Name: The Secret to English Fluency? It's Not Speaking.
Uploaded: 2025-11-25T18:01:16.000Z
Duration: 22 min 39 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...

To-infinitive

For Engvid, this is a special video, part of a four part series we have on the four core things you need to learn in order to learn language.

And we're going to go to the board and talk to E and see what he's listening to.

It seems that listening takes up to 40 to 50% of our day.

So in our communication journey through a day, we will spend 40 to 50% listening.

That might surprise some of you because I talk all the time.

You do talk, but you talk to different people and they need to talk.

If you talk all the time, you'd be the only one.

So we spend half our time actually in listening and a little less time in speaking because we do have more than one person we talk to.

But this does tell us how important listening is to the learning process.

I find it interesting because many students, they're more interested initially in speaking because it makes you feel good when you can speak and people understand you.

But they tend to forget that when we all started out as children, we started listening, not speaking.

And that's why we're going to take the time on this lesson to make sure you get a deep understanding of.

To blow up your ability to listen and therefore learn.

So most people think they're incred, okay?

And I'm talking about in their original language.

So I speak English, you might speak Japanese, you might speak French, you might speak Haitian, whatever you speak.

Almost everybody thinks they're really good at listening, and

they don't think they need any training on it because they have two ears.

You think you can hear because you have ears.

That focus means engage or put your brain into the situation and pay attention.

This is why there's so much miscommunication.

People speaking the same language don't understand each other because they actually don't listen.

This lesson is to help you not only increase your language learning ability, but

to make your everyday listening skills better, which will in turn, of course, make your language skills better.

Worth the time, especially when you're going to spend 50% of your life Listening to other people.

So if passive is just because I have ears, I can hear, what is active?

You understand what someone means when you hear them.

You can hear the words that they're saying, but it doesn't mean you actually understand what they mean.

Only because we usually listen to ourselves a lot, we understand what we think they mean.

And that's where you get what we call miscommunication.

And it's hard to have something called empathy.

And empathy is an ability to feel what someone else feels, right?

To understand the pain they have and to go, oh, my gosh, I got it.

Oh, yeah, I could understand why you would feel that way.

You can't do that if you can't actually understand what they're saying right now.

The other thing about active listening, which is great, is you make people feel heard.

Notice how both of these things have nothing to do with you.

Yeah, I know you're the star of your show, but we're listening because we want to create relationships.

If you love yourself a lot, which most of us do, I love myself.

But if you love yourself too much, you can't actually communicate with another person.

So we want to know what someone else means so we can communicate with them honestly.

Because you may not agree or you agree with them, but

you can't have that real conversation if you're not actually understanding what they're saying to you.

You might be agreeing on everything, but you don't know it.

Also, we exist on this planet because, you know, not exist.

I should say what makes life fun on this planet is other people and other things.

If everybody thinks like you and feels like you, it's a pretty dull place to be.

So we want to be communicating with each other to make.

So I'm going to go through a couple of things here because I've talked about the difference between passive and active listening.

One of the things we do, we have to understand that listening is a part.

I'm going to show you the science part by saying, this would be good to do.

And in fact, there's another part that I'm not even going to touch on, which is body language.

It's not just the words coming out of what somebody's saying.

We watch to see if they're fidgeting, they're Thinking they don't agree.

That's another part of it that we're not even touching on.

So it's part art and part science, because you have to.

Ask the right question to get the right answer.

Follow these four rules and you'll be a great listener.

You still are part of the picture, right?

There's what you want to learn and what you want to know.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Secret to English Fluency? It's Not Speaking.

engage

critical

situation

empathy