Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Last night I was teaching a live class.

  • Every month I teach a live class to the students in my Academy,

  • where I work with a student one on one.

  • And as I was teaching last night, I just have this moment where I thought,

  • it's really about the basics and the foundation.

  • So in today's video, I'm going to go over two things that came up in my live class

  • working with a student who was struggling,

  • and we're going to talk about how you can apply that to yourself,

  • to your own language learning to help you speak English with more ease.

  • The first student I worked with was Alice.

  • Her native language is Chinese.

  • And she said that there had been something early on in my Academy

  • that she didn't really understand, she didn't feel comfortable doing it so she moved on.

  • And I realized what she was talking about was breaking up a word or sentence into its rhythm.

  • And I can see how that can be confusing,

  • but by not really understanding what we mean by rhythmic contrasts in American English,

  • and just moving on, she was never going to be able to really capture that quality of American English.

  • In that course, I have a little video where I talk about why you need to break something down.

  • And I tell the story of when I was trying to learn how to do a double under jump rope move at the gym.

  • This is when you jump rope but each time you jump, you do two rotations of the rope.

  • Now, I thought this was impossible.

  • That was me failing and trying to do this thing.

  • I was putting in an incredible amount of effort and working too hard.

  • My feet weren't light enough.

  • The way I got to start to get the right feeling and rhythm, and touch in my body,

  • was when I started jumping rope without the rope.

  • Now, i've been having my students speak English without words for years,

  • so it was exciting to discover success in a similar situation.

  • In the next few lessons, you're going to focus on speaking English without words.

  • So I have these exercises and you'll see them on my youtube channel too

  • where we talk about the stress of a word, let's take the word 'probably' for example.

  • It's a three-syllable word with first syllable stress.

  • So instead of practicing probably, and trying to think about which syllable is stressed,

  • and which are unstressed, and then also all of those sounds, which I know are tricky,

  • I break it down to just the stress.

  • So instead of practicing 'probably', I have my students practice:

  • DA-da-da, DA-da-da.

  • Really long, up-down shape, and then two little dots.

  • DA-da-da, DA-da-da.

  • Let's take the word 'Chinese', da-DA.

  • Let's take the phrase 'I don't know.'

  • da-da-DA.

  • Let's take the phrase 'happy', DA-da.

  • So these are all things, anything that's spoken in English,

  • we can break down to just the rhythm on any syllable.

  • I've chosen D and AH, or the schwa for unstressed, da-da, da-da, da-da-da.

  • But when a student comes along whose native language is not stressed timed, but as syllable timed,

  • like Chinese, where every syllable is the same length, it can be really hard to think in this way.

  • Long, short? Short, long? What?

  • So i'll have students that will come to me and they'll say, let's take the word 'happy' for example, happy.

  • And I get the stress, the one is higher,

  • the intonation is higher, the pitch is higher, but the length is too much the same.

  • Happy.

  • In American English, we want happy.

  • So the last syllable isn't EE but it's EE.

  • And so getting students to focus on this and to shorten up those unstressed syllables is really important,

  • because it brings in this very natural American character.

  • So when I learned that Alice was not comfortable with da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da,

  • and these rhythms, but moved on, I stopped her.

  • I said you need to go back and work on this foundation for about a week.

  • All right, when it's a two syllable word we only have two options, we have da-da, like Chinese,

  • and we have da-da, like silly.

  • So I would just - let me just hear you say da-da, Chinese, let me just hear you say those two things.

  • - Two syllables.

  • - Yeah.

  • - First stressed.

  • - Second stressed. Like the word Chinese.

  • - Da-da.

  • - Yes. Exactly.

  • Do it again.

  • - Da-da.

  • - Right, and now make the first one even shorter.

  • - Da-da.

  • - Right, and now connect them, right now you're doing da da, and the length is right,

  • but I wanna hear da-da,

  • >> I want to hear them >> Da-da.

  • - Yes, exactly, do it again.

  • - Da-da.

  • - Yes. Again.

  • - Da-da.

  • - Right, and now you can go do all the two syllable words that are like that.

  • Chinese, about.

  • Too often we rush to get on to the next thing, and as adults, we put...

  • We put a lot of pressure on ourselves as we learn, I think, to learn quickly, to achieve it, to be done with it.

  • And when we're doing something with our body, that's brand-new,

  • that's not something that we're learning with our head, and that takes time.

  • So right now, we're going to practice some rhythmic patterns together, how comfortable are they?

  • Please do practice out loud here.

  • Of course, you can watch it and understand, but can you do it with your own body?

  • Money. Da-da.

  • Dinner. Da-da.

  • Classy. Da-da.

  • Now, you'll hear the exact same thing, you do it with me out loud.

  • Money.

  • Da-da.

  • Dinner. Da-da.

  • Classy. Da-da.

