Why you are not fluent in English

- When you listen to me, a native English speaker,

speak English, you can understand lots, right?

But when you want to speak out,

you can't always speak fluently.

Why, what's going on? Let's find out.

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I feel for you. No, I do really, really.

You can listen to English and understand lots.

You can read stuff and understand lots.

But when it comes to speaking,

you can't find the right words.

Your mind goes blank.

It's like the words in your head are beautiful,

but the words that come out are not so beautiful.

And you might feel

that you've been stuck in this situation

like for a long time.

I do feel for you really.

I know I've been there as a learner of French,

Spanish, and Chinese.

I've been exactly where you are.

And I'll tell you right now,

the biggest reason this happens is pressure.

You see, listening and reading are passive.

You just sit back, take your time.

Speaking is real time. People are listening.

There are expectations, there is pressure.

And most people, it's, (stutters)

that's what happens, of course, with the pressure.

But listen, having taught students over 40,000 students

worldwide with my online courses, I am sure I can help you.

By the way, my name is Keith.

I run the YouTube channel, English Speaking Success,

and the website, the Keith Speaking Academy,

where I have my online courses

to help students develop their speaking skills in a fun

and professional way.

So in this video,

I'm gonna tell you the six main reasons

you may not be advancing or progressing as much as you want

with your speaking fluency and what you can do about it.

At the end of the video, I'll also give you some tips

on how to handle that real time pressure when speaking.

Okay, sound good?

Number one, you are trying too hard to impress.

And very often that means that you speak quickly.

You see, when you speak English,

there's gonna be people watching you waiting, expecting.

And it's like you are revealing yourself.

You are showing a part of your personality, your identity,

it's terrifying, right?

And people will judge you whether it's right or wrong.

They will judge not only your English,

but a lot more about you.

So what we need to do is to ignore the judgment.

But I think one of the most important things is

is not to speak too quickly, especially with native speakers

and an IELTS examiner.

They will speak quickly

and we often feel as students, oh, I do as well.

Well, I have to speak quickly too,

so I'm gonna try and keep, I can speak really fast.

And when you speak quickly, you lose control.

And normally it's like when you are running like a baby,

starting to walk and run, boom.

And they tumble and they fall.

Thing to do is to slow down, speak at your own pace.

You can speak slowly and fluently.

Really, you can slow down, speak at your own pace

and forget about everybody.

Number two.

Number two, you are making things over complicated.

And this is particularly true of IELTS speaking students.

They're trying to show off some fancy vocabulary,

speak out these long, complex grammatical structures.

But because you are thinking so much about that,

when you speak, the words are coming out with hesitation,

with pauses, there's no connection, doesn't make sense,

the listener gets confused.

The thing to do is to keep it simple,

especially when you begin speaking.

Forget the fancy vocab.

Forget the complexity, keep it simple, build up.

And as you warm up

and you are walking more quickly,

then you can maybe run a little bit.

But at the start, keep it simple.

Number three, you are focusing on accuracy.

And this is because you want to speak correctly.

You don't want to make mistakes,

you want to speak correctly, maybe perfectly.

But that means that often when you're speaking,

you are thinking, is it the right tense?

Is it with an S? Without an S?

And therefore, as you are thinking, you're not speaking,

there are gaps in your speech.

Loss of coherence and your fluency starts to fall

because you are focusing too much on accuracy.

The truth is you need a balance of accuracy and fluency.

You need both, you wanna focus on communicating your idea,

but have a good balance.

Sometimes it's fluency, sometimes it's accuracy.

Build them both up over time.

Don't just be accurate and have no fluency. That's it.

Let's move on.

Right number four, you lack vocabulary.

This is one of the biggest problems to speaking fluency,

students not having the words

in order to express their idea.

And it means you lose fluency, right?

I mean, you know, you are thinking of a particular item.

You say, oh, I, I want one of those things.

It's a tool.

It's what I need for my car to,

you know what one of those things,

what you call it

and you see how your fluency falls

'cause you're lacking these words.

Yes, you can paraphrase and find a way round,

but only sometimes overall,

if you don't have the vocabulary, especially at intermediate

and above levels, you're gonna struggle.

Vocabulary begins very, very, very tangible.

It's about very simple things.

But as you get at to a higher level,

you're expressing more abstract ideas,

more intangible things, concepts.

And that's harder. You need more nuanced vocabulary.

So the thing to do here is you need to think long term

about your English and building your vocabulary.

Think like test cricket, right? Test cricket.

You play a game over five days.

Now when I talk to Americans about cricket

and a game that lasts for five days, they're like, what?

That's long term.

It's the same when you're building your vocabulary, right?

You want to be be building your vocabulary over time slowly.

