Stumbling Towards English Fluency - How To Be Bold When You Speak

23,014 views ・ 2020-04-07

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Hi there I am Drew Badger, the English Fluency Guide and in this video I'm going to talk
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about stumbling towards fluency, stumbling towards fluency. Now this is an interesting
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idea, something that I think a lot of students need to hear about and it's really important
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not only for fluency, but also for everything else in life you'd like to do. So what do
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I mean by stumbling towards fluency? Well, first of all, to stumble means you're tripping
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a little bit. So if you're walking and there's a rock or
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something on the ground and you walk and you trip over that thing, but you don't fall down,
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you stumble forward a little bit and then you're safe. Now, the reason this is such
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an important idea, especially for fluency is because most people want to be safe. They're
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looking for safety. Write this in big red letters. So they're learning a language and
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they want to be safe. They want to be certain they're not making mistakes, they want to
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be safe in the conversation. They don't want to be embarrassed. They don't
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want to make mistakes in front of other people. They're looking for safety, safety, but nobody
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does great things trying to be safe. So all of the amazing things that we've done as humans
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or people individually building businesses or flying an airplane across an ocean or all
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kinds of things like that, these are done by being bold, being bold. So I don't want
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you to be safe when you learn a language because you're not going to become a good speaker
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if you are, you're going to learn a lot, but you're going to be too shy, too nervous, too
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scared to do that. Also like I'm not immune to this. This is
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a great conversational phrase for you to say, "I'm not immune to something." Immune. Write
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this up here I-M-M-U-N-E to be immune from something. Immune means you have a protection
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against something. So to be immune to something like a sickness. So usually if you get the
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flu and you recover from it, you are immune from getting it again. Also, this is immunity.
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It works the same thing, but when you are safe, you're not making any effort to take
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chances and to try using new vocabulary, you will just use the same simple sentences that
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you always do. You're not going to try to say something new and interesting that you
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learned because you're afraid you might stumble over your words and you might say something
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that makes people laugh at you, something like that.
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So the people who are safe, and I'm not immune from this. When I was first learning Japanese,
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it was the fact that I had struggled for 20 plus years to learn different languages. So
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I failed to learn Latin, failed to learn French, failed to learn Spanish, and I even failed
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to learn Japanese when I first started learning it. When I was really depressed, because here
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I am in Japan and I should be speaking because you learn to speak in the language or in the
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country surrounded by people who speak the language, don't you? Isn't that the secret?
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So it is not the secret. It certainly was not for me. But to be immune to something
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like that means like I struggled with the same thing. So I'm not immune from searching
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or seeking safety. So when I was making lots of mistakes, I would try learning some new
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Japanese and I would be nervous about saying things because I thought people would laugh
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at me or I would say something wrong. And if you're like a guy and you say something
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to a girl, like some Japanese girl just as an example. And she's like, "Ah, that's kind
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of funny you said that wrong." Like you feel kind of, yeah, you know you're not how you
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feel about that. But anyway, what I realized is that you have to be bold and you can't...
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What you can't do, you can't move from safety to being bold. So you can't move from safe
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to bold in a certain way. So you can't do it... You can't keep safety as you move to
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being bold. So there's a point where you have to, it's like if we're going to draw like
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a cliff right here and then a cliff over here to be bold, like we call this a leap of faith.
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Now what usually happens, and we'll just use a very specific example of some kind of vocabulary.
