The hidden reason your speaking skills are NOT improving

so you've been studying a new language for  a while now you know tons of words you spend  

hours going over grammar rules but every time you  try to speak it's like nothing so what's going on  

today I'm breaking down the real reasons why so  many language Learners get stuck when it comes to  

speaking and spoiler it's not how many words  you know and how perfectly you can conjugate  

verbs so the first thing I want to start with is  that knowing words isn't enough because honestly  

I hear it all the time if you know a lot of  words you you'll be able to speak fluently but  

fluency is using words in real conversations  not just memorizing them these two words are  

really important using and memorizing it's all  about how you can use all of these words you  

learned and not just about how many words you  can memorize it's not a memorizing competition  

cuz I was that person too a few years back when  I was in college I literally tried to stockpile  

vocabulary in English I wanted to memorize all  the complicated advanced words in English because  

I thought that's what fluency was but obviously  in real conversations I couldn't use any of these  

words because I either forgot them or I learned  them out of context and so I didn't know how to  

use them in real life and so over time what I dis  discovered is memorizing high frequency words and  

learning how to use them in real conversations  is the key because for ashle speaking we usually  

don't use a lot of advanced vocabulary  and when we do idioms Expressions phrases  

and so when that happens when you already have  a good base of vocabulary that you can use use  

is the most important word here it's going to be  much easier to add idms to add phrasal verbs add  

some interesting Expressions the next thing I see  a lot of language Learners do is you wait to feel  

ready and I honestly think that that's the biggest  trap just thinking that one day you will wake up  

and suddenly you're ready to speak and suddenly  you feel so confident and you don't care about  

making mistakes unfortunately that's a skill and  you will only be able to have that skill if you  

practice enough when you start speaking when you  jump into conversations even if you're not 100%  

prepared and obviously because I don't want your  first speaking experience to be super important  

super nerve-wracking like a presentation at work  I recommend creating those small opportunities to  

speak early on can be talking to yourself try to  look at an object in your apartment for example  

here I have my bed and try to talk about it in  English try to retrieve all of this vocabulary all  

of this information from your passive vocabulary  move it to your active vocabulary and building  

your confidence in those small opportunities  will help you so much later on the next thing  

that makes it super hard for language Learners to  start speaking is over focusing on grammar rules  

like this thing about being perfect about being  a perfectionist if your grammar is not perfect  

you become completely paralyzed and what happens  in those moments obviously your priority is no  

longer communicating it's more about focusing on  forming perfectly curated sentences you're not  

trying to have this perfect Royal English you're  trying to communicate your thoughts effectively  

and yes communicating your thoughts effectively  does include trying to figure out how to say the  

sentence if you understand that you know you've  been trying to use this grammar rule over and over  

again and you still can't get a right maybe it's  time to actually sit down and try to understand  

it because I also don't really support that  approach where you know it's fine I'm just  

going to say whatever I know and the other person  has to figure it out it's not my responsibility  

no communication means trying to communicate  your thoughts effectively and if at one point  

you realize that you're lacking some knowledge  when it comes to grammar why not just sit down  

open a textbook and try to learn this grammar rule  to then be able to commun unicate your thoughts  

effectively and I'm sure you guys can agree  with me here that consistency and planning are  

so important when it comes to language learning  but even the most consistent Learners can feel  

stuck and unsure where to begin and that's where  having the right tools and support can make all  

the difference and that is exactly where life XP  comes in I want to say a huge thank you to them  

for sponsoring a portion of this video and for  providing a platform that has genually improve  

my language skills life XP is a language learning  platform offering personalized one-on-one tutoring  

with professional teachers for the past year  I've been using life XP to take private Spanish  

classes and the progress I've made has been so  noticeable because for me having this opportunity  

to practice in real conversations improves my  speaking skills so so much right now I feel a  

lot more confident engaging with native speakers  in everyday situations it's just something that I  

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possible reason why it might be hard for you to  speak is because you compare yourself to native  

speakers and that honestly used to happen to me a  lot I used to compare myself with native speakers  

so much because I wanted to sound American I  wanted to sound like a native speaker who was  

born in the United States of America and if I  didn't I didn't even want to speak English and  

that's crazy and it's also connected to trying to  be perfect and I know language Learners struggle  

with that all the time what helped me overcome  this is realizing that yes I have an accent  

when I speak English because I'm not a native  English speaker and that also means that I speak  

a different language so I already speak multiple  languages and that's why I have an accident in  

English if I was a native English speaker it would  mean that I wasn't a native fresian speaker so now  

when I speak English when I speak Spanish I do  have an accent in all of these languages but that  

just shows my International background that I'm  learning a lot of different languages that I come  

from a different country and I'm trying to learn  more things about this culture and honestly at one  

point I just realized that trying to be perfect is  extremely tiring when I speak English and I try to  

sound perfect it makes me so tired and when I try  to be my myself Flaws and All mistakes and all I  

just feel so much better I feel alive this is who  I am I'm not trying to pretend I'm not trying to  

fix in my head every single sentence I'm saying  and make sure I'm saying it in the most advanced  

way possible I'm just speaking this language and  I'm enjoying the fact that I can do it the next  

hidden reason that might make it more difficult  for you to speak is because you're over relying on  

translation when I try to translate every single  word from my native language that really creates  

slow and chunky sentences and they feel really  unnatural and so that's why in every single  

one of my videos I recommend moving away from  translation as fast as possible you need to know  

how to translate the word Apple to your native  language you can pretty much memorize all of the  

nouns without your native language because you  can use a picture and this is the word Apple the  

same goes for verbs and adjectives and everything  else and that is exactly how you're going to start  

thinking in a foreign language because I see  a lot of videos on YouTube about how to start  

thinking in English and Spanish and it's honestly  pretty easy you just have to practice the language  

consistently listen a lot and also move away from  translation stop translating every single word to  

your native language start diving deep into  this new language and try explaining the new  

words with the words you already know and you're  going to immediately start retrieving information  

from your brain in English in your forign language  okay and finally something that might be hindering  

your speaking progress is you probably focus  on quantity over quality you try to memorize  

all the grammar rules at once you download a  list of high frequency words and you just try  

to gram all of that I don't know about you guys  but when I do that when I focus on quantity it  

just makes me feel overwhelmed because there are  so many different grammer rules there's so many  

different exceptions so many new words that  I can learn instead of actually focusing on  

intentional learning on the things that you  need right here right now I think in life in  

general I'm a huge proponent of asking yourself  the question why more often why are you doing  

that instead of cramming everything mindlessly  please be more intentional ask yourself this  

question why more often why are you trying to cram  this list of new vocabulary what's the point of  

all of that I get it sometimes we have to do it  because we have an exam so we don't really have a  

Choice here but when you do have a choice  ask yourself the question why more often  

when you have a lot of different options  to choose from why are you choosing the  

option that makes you feel bad that makes you  feel demotivated and that makes you feel like  

you don't want to study this language anymore  so I think it's going to be it for this video  

if you liked it please give it a thumbs up and  subscribe to my YouTube channel I highly highly  

recommend live XP you can check them out in  the description and plus with my promo code  

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language learner I highly recommend this video  just click right here and keep on watching