listening to and with so with grammar you know you might see like how is a certain verb being used or how is a certain preposition being used in this case you know you might pay attention to what words are often going together so for example we often have adjectives and nouns that go together like strong coffee we don't say you know that a coffee is dark or a coffee is bitter we'll say strong coffee meaning that it's not uh coffee that is too light or too watery and it's not talking about literally strong right like it has muscles yeah you'd imagine you just picture like a like a mug with coffee with like biceps arms or something not that yeah there so so many verbs right like one of one of the verbs that I like when I hear it it just like rolls off the tongue you know it just sounds kind of cool it's like Drop it when when somebody is being an yeah when somebody's being annoying and you just want them to stop being annoying and and saying whatever they're saying just say like hey drop it right which is different from literally dropping something mhm so if you don't know the context if you're not aware of the context you wouldn't know what they're talking about there and there's even other phrases like drop the ACT she's like stop faking like whatever you doing like you're you're faking it so stop doing that exactly so there was a nice one here that they said that his nose is crooked he has a crooked nose now we wouldn't say bent here we wouldn't say angled Twisted we'd say a crooked nose so these are two words that really go together to describe a nose like Owen Wilson for example for someone who has this nose that isn't straight and crooked is a really Advanced word and there's not many cases where we use it but we would very often use it to describe that kind of nose you know what that reminds me CU I've seen that in stories and just I guess cartoons like a crooked house right is that a more commonly associated with like Halloween and you have a house that's like abandoned and uh there's something creepy going on there is like it's often it looks crooked yeah and maybe just to drive this point home in other words to reinforce it if you were just learning the word crooked there in isolation it's one of those words that's not useful except for in these contexts we talked about like a crooked nose or crooked house in these collocations we pretty much always use that word but just crooked by itself so maybe if you had for example I'm thinking of a broom because we were talking about sweeping earlier if you had the broom got a bend in it you wouldn't say a crooked broom you'd say a bent broom so it's this kind of thing that if you just learn the word by itself it's not going to be that useful for you but if you learn the cation you're going to be using the right ones together that sound really good at least to a native ear I thought too uh Izzy you were talking earlier about how great Eminem is to learn and you said that you had an example you wanted to bring from that maybe we could look at also how you can learn in context with music for example definitely another great source of uh living your English moments there moments of immersion as I call as I like to call it so the song is Lose Yourself probably one of his most popular songs and it's just motivational tune right you can listen to it before maybe going to the gym uh or if you want to just like get excited about anything you're going to do next it's a great one get pumped up that would be a nice cool location to use there so if you want to get pumped up you should listen to this one this is uh Lose Yourself so I'm going to try and sing it here again the other day I was singing Adele on his podcast so might as well try this Eminem is a rapper so maybe this will be more of a challenge so this is how it goes you better lose yourself in the music the moment you own it you better never let it go you only get one shot to not miss the chance to blow this opportunity comes once in a lifetime you better yourself so so many you did great you got like all the connected speech here you go which is an important part of cations too right A lot of times they will appeal if you're if you're listening if you're not just reading they will sound connected a lot of times right A lot of these Expressions that and you can practice that yourself and that helps memorizing uh those words too I would say as a combination of words as like a word chunk it's so much easier to to remember them later on that might almost be like a 3.5 or third third and a half Point here of a mistake a lot of Learners make is even if you're learning collocations just learning the location but not learning it as a word chunk which would include the sound as well so if you're listening to something paying attention to what words go together but also usually they'll create a sound unit and maybe you could share some examples of that straight from the the lyrics here so Lose Yourself so you were talking about lose before Miss lose here's another example of how you can use lose the the verb lose but this is different from everything we've said here so far so what what does that mean to lose yourself in something it's like when you achieve flow states which is when you're so engulfed by something or you're so wrapped up in something that you lose which using the word loose here but all sense of time all sense of maybe what's happening around you you're just completely engrossed in that moment and then he says so you better lose yourself in music the moment you own it huh so what what is that to own it if you own it it's you take pride in something so it's just like again it goes hand in hand with lose yourself in the music because lose yourself in the moment because now you're you're you're so in it that you you own it you take pride uh in that and I said handy hand I guess it's another cocation there right cuz it's not literally you're not actually pi ing hands there is just like it's connected right and you had some nice sound units there as well that it's not hand in hand it's hand in hand it all flows together right or own it