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Let's say you learn this vocabulary from me. Say I'm not immune to whatever, so I'm not
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immune to criticism, so it means that people say bad things about me then I will feel bad
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about that, so I'm not immune to that. If you are immune to criticism, then people can
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say whatever they want and you don't care. You just feel great about that. But you can't
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move from safe to here. You can't use that expression. You might by yourself practice
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I'm not immune to criticism. I'm not immune to criticism. So that's being safe practicing
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that vocabulary by yourself, but in order to be able to use it in an actual conversation,
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you have to jump. You have to make a leap of faith, and this means you're doing something
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where you might make a mistake. I might say I'm immune from criticism or you
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want to say I'm not immune to criticism or whatever. But you make a mistake in the conversation
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when you use it. Well what happens is you are bold. You use that sentence or that phrase
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or whatever in a conversation. And you were bold about that. And when you do that, even
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if you make a mistake, the... If we're going to make a simple graph here, this is a kind
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of an easy way to do it. I remember teaching a Japanese guy this, he was a friend of mine,
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kind of a practice partner many years ago with me. But I explained to him that when
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your confidence is higher than how you feel about making a mistake, then you are more
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motivated to improve. So at some point you might feel if we want to give this a number,
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like you feel five... You feel kind of like, I have like a negative feeling of five from
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making a mistake and people laughing at you. But because you said something, you have a
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confidence boost of 10. And so should you be bold in this case? Absolutely. So it's
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maybe you lose a little bit, but you gain a lot more. So in this conversation, most
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people, they only think about the mistake that they made, but they don't remember the
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boldness, the action that they took. And when they remember that, they feel good about that
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and that helps them move to fluency. So what does this mean coming back to the idea of
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a stumbling towards fluency? It means that you're constantly all the time trying to jump
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across this. And after a while you're learning a new phrase and you use it, you learn another
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new phrase and you use it. You're trying something new and you're going to make mistakes part
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of this. But if you remember, "Hey, I was bold. I tried using that phrase, even though
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I knew it might not be perfect for me." And because you did that, you feel a lot more
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confident and the next time you use it, now you're going to feel really strong about using
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that thing. And you're going to have... Most of the problem problems that people get in
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conversations is because they're worried too much and the worry affects how they speak.
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But if you're bold, if you're moving forward with kind of stumbling forward, so you're
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not doing it perfectly, but you're making progress. And that's the key. So if you're
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perfect, you stop here, you make no progress. But if you stumble, you're like, "Ah, I didn't
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quite do that perfectly, but look, look, I made it over here." So it's not perfect, but
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this is how you make progress. So the only way to do that is to be bold.
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So be bold when you speak. When you try something, force yourself to make some phrase or say
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something even if you're going to say it badly, you could even try to intentionally say something
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badly just to see how it is. It's like if you're a guy at a bar and you're nervous about
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asking a woman out, just walk up to some random woman and say, "Would you like to go out with
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me?" And even if you expect her to say no and she says no, you're fine about that like,
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"Oh, that wasn't so bad." So I took a step. I learned how to do something. I was bold
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and I think less about the mistake and I think more about how awesome I feel because I took
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a chance. And that's how you develop the ability to take risks and to be bold and to become
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fluid. You got it? Does that make sense? All right.
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That's enough for explaining about this. But this is what I mean by stumbling towards fluency
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and it works in all areas of life. So it's better to try something, even if it's imperfect
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action than to wait and do nothing and wait for everything to be perfect. So this is not
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to just about fluency. I can make the same video about business or playing the guitar
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or singing in front of other people. It doesn't really matter. We all struggle with these
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same things. But if you remember this, the thing that gets you to take action is this
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idea down here. So you get like a 10X boost even if you made a 5X mistake or something
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like that. Does that make sense? All right, well that's it. If you'd like to learn more
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about this, how to put this into practice, you can click on the link in the upper right
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of this video or on the link in the description below this video to learn more about the fluency
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course. I give lots of great secrets like this and
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talk not only about the vocabulary but how to think the same way a native speaker or
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a fluent speaker is speaking so that you can become a confident fluent speaker. So do that
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and also click on the link at the end of this video if you'd like to subscribe to the channel
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or anywhere else, it's just teaching you more vocabulary and it's not really doing much
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to improve the way you speak, then start thinking about bigger ideas like this, because the
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outside kind of the breakthrough that you get from moving to where you are to where
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you want to be is usually not going to come from what everyone else is doing. So if that
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makes sense, click on the link in the upper right of this video or on the link in the
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