Give me 10 Minutes and You’ll Start Thinking in English.

For the next 10 minutes you are going to follow my speaking routine with me. Five steps. You and I. This routine helps me stop treating English like another boring school subject. This routine helped me live in English. This routine helps me travel. My name is Veronika. I'm originally from Poland and I'm a digital nomad, meaning I travel full-time. I work remotely from beautiful places. Hello from Thailand. And without English, all these things would be totally impossible. The final step of my routine is the most important one. It's the one that most people skip. That's why they feel stuck. That's why they understand English but they can't speak it. Let's get started with my 10-minute speaking routine that will help you think in English and stop translating. The first step. You need input. New information to enter your brain. So you are going to watch something that you genuinely, deeply, truly like. Something that you would watch anyway in your native language. Whether it's a YouTube video, a movie, a show, whatever. It needs to be yours. First you're gonna watch with subtitles. I know that a lot of English tips out there on the internet tell you subtitles are bad for language learning. They are not bad. They actually help your brain identify phrases easier and faster. Especially if you are a visual learner like me. I memorize new things by looking at them. So your job is as follows. You watch one minute with subtitles and after that you re-watch the same video for another minute but this time without subtitles. You want to be an observer. Observe carefully the people's mouth movement, their gestures, how they interact with each other. If you don't understand a word, if you don't understand a phrase, if you don't understand some grammar structure, it doesn't matter at this point. Just make sure that you get the main point. Just make sure that you understand what's going on and the situation in general. Why do we do that and why this step is so important? Because your brain needs English before it's able to produce it. If you've never listened to this phrase you will never be able to produce it. But guys if you subscribe to my channel most probably you already know that watching alone is not going to make you fluent. So here we go with the second step of my routine. You are going to copy what you heard. In other words we can say that it's the shadowing technique. The famous and my favorite the shadowing technique. I know it's pretty windy out here because I'm literally at the beach. Here you can see the beach. I'm in Thailand in a beautiful coffee shop but I would like to show you how I do it and how I copy native speakers. How I copy exactly three phrases and how later I make them my own. So I have my cell phone here and I'll improvise here with you. So here I have my YouTube. A video popped up of a traveler that's an American and it's perfect for my goals because my focus is American accent. Obviously I have my own accent, my Polish accent and it's a part of my identity and a part of my story. But I work with American clients. I love to travel to the USA so I'm focused on American accent. But you pick the accent that you need the most. I'm going to watch for one minute with subtitles and then I'm gonna turn the subtitles off. Today we're exploring a country not many have traveled. A country that was once thriving with tourism but now is completely empty. A nation that is home to the holiest sites in all of Buddhism. This is by far the most raw adventure I have ever been on in my life but also the most eye-opening. And now my job in step two is to choose three phrases that I think are going to be useful in my life. And whenever I make new friends or I meet some new business partners I can reuse these phrases in my life. So the first one was... Today we're exploring a country. And I make sure I say these phrases out loud at least five times. I'm gonna actually write them down in my notes. We're exploring a country. I continue watching and looking for the second phrase. This is by far the most raw adventure I have ever been on in my life. I'm gonna write the full phrase. The most raw adventure I've ever been on in my life. The most raw adventure I've been on in my life. The most raw adventure I've ever been on in my life. The most raw adventure I've ever been on in my life. The most raw adventure I've ever been on in my life. I used to think that you pronounce this word as raw but it's raw. That's the magic of shadowing. The most raw adventure I've ever been on in my life. Can you see when I'm repeating these phrases I'm expressing my emotions, right? I try to copy this guy but at the same time I'm feeling this phrase. Okay, now we are looking for the third phrase. But also the most eye-opening. The most eye-opening. It means that something opens your eyes but it also opens your mind. The third step of my speaking routine is to change and make it yours. Take these three phrases, grab them and make them about your life. So here I go with my three phrases. The first one was we're exploring a country and now I'm making it mine. Right now we're exploring a stunning country, Thailand, together with my boyfriend. Okay, here I go with the second sentence. The most raw adventure I've ever been on in my life was when I was 19 and I was backpacking in Southeast Asia with my best friend. Why was it so raw? Because I had like 400 euros in my pocket and nothing else. Two months in Southeast Asia and we survived. I wouldn't do it right now when I'm 27 but when I was 19 that was literally the best I could do with my life. Give me a second. I'm gonna grab my coffee because I'm getting a bit thirsty. Here I go with my coffee. Wait a second. My camera is not following me. Hi, I'm here. This is my face. Follow me. Because my camera is in Spanish and it was telling me I really need my coffee because I woke up today super