Becoming Fluent in English

Hey English learners, how's it going? Today, I want to talk about becoming fluent in English. In this video, I'm going to talk at normal speed. You have the subtitles here below, so this will be good practice for your listening. There are two definitions of fluency that I want to go over. So, people think of fluency in different ways. Some people think of fluency as just speaking in a fluid manner, meaning you're speaking without needing to stop all the time, you're speaking continuously, it's just flowing from your mouth, but you still have a good number of mistakes, right? That's what many people's definition of fluency is. However, there's another definition that some people, that they support, another definition of fluency, which is when you're at a very, very high level, you speak very accurately, you have just a really, really, really high level of language. Some people think of that as fluency, right? So, there's probably no consensus. It's not like, all right, we can all agree on one definition of fluency, but usually people take one of those two approaches when it comes to fluency. They think of it in one of those two ways. Either they're more literal, like, okay, it's fluid speech that's coming out of your mouth, there are mistakes, maybe even a good number of mistakes, but it's flowing very naturally. Or some people have a very strict standard, a very high standard, I think, fluency that refers to just having an extremely high level in the language, right? Where you're speaking very, very accurately as well. So, I'm going to talk about both of those today. I'm going to talk about my opinion on how someone reaches those levels, how someone reaches fluency. Again, this is my opinion. Other people will disagree with me. This is just what I think about this, right? And ultimately, this type of video is not just to give you advice or tips or things like that. It's for your listening practice. So, whether or not you agree with me, it doesn't really matter. You're here to practice your listening and just increase and improve your comprehension. So, that's what we're going to talk about today. By the way, if you want more advanced content like this, where I speak at normal speed, make sure to sign up to become a Listening Time family member. The link is down below. You can sign up to become a Listening Time family member to receive my advanced podcast episodes in which I speak like this. I speak fast, okay? So, let's talk about fluency. Fluency refers to oral communication, obviously. So, we're talking about speaking and understanding here. We're not talking about writing and reading. Of course, those things are important, but here I'm just talking about your fluency in the oral realm. So, in order to be fluent, you need both speaking and understanding. A lot of people just focus on the speaking aspect, but if you can't understand well, I don't think that people would normally consider you very fluent if you just can't understand what people are saying to you. If you're having every 30 seconds or so, you have to say, hey, can you repeat that? Can you repeat that? People probably aren't going to get the feeling that you're fluent, quote-unquote. So, you need speaking and understanding. So, let's talk about a couple different phases of becoming fluent, whether that's reaching the first definition of fluency or the second that we went over. So, let's talk first about building a foundation, okay? When you're starting out, when you're at a lower level, you got to build your foundation for the language, your foundation of your knowledge of that language. And in my opinion, that comes from your comprehension of the language, your understanding of the language. So, in this phase, you're going to want to do tons and tons and tons of listening practice. This is going to be the main thing that you do. Of course, some people do like to speak really early. I'll talk about that in just a second, but let's focus on the main foundation of your knowledge of a language, which is what you can understand, your comprehension, okay? So, once you're able to understand many things in the language, you're building up a passive vocabulary, a passive knowledge of the language, and you can turn those things into active knowledge later on, right? But you're first just building up this foundation of mostly passive knowledge, but also active knowledge once you have heard the same thing many, many times, you can probably just actively say it without even thinking about it, right? So, that's going to happen too. But in this phase, you really want to just focus on learning as many words as you possibly can. Again, first passively, later on, they'll be more active, but just understanding vocabulary. That's a really, really big key point here. Using comprehensible input, this is a term we use to talk about input, like stuff that you listen to or read, but in this case, we're talking about oral communication, so listening to things that you can understand, but they're a little challenging for you. So, it's not like you can understand 100% of everything that's being said, but you can understand the point of what's being said, and your brain is trying to kind of put the puzzle together for the words that you can't quite understand, but you get the context. So, using content that isn't way too hard for you or too easy for you. If you understand every single thing, every single word, that's probably too easy for you, right? You need to use content that's a little challenging for you, but that you can still understand generally, right? That's comprehensible input. That should be the majority of what you do when you're building your foundation to try to become fluent, is you need to listen as much as possible to comprehensible input. Listen to tons and tons of different types of audios, videos, different sources. Of