  • Da-DA.

  • Alive. Da-DA.

  • Until. Da-DA.

  • Again.

  • Now you'll hear the exact same thing, you do it with me out loud.

  • Da-DA. Alive.

  • Da-DA. Until.

  • Da-DA. Again.

  • Da-DA-da.

  • Unlikely.

  • Da-DA-da. Forever.

  • Da-DA-da.

  • I think so.

  • Now, you'll hear the exact same thing, you do it with me out loud.

  • Da-DA-da. Unlikely.

  • Da-DA-da. Forever.

  • Da-DA-da. I think so.

  • DA-da-da. Africa.

  • DA-da-da. Company.

  • DA-da-da. Holiday.

  • Now you'll hear the exact same thing, you do it with me out loud.

  • DA-da-da. Africa.

  • DA-da-da. Company.

  • DA-da-da. Holiday.

  • Da-da-DA. Engineer.

  • Da-da-DA. Guarantee.

  • Da-da-DA. Recommend.

  • Now you'll hear the exact same thing, you do it with me out loud.

  • Da-da-DA. Engineer.

  • Da-da-DA. Guarantee.

  • Da-da-DA. Recommend.

  • Thinking about stress this way can really help

  • when you're working with a longer word that's more difficult,

  • because focusing on the stress helps you figure out how to simplify things.

  • For example, the word 'regularly', that is a tricky word.

  • Reg-ularly.

  • --gularly, --gularly.

  • When you know that you can take those final three syllables and simplify them

  • so that you can say them more quickly, it will definitely help.

  • Then I met with a student named Grace.

  • Grace has been living in the US for quite some time and she's from Brazil, her native languages Portuguese,

  • and she's really done so well with so much of mastering American English,

  • but there were some things that were still difficult for her

  • and the thing that I wrote down as she was speaking, that I just noticed

  • as a flashing light, the biggest issue with her sounds was the R sound.

  • No surprise.

  • It's extremely tricky for lots of people.

  • With her, she was putting in so much effort.

  • And it makes sense.

  • When we learn how to do something, we use our brain, we understand it,

  • and then we apply that idea to what we're doing.

  • We try, we put in effort to make it happen.

  • And what was happening was as she did that,

  • it's hard to do that so quickly in a word or in a sentence, as she did that, it brought in more attention,

  • it made it harder, so she put in more effort to try to get that R sound.

  • And her R ended up sounding like this. Ohrr.

  • More stuck in the throat, not a clean forward American feel.

  • Now, with an adult speaker, I do often describe what's happening,

  • show them what's happening with photos and videos

  • so that they understand how to make a sound like the R sound,

  • where you can't see much because of the tongue position and the mouth position.

  • So with adults, I do give this kind of information.

  • But then sometimes that means you try too much to use your head to make it happen.

  • So with Grace, I decided to do something that was mimicking more the way a child would learn.

  • What we did is we said: you've got to throw out everything you know,

  • brainwash yourself, you know nothing about R.

  • You've never heard of it.

  • It's a brand new concept to you.

  • You can't see a photo of how it's made, I'm not going to describe to you how it's made,

  • your only resource for understanding the sound is hearing it.

  • So I'm gonna say it, and then you repeat it, and as you're repeating it,

  • you just try to match that sound, use your ear to match the sound.

  • What am i hearing?

  • Is it like what Rachel did?

  • If so, good. If not what can I change?

  • Rely on what you're hearing and turning that into your voice,

  • rather than relying on what you know and trying to make your sound out of that.

  • Focus less on what your tongue is doing and to focus a ton on the sound.

  • So.

  • I'm just going to make an R sound.

  • I want you to close your eyes and just try to find that sound with your mouth, try to match my sound.

  • I'm going to do it for about two seconds. Then you do it for about two seconds, then I'm going to do it.

  • We're just going to go back and forth for several times.

  • Just see what you can find.

  • Don't think about what you're doing with your tongue, think about the sound, and matching the sound.

  • Okay? - Okay. -

  • Errrrrrrr.

  • - Errrrrr.

  • - Errrrr.

  • - Errrrr.

  • - Errrrr.

  • - Errrrrr.

  • - Okay, so a couple things are happening. It's actually starting pretty good.

  • Then you're kind of doing this with your jaw.

  • - I'm trying to move.

  • - Yeah. Actually that is making it less good.

  • So I asked her: what are you doing? And she said,

  • well I started making the sound, and then I thought about how I needed to make it more forward,

  • that was the problem.

  • She started thinking about how it needed to be.

  • And sometimes, we just need to shut that off.

  • So it's important as an adult to learn everything about the sound,

  • and understand that, and practice it with that way some, but then it's also really important sometimes

  • to just let that go and learn as a child learns when it comes to brand new sounds.

