- Do you translate everything in your head?
Because if you do, there's a good chance
that what you're doing to improve your English
is actually making it worse and not better.
Watch on.
Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingEnglish.com.
If you are stuck thinking in your native language,
translating everything in your head word by word,
rule by rule,
painstakingly computing your English sentences as you go,
there's a good chance what are you doing
to improve your English is making the situation worse
and not better.
You see, we get good at what we practise and many people,
although they think they are doing what they should be doing
to improve their English,
are actually practising these mental gymnastics
that make you do what you are doing.
First of all, let's think about what you probably did
when you were at school.
If you had English classes
and if you didn't like the classes
that typically people in Japan have
and certainly what I had when I studied French in the UK,
there's a good chance that you learned by
memorising lists of vocabulary, studying grammar rules,
translating sentences back and forth.
Learning to take the grammar that you learned,
slot in words, and construct and compute sentences.
And of course, your teacher would put you on the spot.
Hey, Julian!
She would say, stand up, tell me how to say
"I have a green apple" in French.
And then I would be expected to produce the sentence,
which of course I had no fucking clue how to do anyway,
but in my head I would trying to make it work.
I'd have apple.
(speaks foreign language)
No, that's potato.
(speaks foreign language)
I don't know pom.
You get the idea.
And I would all be a total mess in them.
Most people have English lessons like this.
What you are actually doing there is practising
thinking about what you're saying as you're saying it.
And of course in that situation,
if you get it wrong, what happens?
Your teacher punishes you by saying no, that's wrong!
Or by giving you bad scores on a test.
So that reinforces the feeling that you've got to
spend more time thinking about these things,
more carefully to compute them properly.
And then we get older, we struggle with our English.
We start thinking in our native language,
translating, not speaking as fluently as we'd like.
So what do we do?
We think well okay, obviously I need to memorise more words.
I need to study more grammar.
And a little bit at a time you train yourself
to think about everything as you are saying it.
The way you are learning, although you think
you are doing what you need to do to get more fluent,
you're actually making the problem worse,
because what you are practising is
not what you need to be able to do and that is
to be able to speak fluently and spontaneously
without all the mental gymnastics going on in your head
that are slowing you down in the first place.
And the first thing that you need to do is to
understand that very fact that what you are doing
is probably making the problem worse,
so that you are able to let go
and to start training yourself a little bit over time
to start speaking directly in English
without thinking in your native language
or having to you know, having to construct and compute,
and gymnasti-cize these sentences and all words.
It doesn't matter.
You get the idea as you go.
I will make more videos about this.
Talking about how you can actually do this,
but if you want to get into straight away,
I recommend you check out my book
Think English, Speak English:
How to Stop Performing Mental Gymnastics
Every Time You Speak English.
It's on Kindle.
It also comes in paperback.
Also via Amazon.
You can read the first chapter for free
and it comes with a complete audio version
and it only costs like $2.99 or something stupid like that.
If you wanna fix this problem that you are struggling with,
if you are struggling with it,
go to ThinkEnglishSpeakEnglish.com and check that out.
Otherwise this is me, Julian Northbrook,
signing out from other video.
Give it a thumbs up if you found it useful.
If you hated it, whatever, give me a thumbs up anyway
and I will see you in the next video
and I will talk more about this in future videos
so stay tuned.
Buh-bye.
(upbeat music)