Why Fluent English Speakers "Learn Horizontally" - How to Think in English

Hi there. I'm Drew Badger, the founder of EnglishAnyone.com, and in today's video I

wanted to make something because of actually a lesson I saw my mother-in-law was using.

So this is my mother-in-law, my wife's mother, who is learning English, not for me actually,

but because she's a little bit stubborn. She doesn't want to learn with me even though

I'm right there, best resource around. But she'd rather just go to a regular English

class as a social thing. But I always explain to her, because she has

questions about how she should be learning and she's not really making a lot of progress.

She's learning some interesting words and she knows some things, but she still doesn't

communicate really fluently at all. And so this is why.

Now when she was learning English in school, and this is the same thing everyone else experiences

and what I did when I was first learning languages, you begin with the language you want to speak

and then you translate that into whatever, and then so you're having to learn the language

through a translation. When a native is actually learning the language through that language

itself. So this is the most important part. I talk

about this all the time. You have to be learning in English if you want to be speaking in English

without translating in your head before you speak.

Almost everyone, especially Japanese speakers out here that I speak with, they're always

having to wait, think a little bit about what they want to say, make the sentence in their

head and then speak. And it's really frustrating, especially when you want to just express yourself

without thinking and hesitating. So this is the first problem she has. And

the second problem, this is what most people who are learning a second language they don't

realize is they're trying to go from one word to one word. So they learn the definition

of warm and then they try or try to translate that. Like if I'm going to say this in Japanese,

it'd be [foreign language 00:01:59]. So if I'm translating that into Japanese and

I have to think about that. When I say something is warm, how do I say that in Japanese? And

I have to think about that. The problem with this, so we've got two problems

here. The number one problem here is the translations. The number two problem here is learning individual

words rather than phrases. And this is why she's reading lately, this lesson came because

she had a lesson about Valentine's Day and she was reading a newspaper article about

how Valentine's Day is great for couples, but companies are using it as a marketing

time because sales are usually slower in the winter months. So right after Christmas, January

and February, usually these are the two worst months for selling things because people spend

all their money at the end of the year and they don't want to spend so much in January

and February. So Valentine's day is a really great opportunity to get people spending money

going out to dinner or buying chocolates or flowers or things like that.

So in this article she read a sentence that said Valentine's Day is a good time to warm

up sales. So warm up sales. Now what she's doing, because of how she learned, is she's

thinking about each of these words individually instead of thinking about it as a whole phrase,

the same way a native would. Now warm up, this is a phrasal verb that means

to make something warmer. So if I'm cold outside, I want to go back in my house and warm up.

So I'm trying to warm up something. I'm warming up myself or I might put some food into the

microwave to warm it up a little bit. So I've got some maybe milk, I want to warm up the

milk. You can also say heat up. Same idea to heat up. You want to increase something,

just make it a little bit warmer. But to warm up sales, again, when we're learning

something like phrasal verbs, and this is what I teach in my visual guide to phrasal

verbs, which you can learn more about by clicking on the link in the upper right of this video,

or on the link in the description below this video. But when you're learning phrasal verbs,

they all begin with some kind of physical origin. So physical base idea of making something

warmer. But we take that and then we have the more figurative meaning of warming up

or increasing, improving, something to warm up sales.

So as an example, I might be in a conversation with someone and at the beginning maybe we

don't really feel like we're connecting very well, but over time I'm warming up to that

person. Or over time I'm warming up to an idea.

Maybe my wife wants to move to a different city, and at first I say no, I don't really

want to do that. But over time I'm warming up to the idea of doing that. Does that make

sense? So we begin with something physical like warming up some food, or our ourselves,

or our bodies, warming them up after a cold day, and we take that and we go up to a more

interesting use of that where you're feeling more positive over time about something. To

warm up to some kind of idea. So here we have warming up sales, meaning

to increase sales because you can talk about sales being cold. So sales are cold right

now. Nobody wants to buy anything. People's wallets are frozen shut. And you can take

all these different ideas, like we're having a physical idea, but make it more interesting

using it in a figurative way. But if you learn just warm and you try to

translate that and then up and try to translate that in sales, you don't get that. If I'm

speaking Japanese, it's [foreign language 00:05:49]. I don't understand what that means.

But if you're thinking about it as an English person, it's almost like you're learning horizontally

rather than vertically, if that makes sense. So you're not thinking about individual words,

you're thinking about phrases and how this works. And when you understand phrases, it's

really interesting because you can change these around.

Again, you can warm up an attitude, you can warm up to some decision or something like

that, like I mentioned about warming up to moving to some different place and warming

up to an idea about something like that. So this is how natives learn, and this is how

you learn your native language as well. You're beginning with individual words, usually if

you're talking about a noun, like a bird, or a dog, or something like that. You can

show what that thing is and then this is the name for that. Like this is a marker.

But over time, young children, they're starting to learn things and phrasal verbs are really

an important part of that, especially for native speakers because they're thinking about

these things in phrases. They're learning a physical meaning of that and then they're

taking it to a higher level by using it with these other things as well. So this is why

we learn all in English, so we don't do this with translation. We learn something in English.

We're using this in English. That way we don't have to think and translate in our heads.

And then we're also learning phrases rather than just individual words. Does that make

sense? Well, again, I don't want to give you too

much information, but I thought this was an interesting example because my wife's mother

was asking me about this. She was saying, "Can you read the sentence to me and help

me understand it?" So usually a non-native speaker, when they read a sentence, it's almost

like they're looking at all these individual words.

So if I imagine a paragraph of text, to a non-native speaker, it looks like this. So

if we're going to talk about this is a cat and something, something, all these are individual

words, but to a native speaker it's looking more like this. Maybe one word, one word,

and then these three words are together. Or these three words are together, or these four

words, or something like that are together. So natives are learning to think about phrases

like that. And if you learn phrases, especially things

like phrasal verbs, this is a really great way to do this because they are so common

and so important for learning English. So again, if you'd like to learn more about

that, click on the link in the upper right of this video, or on the link in the description

below this video. But you should always be thinking about things in phrases. Of course,

individual words are important, but it's the phrases that really help you speak fluently.

Because, as you notice, if you go back and watch this video again, I'm really speaking

in phrases. Speaking in phrases. Well, that's it. Again, click on the link

in the upper right of this video if you'd like to learn more about the visual guide

to phrasal verbs that will help you understand lots of these great phrases and use them in

the same way that I'm using them here. We begin with a physical idea of something. We

move on to a more figurative meaning. And it really just multiplies your vocabulary

a million fold because you can learn so many great words with just a few simple words and

phrases. Again, you're taking different things and

combining them in different ways. So I can take warm up, or heat up, or cool down the

same kind of thing. Oh no, sales are cooling down, sales are cooling off. Same idea, so

we're decreasing something. Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this lesson.

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