Name: Learning English as an Adult┃Learn American English Pronunciation On the Go
Uploaded: 2025-08-14T18:21:33.000Z
Duration: 36 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Present continuous

You're listening to the Rachel's English Podcast, made especially for non-native speakers, where we study the way Americans really speak.

To-infinitive

My goal is for you to listen to this podcast every week and sound more natural when speaking

English and improve your listening comprehension.

If you need a transcript of this podcast, it's absolutely free to download.

Visit rachelsenglish.com slash podcast and look for this episode.

In today's episode, we're speaking with an American about how he learned to speak English.

Now, most Americans don't know how they learned because they learned when they were kids, and it happens naturally by immersion.

Dave learned that way, but when he suffered a stroke as an adult, he had to relearn how to speak.

He has some great insight into how an adult can train to sound more like an American, and to participate in American English conversation.

Dave and I met only online, but several years ago, we had a Skype call.

I want to say that was like five or six years ago.

And Dave contacted me because he had been using my videos to practice his English, and he was using them in a way that I had not thought about before, and that was as a native speaker who had suffered a stroke, and was needed to relearn speaking.

And I thought, whoa, you know, I'm making these videos for non-native English speakers, but this is an obvious application as well.

And I've actually made a video that has a little bit of video with Dave in it as well.

So, if you want to check out Dave, go to Rachel's English on YouTube or on my website, and search the word squirrel.

It's hard because it has S, K, and W all at the beginning.

So, Dave, can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

How old were you when you had your stroke, and what were you doing up to that point?

And at the time, I was working for a software company as a technical writer.

So, my job was working with words and language.

And I even had people reporting to me who were not native speakers.

And they would always come to me and say, what is the best way to say this or that?

Okay, so you were an expert there on English, on the language.

Yeah, that's, I was going to ask you, what was your relationship to language like before the stroke?

And it sounds like not just the average relationship that your average American would have, because it was, in fact, your work.

And I woke up, and I couldn't move my right side, and I couldn't speak at all.

After a while, I re-learned how to move, and I re-learned how to walk, and my hand and arm got better.

Was speaking harder to work on, harder to gain ground with than the physical with the arm and such?

My arm came back so, so quickly, but my language was very, very gradual.

And as you can hear, my voice sounds odd.

So, do you know, is there research to say why the language takes more time to come back than walking, for example?

Does it have to do with the smaller and more subtle movements?

Some people, with a speech, some people never get it back.

So, I found I am lucky that I can speak at all.

I don't know, but my stroke affected my left side of my brain, and that is where the speech sensors are.

So, you said when you realized you were having a stroke that you couldn't speak, when were you able to start speaking?

About one or two weeks, the speech therapists who work on my being able to imitate sounds and words, and words, but I couldn't come up with them by myself because I had aphasia and apraxia.

Okay, so two different speech issues, aphasia and apraxia.

So, what would be the definition of those two conditions?

At first, every word I wanted to say, I couldn't come up with a word for it.

I knew what I wanted to say conceptually, but not the individual words.

Every word was at the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't speak.

That seems like something that I wouldn't even know how to practice, remembering the words.

Well, in my case, the speech therapists have lots of tricks to get that to help me.

And in my case, aphasia was only about two years.

It got better and better, and now I mostly can get the words.

I know what the words I want to say, but apraxia is now my main problem.

Apraxia, as opposed to aphasia, apraxia means I have the concept of what I want to say.

I have the words I want to say it, but I can't remember how to make those words.

The muscles and the tongue and the palate are not...

So, that's why your videos were so good for me.

So, apraxia is you can hear the word in your head, you know the word, but getting it out of your mouth is a struggle.

Yeah, I had to relearn all the, how to make all the sounds in the English language.

Wow. And then also how to put them all together.

Would you say that now, do you think more in terms of sound units, or have words themselves become a unit? Maybe even common phrases have become a unit.

Yeah. I am working on that. Many, many, many phrases come out naturally now.

Yeah. That's one thing I try to encourage my students to do, is to identify phrases that they're using all the time, or hearing all the time, like,

I don't know. And to think of that as one thing rather than three separate words.