Name: Speak Less, Ask More: Use Questions to Improve Your English
Uploaded: 2025-10-16T18:28:38.000Z
Duration: 17 min 18 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...

Future simple

This video is going to be a little different than my normal videos.

To-infinitive

It's part of a four part series in which we're going to look at communication in its totality or in its big form.

And we're going to show how speaking, reading, writing and listening work together.

And right now I'm going to go to the board and start with our first lesson.

And look, Mr. E is here to tell you that speaking is an important part of language.

We say acquisition to get language because in order to communicate you need to speak and to listen.

Mr. E is telling you that speaking takes up 25 to 30% of language usage in a day.

So you spend 25 to 30% of your day speaking more than, and

you know, 10% for, I believe, writing, 10 to 15%.

In this lesson we're going to talk about the most important part of what I think you want to do when speaking in order to learn the most in language.

And it's not speaking, it's actually questions.

You want to learn to ask questions in order to improve your speaking and your communication ability.

And let's go to the board to find out why.

Well, most people want to speak because they want airtime.

They think if they're not speaking, they're not being taken seriously or they're not important and it's the person who's speaking who has all the power.

Some people are just stupid and they talk for the sake of stupid.

When you want to speak, you want to learn something or inform people.

And the best way to do that is to start by questions.

For some people, speaking is your mouth is open but no one's home.

They're talking and they've got lots to say.

It may not be informed, it may not be well thought out, it may not even be clear.

And it's confusing for people, but they feel good because they're speaking.

And the act of using questions is what makes it active.

Because when you use questions, we ask open ended questions.

We don't say ask questions where it says yes or no.

We ask a question where the person has to speak More, or we say elaborate.

And as they do that, they give us more information so we can communicate more effectively with them.

We use questions to clarify, like, what do you mean, connect?

And empathy and reflect, to think about it.

So by asking questions, we can have all of this, which is different than just speaking for the sake of speaking.

Why I chose speaking as the cornerstone for questions, for the cornerstone of speaking, as opposed to just say you can talk about this and that.

I've got videos teaching you how to do small talk, how to ask questions and that.

You have to understand the importance of questions so that you can utilize them to learn language, not just for better communication, which is what it's about.

That's why you're learning a language, to communicate.

But we want to do this so that we can actually get more out of our conversations and closer relations.

Well, years ago, I stumbled on this book called Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein.

I can't remember the university he worked at, but he does.

He's in the Department of Communication and Language, and he had a book.

And this book was expensive because the book was tiny and it was like $40.

And why would I pay $40 for like 80 pages?

This is not a direct quote, but it's basically what he said.

He said, by asking questions, we are asking the other person to enter a relationship of trust and respect.

I always thought, especially I was teaching English, that I would speak to you, you would speak to me, and

But the underlying thing to him was every time you have conversation and a question is asked, you're creating a relationship.

I never got it, and most people still don't.

So you're going to have an advantage over many people if you really understand this.

When you ask a question, you're saying to someone, I don't know, I'm vulnerable.

Well, some people, you'll ask a question like, is the library here?

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Speak Less, Ask More: Use Questions to Improve Your English

literally

perspective

engage

opportunity