course, doing reading is also important as well. It really helps you learn vocabulary, and then when you are watching videos with subtitles or listening to something with the transcript, it's reading too, right? You're listening and you're reading. So, you're doing listening and reading practice. Doing a lot of repetition is really important when building a foundation, right? When you're really trying to just develop a lot better understanding of a language, and then even just working on, you know, speaking well. Doing a lot of repetition is going to help with that because when you hear the same thing over and over again, that thing, first it becomes like your passive knowledge, and then you've heard it so much that you can just naturally say it as well, you know? It becomes an active vocabulary word or phrase that you know, right? So, doing a lot of repetition, both like direct repetition where you're just listening to the same thing again and again, and then also like indirect repetition, like maybe you're listening to like one YouTuber or something like that, and you just listen to all their videos about one topic. So, it's not literal repetition where you're just listening to the same video over and over again, but you're hearing them talk over and over again about the same topic. And of course, we tend to use the same types of phrases and words. We have a certain style of speaking. So, you're going to get repetition just listening to the same person talking about the same topic, right? So, that type of repetition, and then explicit direct repetition where you're just listening to the same thing over and over again, both of those are really, really powerful tools, powerful methods to help you build your foundation. And so, after you do hundreds of hours of this, of just really intense listening, repetition, just learning vocabulary and all this, you're going to eventually reach a level where you can understand one person when they're speaking to you, or you can understand a person that you're listening to on YouTube or something like that. And then, you're going to develop a very wide range of passive words, like words that you know passively, meaning like when you hear them, you know them. You can understand what the person is saying, right? You will eventually know most of the words that you hear. If you do this for hundreds of hours, you'll reach the level where most of the things that someone says to you, you will be able to understand, right? And that's a great feeling, okay? An optional part of this first phase of your learning is speaking. And I say it's optional because some people don't like to speak early, and that's okay, right? I think, in general, I'm someone that doesn't really like to speak that early, but I know other people that really like speaking early, and it can work for them, or maybe it can work for you to not speak early. I've talked to many people who did not speak early, and then, finally, they have a conversation with me, and it's their first conversation that they've ever had with a native speaker, and they're speaking great. We're having a full-on conversation, even though it's the first time they've ever spoken to someone. So, you can reach a pretty good level where you can start to speak to people even without doing a lot of speaking practice in this early phase, okay? So, that's why I say that this is optional. Some people really, really like to do this, though, so, you know, it's obviously just your choice. The next phase, though, after you've built this foundation where you can actually understand a person pretty well, like you can understand the majority of the things that they say to you, you can already interact in the language like that, once you're at that intermediate level, then things change a little bit because, well, let's just first talk about where you're at at this level. Once you're, you know, I think all of you, if you just do this, you're all going to reach the level where you can understand someone, even when they're speaking at normal speed, you can understand them pretty well. You guys can all reach that level, okay? You guys all have that ability just from doing tons and tons of listening practice, repetition, using comprehensible input, reading, you know, you're gonna reach this level, okay? However, there still will be gaps in your comprehension at this level. It's not like you're gonna understand every single thing that someone says, and different speaking styles can be hard, and you might even have major difficulties when it comes to group settings, like when you're listening to more than one person speaking, right? That's something that I dealt with when I was learning Spanish, like I was able to talk one-on-one to someone really well, but then if you threw me into a group setting, suddenly I was like, like there were so many things I couldn't understand, right? So even at an intermediate level, you might still have those gaps, it might still be hard for you in a group setting, right? So at this level, there's a few things that you'll be able to do to increase your comprehension. You need to start spending more time listening to more than one person speaking, right? It's still good to listen to one person speaking, that's still great, but adding in content where you're listening to more than one person speaking is essential, right? By the way, that's why I make my US Conversations podcast. I talk to different English teachers from around the country, and I transcribe our conversation. We speak at normal speed, it's authentic, so it's good practice for that specific type of practice. If you want that, the link is down below as well. But you have to start practicing with that, because if you cannot function in a group setting, people are not going to consider you fluent, right? If you talk pretty well one-on-one, but suddenly you're in