late, like 2 p.m. again. Let's go with the third phrase. The most eye-opening. Okay, so the most eye-opening experience of my life was when I first traveled to Sri Lanka because for the first time in my life I experienced a completely different reality than the one I grew up in in Europe. Did you notice how personal my sentences are? It's because English or any other foreign language you're learning becomes easier when it sounds like your life. These sentences already belong to you. That's amazing but when I'm talking to a real person I'm not gonna look at my notes, right? So this brings me to the fourth step. Speak with your notes closed. Actually for that I'm gonna need my cell because I'm about to record a two-minute video of myself speaking. My goal is to use these three phrases so I'm gonna try to tell a story. It can be a bit clumsy. It doesn't have to be perfect. The goal is just to open my mouth and speak out loud. My camera is a bit dirty. We need to clean it. Okay, so here I go. Together with my boyfriend we are exploring a country that's absolutely stunning and it's Thailand. The most eye-opening thing was that we never explored really the southern Thailand and the central part of Thailand and we are so surprised. We are so surprised by what we found. We are right now at the beach recording videos, working under a palm tree and I didn't know that Thailand can offer you so so much. This country has fantastic energy. I mean I love the culture. I love the Buddhism. I love how I feel in Thailand. I love the people in Thailand. They are so kind and polite and they always want to help you and even if they don't speak a lot of English it doesn't matter. You always find a way of communicating yourself with Thai people and I'm pretty sure that if I were to settle down at some point in my life that would definitely be in Thailand. I wouldn't go to any other country. That would be Thailand. Right now I just need to figure out my visa situation in Thailand and figure out how I can be here longer and I wanted to also talk about the most raw adventure I've been on in my life. It was when I was 19 so that was eight years ago. It's a pretty long time but anyway eight years ago when I packed my backpack. I remember my backpack was like seven kilograms so it was just like necessities, the basic stuff and it's been the most raw adventure because I was 19. I was with my best friends and we just had 400 euros each so and we survived. So that's it. I recorded myself speaking in English. I made some mistakes for sure. There were some ims and oms and I was sometimes correcting myself but who cares. I spoke English and this is what matters. If you want to think in English you just have to keep going and stop judging yourself. This brings me to the final fifth step of my speaking routine so you can start thinking in English. Use. Use this practice in real life. Think about one situation, just a two-minute situation where you can use English. Whether it's with your co-worker, in a convenience store, in a grocery store, telling somebody about your weekend, making small talk, adjust it to your life. Now a lot of you guys are gonna tell me in the comments that you live in your home country and you just don't have any opportunity to speak English. How? How? How? Do you have this? Do you have this? If you have this and you are watching this video it means that you have access to the internet. There are millions and millions of people learning English every single day. Find a perfect app for you, a language exchange, a Facebook forum or even comment on this video and look for a speaking partner. Guys, the sky is the limit. I discovered from my own experience and from the experience of my clients that ideally speak English in a survival situation. Let me give you an example. When I was 21 I left Poland, my home country, forever. I never came back. I moved to Spain and I needed to survive in Spain. I got sick, I needed to go to a doctor and this is how I learned Spanish so fast, to be honest. Because I was forcing myself, I didn't have any other choice, I was forcing myself to speak Spanish in situations that were necessary for my survival. The same happened with my English. I used to learn English for more than a decade at school. When I was 19 I moved to the UK and I lived there for six months. English I learned from a textbook at school was completely useless. I mean nobody in the UK spoke like this. So I just needed to survive and now that I'm thinking about it this is what made me fluent. Let's have a look at the sea for the final reflection. The ultimate goal of this channel guys is to help you, genuinely help you from the bottom of my heart make English a part of your life because I know firsthand how useful it is. So I don't want English for you to just be... I almost lost my camera because of the wind. I don't want English for you to become just another thing you study. I want English to become something for you that makes your life bigger. English helped me leave my home country when I didn't want to live there anymore. Running my business in the United States of America would be absolutely impossible without English and I'm just a normal Polish girl. So guys if I can, you can. If you'd like to work with me on one-on-one sessions so I can coach you personally, I can share with you all of my little secrets and I can create a strategic personalized plan that's gonna level up your English in no time, drop me a WhatsApp message here in the link down below in the description. Yes, it's me that's answering personally to every single message. Sometimes you just need to give me a bit of time because I get a lot of messages and I want the experience for my clients to be very personalized so it's me behind everything. Thank you guys so much for watching Wanna Speak By Veronique. Comment with this phrase. I'm a confident English speaker. You got this. See you next week in my next video. Bye!