Transcription
How to speak fluently in English. How to speak confidently in English.
This is part two of how to improve your English speaking skills. And today I'm sharing nine simple steps plus daily exercises that will help you improve your spoken English at any age. Do it without relying on anyone, just by investing 15 minutes a day. So go ahead, hit subscribe, and let's get started.
Now, if you've been trying to improve your English speaking skills for some time, but if you're still struggling, the reason is probably fear. Fear of being judged, fear of sounding dumb, fear of not being able to put your point across. And these are all valid fears. But until you overcome them, it is going to be very difficult for you to learn how to speak well in English. So all of the steps that we are going to discuss today will essentially help you overcome this fear of speaking in English.
Starting with step one, which is to use AI to your advantage. Now, this is perhaps the biggest boon in recent times, and I'm going to tell you how to exactly use AI to practice your English so that by the end of 30 days, you will almost be a pro. It is such a low-stakes situation that you are easily able to have full conversation with an AI tool without feeling pressured to be perfect.
Now, my favorite tool to do this is Microsoft Copilot. And I use the free version for this. This video is not sponsored by Microsoft Copilot, by the way. I think ChatGPT is also great, but I have the paid version of ChatGPT. So, I'm not sure if all of this that I'm about to tell you works on the free version. So here are a few ways in which you can use AI to practice your spoken English.
Number one is to have a daily small talk ritual. I basically want you to spend five minutes every morning doing this. Ideally, after you have gotten ready for the day and before you are going to work or college or school. Think of this as warming up your brain to talk better in English throughout the day.
First of all, you're going to go ahead and put this prompt in Copilot. It is an app that you download on your phone, and it kind of looks like WhatsApp, right? This is the prompt you're going to put in the app. And once the AI says okay, you're going to hold the mic button and describe in one sentence how you are, what you have done, and what is your plan for the day.
This is how it typically goes. "Hey Copilot, I am feeling kind of anxious today. I had a lot of work to do. So far, I have recorded two YouTube videos, a couple of shorts, and now after doing all of that, I have to go for the fitting of some of my wedding outfits. Um, and then my day will also have me sending those videos out to Sanche, who will be editing this video."
"Sounds like you've got a jam-packed day. Juggling all those tasks could definitely make anyone anxious. Wedding prep, video shoots, and coordinating with Sanche, it's a lot. Is there a way you can simplify things or maybe delegate some of it?"
"I am actually traveling in the next two days. So while I have delegated a lot of work right now, there is work that I have to do in advance, which is why like the next two days are also going to be hectic for me."
"I hear you. Prepping for travel can really ramp up the to-do list, especially when you're trying to get ahead on things. Just remember to take a breather when you can. You deserve it. Anything specific on your mind about the upcoming trip?"
"It is my bachelorette trip, and I'm very, very excited about it. Uh, I am getting married in November this year, and I really want to have fun with my girls on this bachelorette."
"Ah, bachelorette trip. That's so exciting. November will be here before you know it. It sounds like a perfect chance to relax and have a blast with your girls before the big day. Where are you planning to go?"
"Planning to go to Vietnam."
"Vietnam. That's an amazing choice. It's got everything. Beautiful landscapes, delicious food, and vibrant culture. Your bachelorette trip is going to be so epic."
You see how cool that was? It can have an entire conversation with you till you say stop. Awesome. You can then just keep the conversation going till you hit your two to three minute timer. And this exercise is so effective because it makes you get into the habit of talking in English. Slowly, you can increase the duration of doing this. You can go from two minutes to five minutes to ten minutes, depending on your comfort level. But I want you to do this for at least two minutes every single day for the next 30 days.
Now, keep in mind here that you are not looking for feedback at this step. But you are just getting comfortable putting your thoughts out in English. Whatever question AI asks you, you have to respond in English. Whether your grammar is good or not, whether you have the vocabulary or not, doesn't matter. You just have to get into the practice of responding in English.