the car with two or three people and you can't follow the conversation, people aren't going to consider you fluent, right? Even if you speak fairly well, okay? So being able to understand people in different settings, different group settings, this is essential when it comes to fluency, right? So you need to be able to interact in group settings, be able to understand more than one person speaking. When it comes to the actual you speaking, it's going to be really important for you to actually integrate a lot of speaking practice into your routine. Now, it's not so optional, right? If you actually want to reach a level of fluency, yeah, the first phase when you're just trying to build that foundation, it's optional, right? In my opinion, okay? Once you're at this intermediate level, once you can understand people well, then speaking becomes a priority and becomes a big priority, okay? And I'm sure those of you watching right now, this is what you're most interested in probably. You want to be able to speak fluidly, speak naturally, right? Well, how do we do this? Well, when we speak naturally, when we speak fluidly, when we say things in a natural way without needing to stop and think and, you know, put the sentence together in our brain, it's because we're saying things that we already know are correct, okay? Because we've heard them millions of times. I'm exaggerating here, but we've heard them many, many times, okay? So that's why listening and repetition is so powerful to help your speaking. Because once you've heard someone say a certain phrase like 200 times, you just know that it's correct and you just say it naturally, right? It can just come out of your mouth without you realizing it. That's happened to me many times in different languages where I just randomly say something. It's like the first time I've said it, I'm like, whoa, I've never said that before. But it's just so natural to say it because I've heard it so many times, I know it's correct, right? It's just natural for me to say that. So that's kind of what we want to do in order to become fluent. So you've got to continue doing tons and tons and tons and tons of listening practice, okay? Reading as well, but especially listening practice because we're talking about oral communication here, right? You know, for me, for like French, when I started speaking French regularly, I had already done hundreds, thousands maybe of hours of intense just listening, you know, where I wasn't just listening to like content made for French learners. Like I was listening to native content, right? You know, YouTube channels of online entrepreneurs talking about, you know, online entrepreneurship and they're just talking to other French speakers. Like I was using that content before I even, you know, was having conversations in French. I was listening to native content just every day, just, you know, doing this, just so much of this and doing repetition and, you know, all of this just gave me so many phrases, so many words and phrases that I could already just say naturally without even thinking about them. So when I had my first, like when I first started having regular conversations in French, I could already say so many things naturally just because of all that, you know, listening I had done, right? And of course I had to start filling in my gaps, but I already had just this great, great foundation. So listening is just, you know, that's the pillar, that's the foundation of your knowledge in a language, okay? What you can understand, your understanding in that language, right? So it can be discouraging when you're at the intermediate phase because you know a lot of words, whether it's passively or actively, even just passively, you know so many words, you know so many of the common words, you know like most of the common words. And so the things that you don't know at this phase are things that don't come up that often, right? So things that come up really often, you've already learned those things in your foundation phase when you're just like building your foundation. But then, you know, once you reach a higher level, you're at an intermediate level, the things that you don't know, you don't hear them that often because they're not as common. And so it can feel like you're not really learning a lot of new things because it takes so long for you to hear those same words again and again and get that necessary repetition, right? And so one thing you can do is you start to try to actively fill in your own gaps just in an active way where you speak and you see what you can't actually say yet. And then you, you know, write down those things, you translate them, and then you fill in those gaps. You search for your own gaps instead of just waiting for your gaps to get filled through your own listening practice. You know, speak, speak to someone or speak to yourself and actively fill in those gaps, right? So you're going to need to do this if you want to really increase your level of speaking in a faster way. Obviously, just doing a bunch of listening is going to help your speaking. But if you want to speed this up, if you want to get, you know, reach a higher level in a shorter amount of time, it's great to actively do this. And so, you know, what I did, I haven't done as much recently, but what I was doing a lot last year was I was speaking to myself in French, usually out loud, and I would do this like almost every day. And when you do this almost every day, you just keep on finding more and more gaps. You close those gaps, you learn the things that you're trying to say, that you can't say, you know, you actively do this, you're going to, you know, really increase, improve your level of speaking, right? So do this, do it frequently, speak to other people, you know, use these different tools and websites where you can take classes with native speakers, do