we don't give it space there it's like Own It own it the N links on to the it right and you can see that too in Let It Go which is here so you better never let it go I guess it's also present in a Disney a popular Disney song all right from Frozen so there you have have uh you're talking connected speech so let it and you have a flap t or an American t as we call it and the in let so let it sounds like a d so it's like let it and I think he drops the T there in it so like let it you just stop the flow of air says let it let it go you better never let it go and we have two more Expressions here only get one shot and once in a lifetime but I'll leave the those for you to learn on the app you you're a listener if you go to the real life app right now you can uh see the full transcript as Ethan said earlier and learn all about these expressions with flashcards nice so the last mistake that I often I'm seeing Learners making especially nowadays is that we have all these amazing tools that people aren't taking advantage of like maybe you're just getting sucked into learning vocabulary lists or lessons where they teach you all the vocabulary about X topic but as we've already seen that's not the most effective way to go about learning there's much more natural ways one of these tools that I have found is just a GameChanger meaning something that is innovative and makes a humongous difference is AI so I really like chat chbt for anything having to do with questions about language and so just to give you guys a quick example of this I headed over over to Google news and just grabbed an interesting headline there uh so this headline says Julian Assange I'm not actually sure how to pronounce his name but he's the guy from Wikileaks cut steel to plead guilty gain freedom so actually news headlines usually they have a lot of collocations and expressions in them so it can be if you like learning if you like reading the news it can be a great way to learn these so there's some nice things here like cut a deal plead guilty gain freedom right so just to give you guys an example of how I might use AI in my language learning is I would have a conversation chat PT like if I'm doing this with Portuguese for example I'll actually try to always keep the conversation in Portuguese so if I'm asking about some sort of uh for example the other day I saw a new expression in Portuguese while watching a Brazilian series and I'll actually ask it in Portuguese what does this expression mean and it gives me the explanation in Portuguese so what Izzy was saying earlier about not being in the habit of translating this can help you just to start thinking more in in your target language which in this case would be English right so I'm just going to pull out my phone here and open the chat gbt app and actually try speaking with it so sometimes I might write it but it can also be great for your speaking practice to actually have a conversation with chat trib team if you haven't tried that yet what does it mean to cut a deal to cut a deal means to make an agreement or come to a negotiated settlement often in business or politic politics it's about reaching a compromise or Arrangement that both parties can accept what about if someone is arrested what does it mean to cut a deal in that context in the context of someone being arrested to cut a deal usually refers to negotiating a plea bargain with the prosecution this often involves the defendant agreeing to plead guilty to a lesser charge or provide valuable information in exchange for reduced sentence or other concessions can you give me some more examples with cutting a deal here are a few more examples one in a business setting two companies might cut a deal to merge sharing resources and profits two in sports a team might cut a deal with a player to extend their contract for a few more years three in politics two parties might cut a deal to pass a piece of legislation agreeing to support each other's proposals these examples show how cutting a deal involves negotiation and compromise to reach an agreement yeah so we can see even just beyond the context that I saw here we can use this expression in all sorts of different context right so it's just really mind-blowing tool for language learning it really is and if you feel like it's the vocabulary it's using is too difficult you could even ask hey I'm learning English you know I'm more at an intermediate level so could you uh use more basic level words or you can just ask it anything you want right before you ask it any questions like Define this or give me examples of that all right so to wrap up today's episode I thought a fun way that we could actually learn some more collocations and put your English knowledge to the test is to play a game I'm calling phrase [Music] frenzy what's a frenzy a frenzy is where many people are going crazy I suppose and we'll use it in this sort of sense to say like you know you're having a crazy fun time yeah maybe if you go see a soccer game at the stadium uh people like when your team scores you basically experience like a frenzy there in the crowd that most certainly is true when I lived in belan in Brazil there was actually two teams there are two teams in belan and they're their rivals and when there was a game between the two of them it felt like the city would literally shake when one of them would make a goal so you can see definitely that felt like a frenzy around football around soccer so it's pretty simple I have some sentences and each of them has a collocation but one word of the cocation so they are each two word collocations but one word is going to be blank and you'll have to guess what the other word is these are all quite Advanced ones so I think even for native speaker they could be difficult but are you up for the challenge Izzy I am let's do this what's the worst that could happen so the first one is it hurts so bad I was in excruciating pain you got it excruciating pain so these are two words excruciating we don't use in that many context it means an extreme degree of something but it's often collocated in this way