And as your vocabulary gets better

and better and better,

your fluency will get better over time.

What you don't do is suddenly try

to learn lots of vocabulary above your level,

boom, because your fluency will drop

because of what I said before

about over-complicating things.

When you're speaking, a lot of the time

when you're practicing,

use vocabulary just below your level,

words you are comfortable with,

confident with you know the meaning and can express,

and you'll be speaking more fluently.

Of course in the background over time,

you are building up all of that vocabulary.

So you are slowly raising your game,

not cricket, English over time.

That's the way to do it.

You are shy, maybe you are, maybe you're not.

But for a lot of introverted people, we, I say we

'cause I am introverted,

often let our shyness affect our fluency.

It doesn't have to, but sometimes it does

because it means that you mumble.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna go do that (mumbles),

you know what I mean?

Right? Not speaking clearly.

Sometimes your body language falls down

and you lack confidence.

And this can affect your fluency directly.

The thing to know,

and I talked about this in a recent video

about being a confident speaker of English,

is that you can be shy and confident

and you can use, you can even use your shyness

to build your confidence,

be a strong, confident speaker.

And then when you are not mumbling,

you are speaking clearly loudly with a body posture

to communicate, then you can speak more fluently.

It takes time, it takes a practice.

But most of all, it takes awareness of this.

If you are shy, if you are extrovert,

you probably don't have this problem.

Let's move on to the last one.

Number six, you don't practice enough.

Now, when I say practice, I don't mean practice speaking,

although yes, you need to practice speaking lots and lots.

I mean, you don't practice fluency enough. Practice fluency.

What do you mean?

I mean is to practice speaking your sentences

and your ideas again and again and again.

What most people do of course in a conversation is

you get your idea across and then carry on.

You move on to the next idea.

Of course, when you are on your own though

practicing alone at home,

I recommend you don't just say the idea once,

but practice saying it again and again.

And this is great for IELTS speaking,

repeating your sentences again and again.

And you are practicing the fluency.

You're just getting the idea

and practicing saying it more fluently.

The other thing to do is to notice

and learn phrasing and intonation.

Phrasing is where the native English speaker pauses

in their speech, okay?

And the intonation,

so each phrase has an intonation pattern.

There are no fixed rules for this,

but there are patterns you can follow.

For example, take this simple sentence, right?

If I could speak fluently, I would pass my test.

The phrasing here is I stop after fluently.

If I could speak fluently, pause, I would pass my test.

That's how a native speaker would normally, not always,

but normally naturally phrase that sentence.

And the intonation, especially with these if sentences is

DDD, DD, DDDD,

if I could speak fluently, I would pass my test.

Okay? So that pattern is a common pattern.

And if you can pick up these patterns and learn them

and notice 'em, a great place to do this is interviews.

Interviews of famous people, actors, et cetera, on TV,

you'll start noticing this.

If you want to do it systematically.

This is what my fluent grammar

for IELTS speaking course does.

Basically, it takes all of these grammatical structures,

breaks them into phrases.

Whereas a native speaker, we would break down the phrasing

and shows you the intonation

and you just repeat and practice.

And that really practices your fluency.

It's a bit like shadowing on steroids.

It's a really great way to do it.

And that practicing fluency, funnily enough,

makes you more fluent, right?

Good. So there you go.

Now you know the six main reasons

why you are not speaking fluently.

Remember what I said though at the start?

Knowing is not enough.

If you want to change, you need to do something now.

So have a think about what you're going to do differently.

Oh, and do you remember at the start of the video,

I talked about pressure?

The biggest problems of speaking fluently is

that people go blank

because there's the real time pressure,

the expectation, people watching you.

So there are lots of things you can do with that.

I'm just gonna give you one tip today on how to handle

that pressure so you can speak more relaxed

and more fluently.

And it's the following is breathe, smile,

and make eye contact.

Breathe 'cause that physiologically is gonna help

relax your body.

Smile 'cause that will help you relax

and it will help other people relax.

And when they relax, you relax and it's a virtuous cycle.

Everybody's relaxed.

And the eye contact will just help, again,

make you relaxed and other people relax.

It's a good communication technique.

Okay, so breathe, smile,

and make eye contact.

If I could speak more fluently, I would pass my test.

That's it.

I hope with this video you will be able

to speak more fluently in the coming weeks

as you take action and practice more.

That's it for today. Thank you so much for watching.

If you've enjoyed the video,

please do like turn on the notifications, subscribe as well

to the channel so you can find out

about upcoming videos as well.

Leave me a comment, tell me which of these tips

you enjoyed or liked today.

And that's it.

I will see you next time in the next video.

Thank you so much for watching. Take care, bye-Bye.

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