that, and also speak to yourself, right? You know, just speaking, whether it's to yourself or to another person, if you do this frequently, you're going to train those speaking muscles, your ability to just say things that you know, and then you're also just going to find your gaps, and you want to actively do that, right? The way we get better is we find what we don't know, and then we learn it, right? That's how we close our gaps, that's how we get better at speaking. And so, you know, it's pretty basic, everything I'm saying right here, in terms of like the philosophy behind it, right? You're doing tons of listening, you're doing a ton of repetition, but you're also at this phase, you're actively trying to increase your speaking, to improve your speaking by filling in your gaps, right? And so those two things, if you do them for, you know, many, many hours, you're going to reach a level where you're at that first level of fluent, that first definition of fluency that we talked about, where you can speak pretty naturally with mistakes, because you're still filling in your gaps, it's still going to take a while, but you're speaking naturally, you can interact with people, you can even interact with people in a group setting, right? That's a really, really, really great level in a language. Once you've reached that level, it's like, people just view you as like, you're good in that language, right? And for many people, that's fluency right there. You might tell me, well, I want to reach that second definition of fluency, where I'm just really, really good, and I'm not making a lot of mistakes, and I'm just like, speaking extremely well. Well, how do you reach that level? Well, you do this, but you do it more intensively, and or, you do it for many, many, many, many more hours, okay? Add hundreds, if not thousands of more hours of what I just said right now, and you can eventually reach that second definition of fluency, depending on which definition you're going for, right? But there's not like another secret key to reach that other level. It's just that if you want to be more accurate in your fluid speech, you got to have more phrases that are just in your mind that you just know without even thinking about. You just know they're correct, and you just say them, right? That's how we as native speakers talk. So if you want to have that as well, you know, imagine how much listening you need to do, how much repetition you need to do, how much speaking you need to do where you're filling in your gaps, and then not only that is something I forgot to mention, not only filling in your gaps, but actively learning vocabulary as well. Like, you know, it's one thing to just say, okay, I didn't know how to say this. Let me translate it. All right, that's how you say it. Another thing, a better way than just doing that, is to now try to actively learn that phrase. Learn that word that you didn't know, right? And that could be with flashcards, or maybe you have some other way. I've done flashcards, and it's worked for me. But actively trying to learn words and phrases that you need. You don't need every word. You don't need every phrase. You just need the words and phrases that you use, okay? And, you know, this is just a process that takes a lot, a lot of time, okay? People, you know, constantly, you know, tell me that they have a problem. They have this problem. They have this problem because they're not speaking accurately. It's not natural for them. They freeze up when they're speaking. Well, that's not a problem. That's what the process is. You have to get through that by doing much more listening, much more repetition, much more speaking practice, filling in your gaps, and actively learning vocabulary. It really is simple when you think of that, you know, whole philosophy behind it. So these are just my opinions, of course, and some people might disagree with me. But I think it's pretty basic at the end of the day. The big thing is that it takes a ton of time and it takes active practice as well, right? If you're doing all this just very passively, you're not really invested in this, it's not going to be the same thing. If you're actively doing this, if you're actively engaged, if you really are just like there in it doing this, you know, doing it in a very active way, you know, eventually you're going to reach your goals. It's just that if you have that second definition of fluency, it's going to take a long time, okay? A really long time. Or it could be a shorter amount of time, but you're going to be spending many, many hours just every week doing this and most people don't have that time. So you could shorten it, it might not be that long in terms of like years, but you're going to have to do tons and tons of practice. And I'm not trying to discourage you, I'm just trying to make it clearer why you're not at that level of fluency, whatever definition you have. It's, you know, it's a matter of time, being engaged with it, and being active, actively trying to fill in your gaps, actively trying to understand in group settings, you know, doing this practice actively, okay? My thoughts were a little scattered today, but I think you guys got my point. You can let me know down in the comments what you think about this or if you have any other ideas. Remember to check out my US Conversations podcast, so you can try listening to more than one person talking. This is a skill that you need to develop, as we just talked about. So if you want that, that link is down below, so go down and click on that. And if you just want more advanced content like this, where I'm speaking at normal speed, make sure to become a Listening Time family member, and so you'll get my advanced podcast episodes. That link is also down below. All right, thank you all for listening, for watching this video, and I'll talk to you in the next one.