Transcription
Learn with your ears, not with your eyes. Again, learn with your ears, not with your eyes. And, of course, we're teaching you how to speak excellent English. To speak well, you have to have excellent listening. See, speech comes from listening.
Here's the problem: In school, you mostly learned with your eyes. What did you do? You read a lot of textbooks. You watched the teacher write a lot of stuff on the board. Maybe you listened to the teacher explain English in your language. So you're less—you're hearing your language, not English in your classroom. But in general, what's happening is you're learning, learning, learning with your eyes. That's what happened, and maybe it's still happening now. I don't know, hopefully not—not after today.
So there's a big problem with this. See, when you're just reading and trying to learn grammar rules, for example, by reading grammar books, and trying to learn vocabulary by reading vocabulary lists, and you're trying to read English dialogues, and then you're doing written tests, and then you're doing all these written activities and written drills, none of that is helping you with your speaking. And that's why you probably read English much better than you speak it or understand it. It's a common problem. It's because in school you learn with your eyes all the time, or most of the time, and you did very little learning with your ears.
Listening, listening, listening is secret number three, and it's probably the most important one. You gotta listen a lot. You've got to listen to a lot, a lot, a lot of English. That's the key to great speaking. There's a lot of research about this, a lot of academic research—X research—that shows that listening is the way you improve your speaking, not reading, not practicing speaking in a mirror or something. No, it's lots and lots and lots of listening—lots of it.
Now, this is so obvious, but let's think. Imagine a baby, a little baby—a little American baby. This little American baby, of course, needs to learn English. So how will we teach this American baby to learn English? Will we buy grammar books and try to make the baby study grammar? No, we won't. We could try, but it won't work. Would we try to force the baby to read immediately? Of course not. So how does this little baby learn English? One way and one way only: listening. For six to twelve months, that baby just sits there and listens, listens, listens, listens, listens, listens to the parents mostly, and maybe brothers and sisters, and maybe other people in the family speaking English constantly. And of course, when parents speak to a baby, they don't speak difficult English; they speak very simple, easy English. And eventually the baby starts to learn a few words, like mommy, daddy, maybe food—really simple stuff—but they start to learn a little bit. And that's the beginning, and then they start learning, you know, groups of words, two words, three words together. All of this is happening through listening. And for a while, the baby can understand a lot—the small child can actually understand a lot of English but cannot speak very much. This is natural and normal—that the listening level is higher than the speaking level. And then eventually, of course, the baby will start to speak, one word and two words in the beginning, and then phrases, bigger set phrases, and then sentences, and it just keeps going. And that baby learns to speak excellent English through listening—by learning with the baby's ears. And that's what you have to do. You have to go back and start learning English now, change the way you're learning it. Instead, learn it like a baby—learn with your ears, lots and lots of listening.
Now, like a baby, you should not focus on difficult listening. This is another problem that schools have, and a lot of students have. Maybe they do practice some listening, but when they do, it's so difficult—like they're listening to sample TOEFL tests and things like that—extremely difficult vocabulary, very academic and formal, not really natural, normal English for normal situations. And it's so difficult that you cannot really understand it easily and automatically. If you do that—if you listen to English that's too difficult—your learning will be very, very, very slow. You want the opposite. Like a baby, you want to listen to lots of easy English. Easy listening is the key. Easy listening will give you great speaking. That's what all the research shows—it's very powerful. So you probably need to be listening to things that are much easier than you think.
Here's my basic rule for listening: You should listen to something that you can understand 95% of it without a dictionary—95%. That means you don't need a dictionary at all, because the other 5% you can easily guess, right? If there is a new word or a new phrase that comes up, you can guess the meaning because you understand everything else—you understand the situation, you understand most of it, so you can kind of guess the meaning of that new word. And that's how you learn naturally new vocabulary. That's how I learned it all as a child growing up, and it's how you should be learning it too—with your ears, listening to very easy English. Now eventually you listen and listen and listen, and you understand 100%, well then it's time for something a little more difficult—not a lot more difficult, a little more difficult—and then you listen to that again and again and again. When it becomes 100%, then you find something a little more difficult. In this way, you will rapidly increase your ability.
Here's what else happens: After six to twelve months—it depends on the person—you will find yourself starting to speak English automatically. Correct phrases and words will pop out of your mouth—boom—they'll come out without you thinking at all, just like your language. When you speak your language, you're not always thinking about vocabulary and translations and all this stuff—no, it just comes out—boom. You want to say something, and it comes out. That's what will happen with English, but first you need to focus on listening, and just listening for six to twelve months. It's okay if you speak a little bit, but mostly you should be doing lots and lots and lots of easy listening every day.
How can you do this? Go get some easy audiobooks, easy audio articles. You can get my lessons, you can get our lessons and put them on an iPod, and every moment you have, listen. Be listening, listening, listening to this English all the time. When you wake up in the morning, listen to English—you know, just 10 or 15 minutes. When you're going to work or to school, or you're at home, you know, cleaning the house, whatever—listen to English some more—20 minutes, 30 minutes. When you have a break during the day at lunch, listen to English—10-15 minutes. When you're going home at night or making dinner, listen to English—10, 15, 20, 30 minutes. Before you go to bed, listen to English again—10, 15, 20, 30 minutes. By doing little pieces of listening all through the day, you can easily listen for a total of one to two hours every single day. And when you do that, you will find you will make big improvements. And it takes usually about six months—maybe less for you, maybe more—depends on how much you listen, depends on how easy it is—easier is better.
So that's it. It's simple. This is such a simple rule: Learn with your ears, not with your eyes. And one last note: Your listening ability should naturally and always be higher than your speaking ability. See what happens is your listening ability pulls up your speaking ability. It happens automatically; you don't need to think about it; it's easy. All you have to focus on is listening, and as you get better and better listening, your speaking will naturally improve. It's like it pulls it up, pulls it up, pulls it up, pulls it up.