(dynamic music)

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls!

Hello!

I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com,

here to help you master the English language

with less stress, less hustle,

and fewer of those damn headaches.

Very common, if not slightly misguided question,

how to practise English speaking alone?

Now, the misconception here is that you are

somehow at a disadvantage if you don't have

people around you to practise speaking English with.

But really that's not true at all

and indeed these four ideas

that I'm gonna share with you in today's video

can and should also be used by people

who do use English in day to day life,

whether it's in business or because you live

in an English speaking country, whatever.

These things I'm gonna share with you today,

you should be doing them at regular intervals

throughout the day by yourself anyway.

Okay, that out of the way, four ways

to practise speaking English alone.

The first is quite simply shadowing.

Shadowing is a brilliant exercise for building

what I call the physical aspect of fluency.

It's not a creative conversation practise,

technique, exercise, whatever it is

you want to call it.

It's not gonna help you to speak English

quickly on the fly in conversation

with a group of people bent to going

back and forth and all that stuff.

Shadowing is gonna help you to get

your mouth moving as it should.

It's gonna help you to train those muscles

to move in the way that they should be moving

when you speak English.

It's gonna get you noticing the rhythm,

the intonation, the tone of English,

where we put the pauses, the gaps

between chunks and phrases and words,

where we speed up for effect,

where we slow down to emphasise a point.

Shadowing is all about getting yourself attuned

to those rhythms and the sounds of English.

Number two, quite simply talk to yourself.

My grandmother always used to say

that talking to yourself

is the first sign of madness.

Well, my grandmother was as crazy as they come

so I guess it takes one to know one.

But don't worry, we're not talking about having

full-on conversations with yourself

looking like some kind of crazy person.

No, we're simply talking about practising

saying the language that you've already

inputted into your head, assuming

that you've done the learning stage right.

And remember, to get good at speaking English

two things have to happen,

constant repetitive learning

with constant repetitive practise.

Input, output, repeat.

Assuming that you've done the input stage right,

you should already have lots of bits of English

in your noggin ready to go.

You just need to get good at saying.

Well, throughout the day practise

saying those things.

Practise the pronunciation.

Get good at just making those sounds

and pronouncing those phrases, expressions,

chunks, whatever it is that they are.

For example.

In next week's Extraordinary English Speakers lesson,

we see the phrase never heard of it

that means quite simply you have no knowledge

of a certain thing that someone is talking about.

Practise saying that at regular intervals

throughout the day.

Never heard of it.

Never heard of it.

Never heard of it.

You want to get to the point

where when you say never,

heard of it just flows out from that.

So, where you're not thinking

about each individual word

and putting it together like that.

Also, practise saying in different ways

to give it different emotions, different meanings.

Say it as if you were really irritated.

Huh?

Never heard of it.

Say it as if you were intrigued.

Oh, never heard of it.

Say it as though you were surprised.

Wow!

Never heard of it.

Say it as though you are in the middle

of an argument with your wife

and you're really angry about something.

Never heard of it!

You get the idea.

Just practise saying these things

throughout the day.

Number three.

This one is gonna make you laugh

and yes, it does sound a little bit silly.

Fantasise in English.

This is gonna sound odd

but when I'm walking around

or I'm running, or I'm on my bike,

usually when I'm doing some kind

of physical activity, some kind of exercise,

in my head I'm fantasising about things.

You know, when you're walking down the road

listening to your favourite rock song,

or whatever music it is that you like,

and in your mind you're there on stage

singing that song in front of 10,000 people

and they're all cheering you on

and you're like a rock super star god.

It's exciting.

You get goosebumps and you're like, "Yeah!

"I'm amazing!"

Well, do the same thing in English.

Walk down the road and have conversations

using the language that you know.

Again, it's gonna sound weird

but when I first started to learn Japanese

from a very very early stage, the conversations

in my head started to switch to Japanese.

It wasn't even really a conscious thing.

But even when all I could say in the language

was hello and count to 10,

I did mention myself walking down the road

and then bumping into this cute Japanese girl

and launching into conversation.

(speaks Japanese)

It sounds ridiculous and it is

but it just gets you used to organising

and thinking about the English

you're gonna use in conversation in your head.

This fantasising about chatting in English,

by the way, when done right is also

a fantastic way to train yourself

to stop translating from your native language

to English in your head and think

directly in English to speak English

in a much more natural fluent kind of way.

This is the topic of my book

Think English Speak English.

How to stop performing mental gymnastics

when you speak English.

This book goes into detail about why

you are stuck thinking in your native language

and how that makes it difficult

to speak English fluently and naturally

and importantly, it also shows you

step by simple step how to train yourself

to think directly in English,

as native English speakers do,

to speak English, as native English speakers do.

There's a link in the description

or head over to it, ThinkEnglishSpeakEnglish.com.

It's available on Kindle.

You can read the first bit for free and, as always,

it comes with a complete audio version

to download and listen to, to your heart's content.

Number four.

This one is a little bit more advanced

and a little bit more uncomfortable.

But get your iPhone, your Android,

your smartphone or camera,

whatever it is that you use,

and film yourself speaking about something

you want to get good at speaking about in English.

This is a fantastic way to, first of all,

organise the English that you've got in your head

and say it in the way that you want to say it

to communicate the things that you want to communicate.

But it's also a fantastic way

to build awareness of your own speaking

so that you can watch this recording back,

notice your own imperfections,

the things that you don't say well

and the things that you don't know how to say.

We can then use a technique called

retroactive learning to fill in those gaps.

More on that in a future video.

And of course, my Extraordinary English Speakers members

can and should also submit those recordings

to me for critique so that I can watch through them

and point out all of your mistakes

and imperfections, and then you can take

that information and fix those problems.

So there we go then.

Four ways that you can practise

English speaking alone: shadowing,

talk to yourself, fantasise in English,

and record yourself and review.

Look, the first thing you've got to realise here

is that none of these practise exercises

are going to work if you are not learning

and putting the English you need into your head first.

Somebody left rather sucky comment

on my video yesterday saying,

"Oh, so basically you've just got

"to practise practise practise.

"Bah! I already knew that."

Which was a pretty stupid thing to say

because the point of the video

that I did yesterday was to say

that you need these two stages.

Input, output, repeat.

It's not a case of just practise practise practise.

You need to put the right stuff into here

first, before you can practise that.

Just practising isn't that useful

because well, for example,

if I practised practised practised my French,

I wouldn't get very far because the only French

that I remember from school is "Hello, my little.

Not exactly the kind of thing

that's gonna get me very far in, for example,

a conversation with French speakers,

regardless of how much I've

practised practised practised that.

Two things have to happen.

Input, output, repeat.

Only when you get that balance right

is your English really going to improve.

So don't think you can just do

these practise exercises

and get really really good at English

and skip the hard intensive study part

'cause it don't work like that.

And that, ladies and gentlemen is me,

Julian Northbrook, your beloved host

signing off for another video.

If you've found these four practise ideas helpful,

go ahead, give this video a nice big old thumbs-up.

If you've thought they were crap, whatever,

your problem, not mine.

Go ahead, bash that thumbs-down button now.

If you are new to the channel, subscribe.

And regardless, I will see you,

ladies and gentlemen, in tomorrow's video.

Thank you and goodbye.