you are!

For me it's good morning, and I have to say that today the weather is amazingly bad.

We're actually in the middle of a thunderstorm here in Tokyo so if it's very noisy in the

background, if you can hear the thunder and things in the video I apologise for that!

In today's lesson I'm going to answer a question from one of my YouTube viewers.

This question is from MrWarrior12345 and he asked "How to improve fluency?" and "Does

reading loudly help?"

OK, so improving fluency and about reading loudly or reading out loud.

I'm going to answer this question backwards. So first of all, does reading loudly or does

reading out loud help.

I'M going to say yes, it does.

I think different English teachers say different things and certainly when I was taking my

masters I read different things and some people said it's a waste of time and some people

said it's very useful.

I think yes, it is kind of useful.

Possibly not for reading comprehension.

Because when you're reading out loud, especially as a learner, what often happens is that you

just concentrate on saying the words correctly that you don't get the meaning.

This is definitely the case for me reading Japanese.

Still, I think it's good for just getting used to speaking and using your voice.

And I will say that if you're going to read out loud do it with a big loud voice.

Really project your voice as much as you can.

I think that is quite beneficial.

OK, how to improve fluency.

Well, first of all there is no definite answer to this, and really the only way is to just

do it, to just use English practise makes perfect as it were.

You just have to accept that in the beginning you're going to suck at speaking English.

But practise makes perfect.

Of course, fluency doesn't refer to just speaking.

It refers to all of the skills.

Reading writing listening speaking and thinking as well.

But the way I think about this is... muscle training.

Think of muscle training

Actually I am the worst person in the world to talk about muscle training because

I mean, look at me

I have no muscle whatsoever

But if you want to build muscle

If I wanted to get some muscle on my skinny arms

Lifting really light tiny weights that are too light for me are not going to help

It's useless

The reason why is because you have to stress the muscle

If I want to build muscle I need to lift weight that are heavy for me

I have to push my muscles beyond their limits

I have to apply stress and push them past what they are already capable of

And by doing that

Well, with muscle training what I actually do is create lots of tiny tears in the muscle

tissue

In the fibre

And when it heals it heals bigger and stronger

Able to now cope with that new limit

So to make it bigger again I now have to push it past that limit again

Building fluency in English kind of the same sort of thing really

You have to push yourself beyond your limits

Doing what is comfortable to you and doing what is easy to you all the time

Is not going to help you improve

You have to

Again

Break the limits and go beyond that

I always recommend a two way approach to learning English

I've made videos about this before

And maybe I'll make some more videos in the future

By a two way approach I mean

Short periods of very intense concentrated focused study or practise

Followed by much longer periods of very relaxed English use

Exposure

That might mean just chatting in English or listening to music in English or watching

TV or reading a book or whatever

But you've got these two periods

Very short intense practise follows by long periods of relaxation

And again going back to the muscle training idea

I guess it's the same really

Because you have the very short intense practice sessions where you're lifting the muscles and

pushing your muscles past their limits

And then you have the long relaxation period

Both of these are necessary

Well actually not a trainer or a muscle trainer or anything like that so correct me if I'm

wrong!

But both of these periods are necessary

Certainly for learning English you have these very intense periods

Where you push yourself past your limits

And then you have the longer periods of relaxation

Kind of for healing, I guess

Just to change the metaphor very slightly

Learning a musical instrument is very similar to learning a language

And actually learning anything really words on the same kind of principle

Building muscle is not learning something as such

But learning is all kind of the same

In... What year was it?

In 1993

There was a group of researchers

A group of psychologists

Psychologists?

Scientists?

Psychologists. I'm going to go with psychologists.

Anyway, they were researchers and they wanted to find out why some violinists became very

good violinists but others became remarkable violinists

We're talking world class professionals

So we've got these two groups of violinists

Some are good but some are remarkable

And they wanted to know what is the difference between these two groups of people?

Why does this group become so remarkable?

And they found that the group of violinists which became very good

I mean, they are good, they're professional standard

This group spent a lot of time practising

No surprise there

They spend a lot of time practising the violin

The group who became remarkable on the other hand

They also spent a lot of time practising

But actually their practise sessions where much shorter

And they didn't spend as much time practising overall as the good group

But their practise sessions were very very short very concentrated very intense focused

practise

That was the main different between the two

This group practised a lot, but their practise wasn't so intense

Whereas this group practised less but their practise was extremely intense and extremely

focused

And learning anything is really the same

And certainly learning a musical instrument and learning English is very very similar

Short intense practise sessions followed by longer relaxed exposure and usage session

In some future videos I'll teach you some specific techniques that you can use for building

fluency

Again fluency doesn't mean just speaking

It means reading or writing or listening or thinking in English or anything

Speaking as well

For speaking, one technique I recommend is of course shadowing

And I've made videos about that before

I will make some more in the future

I'll also teach you some other techniques for speaking and for these other skills

So I think that is about it for today's lesson

There doesn't seem to have been too much thunder and lightning whist I've been recording so

hopefully it's not too noisy in the background

So as always if you haven't already please subscribe to my channel

If you have a question or lesson request of your own leave a comment in the comment's

box below this video

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Leave that comment below this video

And I will see you in the next lesson!