How to get fluent in English - 6 Strategies for Frenchies (or anyone!)

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Video transcript:

You are here because you want to get fluent in English. Right?

I often see YouTube videos with titles, like "get fluent in English in 30 minutes" or "learn English in a week". Well, pardon my French, but that's bullshit. I'm not going to give you a magic trick that will enable you to speak English, just like that. It's not possible in one week. It's not possible in a month. It's not even possible in three months, but I will give you some solid tools that you can use to get fluent faster than the average person. And if you follow these strategies, you will get fluent faster and have more confidence speaking English.

Strategy 1

Okay. Let's dive right in strategy number one, you have to be okay with the fact that English is not a direct translation of French. I have students who get very frustrated that they cannot translate literally. We have our own rules, like the many, many different prepositions that we have. We have our own tenses, like the Present Perfect. And just like in French, have many, many exceptions to these rules as well. Not to mention phrasal verbs, uncountable. Now the list is endless. So you have to accept that English is not that easy and you cannot translate directly.

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Strategy 2

Strategy number two daily English immersion, I tell this to all my students and I try to do it myself with my French learning as well. Now I'm going to start with the most time consuming and finish with the least time consuming. We are all busy, family, children, jobs, and we need to find time to sleep, to eat and to exercise.

We're all busy, right? So how do we incorporate, how do we include English into our date? The first first one I'm going to mention is meetups. In France and I think around the world as well, meetup.com is a great website where you can find groups of people who want to do similar things. I found a meetup group when I was pregnant to meet up with other pregnant moms. It's great. And I know there are heaps of English language groups in my small, where I live. If you live in any big city, there will be meetup groups for you. Basically you go out and you meet a group of people who speak English. There may be a native speaker in the group as well, but you are meeting new people. It's a lot of fun. You might meet in a cafe or a restaurant or a bar or park, and just have conversation in English.

It's quite fun.

Another way you can include English in, into your daily routine is by asking to speak English with people who speak English better than you. Does your partner speak English better than you do? Do your friends speak English better than you do? Um, what about your mother in law? Um, somebody, anybody pick up the phone and call them and ask them if you can speak English with them rather than your native language, it takes a little bit of courage too, to be able to do this. And maybe the person who you're speaking with is not fluent in English, but if they're the same level or even better than you, then it's still practicing. It's still good.

If you can't find anyone to speak with as a last resort, you can open a book in English and read it out loud. That way you will hear the words coming out of your mouth.

Even if you don't know if you are pronouncing them correctly. By speaking these words, you will remember them even more. It is so much better than just reading the book silently as an extra step, even better record yourself while you are speaking and then replay, play back the recording so that you can hear what you said. And that way it's even further integrating this new vocabulary into your head. And you may spot some mistakes in pronouncing. By listening back to your audio.

Moving on to grammar, to be able to do grammar every day. Do what I do. I bought a French grammar book. I put it in the toilet and whenever I go to the toilet, I pick it up and I do one exercise. Well, one or two depends on how long I am in the toilet. So it's, it's, it's a really good way of, uh, constantly learning English for listening practice and to be able to increase your vocabulary.

Most of my students watch Netflix. Now it depends what level you are at. I would recommend you at least start by watching in English, of course, so that you can hear the English voice. One of my students actually listens in English, puts on the English subtitles and writes down any words, expressions, idioms, phrasal, verbs, that he doesn't know. Doesn't pause the video. He just writes them down quickly. And then at a later time, he will look up the definitions of those words. So in that way, he doesn't disturb his watching by stopping and starting Netflix all the time. So it's a more active way of watching Netflix. You don't have to do it all the time, but once in every two or three times, it's a great way of increasing your vocabulary and getting to know English that is used every day.

Now, what about listening when you are exercising are when you are driving, you can't watch anything.

I recommend listening to English podcasts or audio books. It's a great way of learning for me, learning French on the go, but there are many, many, many English podcasts.

Strategy 3

Okay. Strategy number three, change your technology to English. Now everybody these days has a smartphone. Okay? And we normally look at our smart phone, one to two, to even three hours a day. What if everything you were looking at on your phone was in English? Um, so what you have to do is go into your settings on your phone and change the phone language to English. And in that way, all the instructions will be in English. And even the keyboard will be in English. You don't have to do that, but it will help you to, to, to spell in English. And it will be more forgiving. Um, when you are, uh, writing texts in English,

Strategy 4

Which brings me to strategy, number four, don't text, never text anymore, voice text.

There are two ways you can do this. You can use voice to text on applications like WhatsApp and just normal. I message. Or you can simply record a voice message and send it instead of a text. I use this a lot in WhatsApp. Um, instead of sending a text, I send a voice message. It feels more natural. One good thing about the voice to text applications is that it will tell you when you're pronouncing something incorrectly, it will spell it incorrectly. So it will force you to improve your pronunciation.

If you'd like help with your English learning strategies, click on the link below in the description to have an 30 minute free consultation with me so that we can talk about how best to approach your English learning.

Strategy 5

Strategy number five, we speak English in sentences, right? We don't speak English in individual words. So the best way to learn English is through learning whole sentences, not lists of words, lists of verbs, lists of adjectives.

It's much, much better to learn a whole sentence. So think of normal every day, expressions or sentences that you use in your own native language, and then see how you can say them in English. They may not be correct, but at least you're trying to complete whole sentences because learning lists is so, so boring. We want to make language learning more functional. So that means learning it in whole sentences.

One more strategy to go, but I'd like to know if you use a strategy that you find very useful for your language learning, share in the comments below so that we can all benefit from it. I love to hear your story.

Strategy 6

Last strategy strategy number six. Do you want to be the most interesting person in the room? How do you achieve that? You do it by asking questions. The more questions you can ask, the more interesting you are and the more feedback you get from people, it's not just about you talking all the time.

So what is extremely important in English is to be able to formulate questions properly. And many of my students have trouble formulating questions. So this is an exercise that you can work on. What questions do you ask people on a daily basis and translate them using Google translate or deeper, um, and see how you can ask them in English. The more questions you have and the more ways you have to formulate questions in English, the better in the description below, we have a link to all of the resources mentioned in this video. Feel free to go over there and check it out, check out these videos next, if you would like to improve your fluency even more. Thank you so much for watching this video. And don't forget to hit, like, if you liked this video and subscribe and share with all your friends, thanks and see you in the next video.