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  • I think you already know that if you want to improve your English speaking skills, you have to practice, right?

  • You have to speak.

  • Studying grammar will never improve your speaking.

  • Listening to English alone will never improve your speaking.

  • You have to actually speak.

  • But what if you don't have someone to talk to in English?

  • How can you practice then?

  • Well, there's a technique that allows you to learn to speak English by yourself.

  • No speaking partner is required.

  • This technique can help improve many aspects of your spoken English:

  • your sentence structure, your grammar, your vocabulary,

  • and most importantly, your ability to express your thoughts and ideas effectively.

  • So what is this technique?

  • Well, here's what it is...

  • Learning to speak English through imitation.

  • When I say imitation, I'm not talking about repeating after native speakers, using the exact same words to improve your pronunciation.

  • I'm talking about something a little more advanced than that.

  • Here's how it works: you listen to a conversation, a story, or some kind of speech

  • and then try to deliver that speech in your own words.

  • Let's see this technique in action:

  • When I was a child...

  • When he was a child...

  • My parents liked to pretend, like many other parents...

  • His parents liked to pretend, like many other parents...

  • ... that Santa Claus would bring us presents at Christmas.

  • His parents liked to pretend that Santa Claus would bring them presents at Christmas.

  • So when my siblings and I would wake up on Christmas morning...

  • So when he and his siblings would wake up on Christmas morning...

  • ... there'd be a bunch of presents, from supposedly Santa Claus, sitting in front of the fireplace.

  • ... there'd be a bunch of presents, from supposedly Santa Claus, sitting in front of the fireplace.

  • So that's how it works.

  • But that's just one way to do it.

  • There're other ways too.

  • For example, instead of imitating very small portions of speech like phrases and short sentences,

  • you can imitate larger portions of speech.

  • So in this case, you wait until the speaker completes a thought or an idea,

  • then pause and try to express that idea yourself.

  • Another approach is to simply listen to the whole speech and then try to deliver that entire speech yourself.

  • So there are several ways to go about it, but what I recommend is to combine them all together,

  • and I call this approach easy-to-hard imitation.

  • Easy-to-hard imitation is based on the concept of progressive training.

  • The idea is that you start with something easy and then increase the difficulty of the activity, forcing yourself to get better.

  • A number of studies have found this kind of training to be very effective.

  • Here's how you can apply this concept: start by imitating small portions of speech first like phrases and short sentences,

  • then move on to imitating larger portions of speech like long sentences or even groups of sentences,

  • and finally, try to deliver the entire speech on your own.

  • This technique offers many benefits.

  • You get to listen and imitate correct English, which helps you learn to form sentences properly.

  • You get to learn idioms, expressions, and other speaking patterns that are used in day-to-day conversations.

  • You get to learn grammar.

  • When you imitate other people, you're learning grammar through a process called implicit learning.

  • This is the process where the learning happens without your awareness.

  • This is how babies and children learn the grammar rules of their first language.

  • When you imitate, you don't think about grammar.

  • You're not trying to understand why the present perfect tense is used in this situation or in that situation.

  • Instead, you're focused on communicationon understanding and expressing ideas.

  • You're still learning grammar but you're not aware that it's happening.

  • This is one of the proper ways to learn grammar.

  • OK, that concludes this video.

  • To help you get started, I've put together a step-by-step tutorial on this technique.

  • If you're interested, click here to go to that tutorial.

I think you already know that if you want to improve your English speaking skills, you have to practice, right?

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