Learn with your ears, NOT with your eyes.

Again, learn with your ears, not with your eyes! You’re learning how to speak excellent English. Well, you have to have excellent listening first. See, speech comes from listening and here's the problem. In school you mostly learned with your eyes.

What did you do, you read a lot of textbooks, you watched the teacher writing a lot of stuff on the board. Maybe you listened to the teacher explaining English in your own language so you're hearing your language, not English!

There's a big problem of this. When you're just reading and trying to learn grammar rules, for example by reading grammar books and trying to learn vocabulary by reading vocabulary lists, you're trying to read English dialogues and then you're doing written tests and then you're doing all these written activities and written drills - none of that is helping you with your speaking and that's why you probably read English much better than you speak it or understand it.

It’s a common problem, it's because in school you were learning with your eyes all the time or most of the time and you did very little learning with your ears.

Listening IS the secret to fluent English. You need to listen a lot! That’s the key to great speaking! This is so obvious, but let's think: imagine a baby, a little American baby. This little American baby of course needs to learn English, so how will we teach this American baby English?

Will we buy grammar books and try to make the baby study grammar? No, we won't. We could try, but it won't work. Would we try to force the baby to read immediately? Of course not!

So, how does this little baby learn English? One way and one way only - listening for six to twelve months! That baby just sits there and listens, listens, listens to the parents. Maybe brothers and sisters and other people in the family speaking English constantly.

Of course, when parents speak to a baby, they don't speak difficult English. They speak very simple, easy English and eventually the baby starts to learn a few words like “mommy”, “daddy”, maybe “food”. Really simple stuff. They started to learn a little bit and that's the beginning!

Then they start learning groups of words, two words, three words together. All of this is happening through listening and for a while the baby can understand a lot! The small child can actually understand a lot of English, but cannot speak very much.

This is natural and normal that the listening level is higher than the speaking level. Eventually, of course, the baby will start to speak one word, two words in the beginning and then make bigger phrases and then sentences. And it just keeps going and that baby learns to speak excellent English through listening.

That's what you have to do - you have to go back and start learning English.

Change the WAY you're learning it and instead learn it like a baby, learn with your ears. Lot’s and lots of listening!

Just like a baby you should not focus on difficult listening. This is another problem schools have and a lot of students have. They do practice some listening, but when they do, it's so difficult - they're listening to sample TOEFL or IELTS tests and things like that. Extremely difficult vocabulary, very academic and formal! Not natural normal English for casual situations. Plus it's so difficult that you cannot really understand it easily and automatically!

If you do that, if you listen to English that's too difficult, your learning will be very slow. You want the opposite, like a baby, you want to listen to lots of easy English. Easy listening is the key! Easy listening will give you great speaking! That’s what all the research shows.

Here’s my basic rule for listening - you should listen to something that you can understand around 95% of it without a dictionary. 95% means you don't need a dictionary at all, because the other 5% you can easily guess, right? If there is a new word or a new phrase comes, you can guess the meaning because you understand everything else.

You understand the situation, so you can kind of guess the meaning of that new word and that's how you learn naturally new vocabulary.

Eventually you listen and listen and listen and you understand 100%. Then it's time for something a little more difficult. Not a lot more difficult, just a bit more difficult. Then you listen to that again and again and again! When it comes to a hundred percent, then you find something a little more difficult. This way you will rapidly increase your ability to speak and understand.

Here’s what else happens - after six to twelve months, it depends on the person, you will find yourself starting to speak English automatically correct phrases and words will pop out of your mouth! They'll come out without you thinking at all!

So, let’s conclude the rule: focus on listening, learn with your ears, not with your eyes. Simple and easy, yet very powerful.

Did you know I’m also doing a fun daily (almost) podcast? It’s called “English In My Mind”. You can find it on any podcast platform. It would mean the world to me if you consider subscribing.

Daily Tricks for effortless English:

Apple Podcasts

Stitcher

Spotify

Learn English,

Have Fun! 🙂

Accept yourself - you might have made mistake all your life and be nothing but a pitiful victim of fear. That's just life. You're not going anywhere until you accept yourself; both the good and the awful. Groom yourself - dress nicely and take care of yourself.

0<POWER pose - learn to open up your body and fake the confidence. It won't change how you feel but it will make you look confident.

Meditate - it will make your mind clearer and make you see things in the proper perspective.

Read self improvement - I don't know what you've heard about self improvement but it's life changing. Do it daily.

Accept fear - stop fighting fear and seeing it as a curse. Fear is just our natural avoidance mechanism for the uncertain. It's a mind trick that looks real. And it's not going away. So do it a favor by accepting it.

Start small - I started socializing by saying nothing but going out to smile at people and make eye contact. Learn to start with really really small actions.

Exercise - exercise releases dopamine that makes one feel good and confident.

Surround yourself with confident people - one thing I've learned is that confidence is contagious and so is the lack of it. So keeps asking yourself “who are the most confident people around me”, once you find them, spend your time with them.

The dictionary meaning of fear is, ‘an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm’ or ‘to be afraid of (someone or something) as likely to be dangerous, painful, or harmful’. Fear is of the UNKNOWN… COVID 19…..