excruciating pain to me a large degree of pain mhm and I'm not sure if we'll Define all these but again if you listen to this on the real life English app you can get vocabulary flash cards for all of them there and I would say that I would not even use the word excruciating outside of this particular collocation um but I do use it with pain because uh tell me if I'm right like excruciating is more it's related to like this kind of face where you're just like it's so much pain that your that your face is just like twisting and your muscles are just super tense is that it mhm yeah it's it's a level of pain that you can't think about or do anything else all right number two in the movie Challengers ca's character does not like to lose she's fiercely blank competitive yeah fiercely competitive so that's another complication we don't use fiercely in that many settings but again it's like someone's fiercely competitive sometimes there are issues I prefer to ignorant on maybe that's why they say ignorance is blank ah a bliss is that it so we say ignorance is bliss or Blissful ignorance ignorance is bliss not a bliss exactly so Bliss is like happiness like a state of happiness but you wouldn't say ignorance ignorance is happiness or ignorance is Joy they're synonyms but it just doesn't sound right and that's what cations I think are all about okay teenagers lies are usually easy to see through because they are fundamentally blank short-legged is that a word that is that's not the the cocation but it's it's a nice Advanced uh piece of vocab so the collocation that we use with fundamentally often in this context would be fundamentally flawed ah okay do you not care about her feelings you showed a blank disregard to her emotions he let me just think hm maybe total or complete so it's blatant blatant disregard a blatant disregard for something I think blatant has this connotation that is like shocking too right so it's more than just complete or full or any of that blatant is just like you you get shocked when you may get shocked when you see it right mhm okay your brains all the time in Ireland so water is blank available widely so actually here it's readily readily available readily nice again it's just like that connotation that you get where widy it would be okay here but readily as you're saying like readily available that is totally something that I hear more often yeah something about widely available like it I understand it it makes sense but it doesn't sound quite as good as readily available all right last one so I think so far you've gotten four which actually is really good because these were difficult and I think the last ones I tried to have ones that weren't quite so difficult to start out so you could get on a roll but I found Brazilian mothers sure love when someone has a blank appetite okay I'm drawing a blank here for this one I don't know what is it that's a good cocation draw blank which is like I don't know there's nothing in my mind so what is that what if I said that here at real life English we try to bring people on our team who are blank Learners ah voracious yeah so this is a word that we use often for Learning and for appetite voracious appetite or voracious learner mhm you can even I think use the word eat or eat up the phrasal verb referring to content or knowledge information right maybe the book is so good Harry Potter is so good just like eat it up in a single day I've done that actually it's cuz I've read it so many times and I think the second time third time it was just like something that I did in a single day just reading the entire book so I ate it up so I give you that last point so I think you got five out of seven that is very I think that I don't know if I would have done better than that so I think that that's very impressive wow oh yeah so guys thanks so much for joining us for today's lesson hopefully you've gotten some tips that will actually help you to learn vocabulary more effectively to feel more confident and able to express your ideas fluently when you get into a conversation and if you find that these lessons are helping you a free way that you can support us so we can continue bringing you great lessons like this is by hitting the Subscribe button and the bell Down Below on YouTube so you don't miss a single new lesson also hit the like button because this helps YouTube to know that you enjoy the content so that more people can have fun learning with us if you are listening to us on Apple podcast on Spotify or any other podcast platform you can give us a festar review again this helps uh people from all around the world who are learning English to discover our content so they can also have a lot of fun learning with us and finally be sure to download the real life app and take your English Eng to a next level with these podcasts and if you do leave us a five star review in your favorite app store and that said no matter what divides us that which unites us is far greater 1 2 3 a yeah many English teachers and schools put too much emphasis on grammar and not enough emphasis on speaking they spread the idea that you have to know all the grammar rules before you start speaking which can have negative effect on your confidence when you finally get to speaking now you may be asking yourself how can I possibly learn to speak English correctly if I don't study grammar well that's exactly what e and I are going to be talking about in today's episode so stick around because this Podcast May just change your life forever [Music]

Channel: RealLife English

Views: 12,019

Keywords: reallife english, real life english, podcast, english podcast, podcast in english, listen, listening, comprehension, practice, conversation, pronunciation, native, connected speech, english lesson, class, advanced, intermediate, fluency, fluent, english course, ingles, ingles intermediario, curso ingles, fluencia, podcast ingles, aprender ingles podcast, aprender ingles, aula ingles, conversação, vocabulary, course, lesson

Id: C8I_kKo_9GE

Length: 36min 53sec (2213 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2024