  • And when she did that,

  • when she brainwashed herself into thinking she knew nothing about the sound,

  • and she could only rely on trying to match my sound,

  • something beautiful happened.

  • She looked so much more relaxed, this sound was way more accurate,

  • and the sound was also more relaxed.

  • It just looked easier.

  • It looked like this is something that you can reproduce and work into your speech.

  • I think that actually what's gonna work better for you with this sound,

  • because you have so much brain knowledge and so much effort,

  • and you've said, you know it's "My R is a problem.

  • like you already have all of these ideas about the R, would be to just let them go.

  • We're going to do it again.

  • and if you notice your mind saying oh my gosh, I need to move my jaw out

  • or something, just try to let the thought come and go.

  • I'm just gonna do it and have you do it back. Okay?

  • - Okay.

  • - Errrrrr.

  • - Errrrr.

  • - Errrr.

  • - Errrrr.

  • - Errrrr.

  • - Errrr.

  • - Okay. All three of those were way better than any r that you did previously.

  • I will say, they looked very relaxed.

  • They looked much less effortful.

  • So now you and me, we're going to do it just like I did with Grace in my class, okay?

  • So we're going to take the R.

  • Brainwash yourself right now. You know nothing about how the R sound is made.

  • You've never seen a picture of the tongue position.

  • You've never heard me describe what should be happening with the tongue or the lips or the jaw.

  • You know nothing.

  • It's a brand new sound. How exciting?

  • So the way you're going to make it is you're gonna hear me do it, and then you're gonna do it.

  • And if it's not right, don't worry, because in a couple seconds, I'm gonna do it again.

  • You'll have the chance to listen again, and then you'll try again.

  • Rrrr--

  • Rrrr--

  • How are you feeling? Is your mind still trying to come in, tell you how to do it?

  • Try to let that go.

  • Say, okay mind, I love you, you're so helpful, for now, I'm going to put you aside,

  • I'm gonna listen to my body instead.

  • So you're taking your ear,

  • your ear is taking what it hears, and it is telling your mouth what to do to make that sound.

  • As you're making a sound, your ear can tell if something's not quite the same,

  • and it will tell your body what slight adjustment to make,

  • and this is how we navigate and find the right sound, okay?

  • So let's try it.

  • Three times, no, let's say five times, I'm going to hold out the R for a few seconds, then you do it,

  • then I do it, then you do it. Don't judge yourself, because that really doesn't matter.

  • Just keep going forward, hearing it, and trying it. Okay, let's do it.

  • Rrrr--

  • Rrrr--

  • Rrrr--

  • Rrrr--

  • And the last time.

  • Rrrr--

  • What's happening? Are you finding a more relaxed sound?

  • I'm actually feeling very relaxed just thinking about how relaxed you are working on this sound.

  • So it's about the basics, taking yourself back to the foundation.

  • So, with the first student it was about the foundation of rhythm, getting rid of

  • sounds and words and just working on rhythm.

  • With the second student,

  • it was about getting back to the basics, the foundation of learning the way a child would learn.

  • Now, i've built a whole Academy around training materials, so

  • that's a sign that I don't think that adults can learn exclusively by listening.

  • I think they do need some help, some guidance and a lot of training.

  • The other thing that I worked with a Grace on was how she felt about her R. Here's what I said.

  • Because it is harder to change that habit when we think: I'm so stressed about this,

  • I'm so self-conscious about it. It's such a problem for me.

  • That does, I think, make it harder to break the habit.

  • So we want to do, like, the good work of breaking the habit,

  • but we also want to do the important work of addressing what are we saying to ourselves about our habit,

  • and is it, like, slowing us down from meeting our goal?

  • So I think that maybe working on both of those things on the R will help...

  • Will help release you a little bit because I definitely see that tension in that effort

  • that's going into making the R and sometimes, speaking in general, not always.

  • So you have to take care of yourself and watch how you

  • talk about yourself and your ability,

  • because if it's not supportive of what you're trying to do, then it's gonna slow you down.

  • And I know it sounds kind of cheesy to say that, but it's true and i've seen it happen, and

  • to help my students make the fastest,

  • best progress,

  • i've learned that I also need to take care of

  • how they see themselves, and that's also something I do in the Academy.

  • You know what? You can do so much.

  • If you're wondering what is this Academy,

  • it's rachelsenglishacademy.com Check it out, join if you'd like, I'd love to see some of you there,

  • and this is the next video that you should watch

  • here on youtube, this is what youtube is suggesting for you

  • based on who they think you are, and who they think I am, so

  • interesting, why not try it?

  • Also, don't forget to subscribe. I make new videos on the English language, specifically

  • spoken English and English pronunciation, every Tuesday, please come back and check it out.

  • That's it guys and thanks so much for using Rachel's English.

Last night I was teaching a live class.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it