The second thing you can do with AI is actually role-play real situations in your life. This is where things get practical. You can make AI pretend to be anyone. AI can be a waiter, a shopkeeper, a colleague, even your boss, your teacher, whoever, right? You can basically simulate or like set up a fake situation and then ask the AI to talk to you in that particular situation.
"Okay, pretend that you are a waiter in a cafe. I'm ordering coffee and I want you to keep the conversation going."
"Absolutely. Let's get into character. Welcome to our cozy cafe. What can I get started for you today?"
"I want an iced cappuccino with jaggery instead of sugar."
"An iced cappuccino with jaggery. Great choice. That'll add a nice earthy sweetness. I'll get that brewing for you. So, while you wait, are you up to anything fun today?"
"I am planning to go wedding shopping today. I just stopped for a quick coffee here."
"Wedding shopping. How exciting. Picking out those special details is such a memorable part of the journey. Your iced cappuccino will be the perfect shopping fuel. Are you on the hunt for anything specific today?"
"Looking for my wedding lehenga today. Uh, I really want to wear it on my reception. So, and also that is the only outfit left."
"The wedding lehenga for your reception. That's a big one. It's going to be a showstopper, I'm sure. Finding that perfect outfit to celebrate in sounds like a dream. How long till my cappuccino is ready?"
"Your iced cappuccino will be ready in just a couple of minutes. We're making it fresh for you with that lovely touch of jaggery. Just enough time to plan out which shops to hit first."
Now, you can do this for a meeting, for a presentation that you're about to give. And it helps you get acclimatized or get used to that exact scenario in real life that scares you. Again, this is helpful whenever you have a new scenario coming up, like a meeting or dinner with someone. You can role-play the exact thing and practice speaking those things before doing it in the real world. It also helps boost your confidence when you are speaking in English.
And the third thing, of course, that you can do with AI is to ask for feedback. Now, this is an amazing part because AI, most AI tools out there have been trained largely on English language models. So it is great at grammar, it is great at sentence structure, and it can very easily be your English speaking coach. You can ask it to be gentle or you can ask it to be strict, depending on how you learn most effectively.
And again, Microsoft Copilot is the tool that I use for this. Very, very easy to use. I will basically tell the tool that I am going to speak something out loud and I want it to correct me once I am done. You can also do the same thing for all of the two steps that we've discussed before, right? So, your daily small talk and your role-playing simulation. Once you're done with that conversation, you can simply ask AI to give you feedback on what you spoke right and what you spoke wrong.
If you're doing a standalone practice where you are just throwing phrases at the AI, you want to pick phrases or sentences that you do end up using in real life, or maybe just look back on the conversations that you've had in the day. Pick sentences from there, put it into AI, and then ask it to correct where you went wrong.
For example, this is an interaction I had yesterday. "Can you tell me if I made any mistakes in the conversation that we have had so far in the English speaking part of it specifically?"
"Your English has been spot-on, super clear and natural. You're nailing it. Is there a particular part you're unsure about?"
"I will tell you something that I said to somebody yesterday, and you let me know if there were any errors in that."
"Absolutely. Go ahead and share what you said. Let's take a look."
"Yesterday I go to market and buy three apple but apple bad and sour. How to get refund?"
"You were super close. Try this: Yesterday I went to the market and bought three apples, but they were bad and sour. How can I get a refund? You just needed a bit of tweaking with the verb tenses. Keep it up."
"So in the verb tenses, what mistakes did I specifically make? Can you tell me those? Can you elaborate on those so that I can learn better?"
"Of course. So in English, verb tenses are used to indicate the time of an action. When you said, 'I go to market and buy three apple,' the correct past tense would be, 'I went to the market and bought three apples.' The verbs 'go' and 'buy' needed to be in their past tense forms, which are 'went' and 'bought.' And for 'apple,' since you bought three, it should be plural. So 'apples.' That's the gist of it."
This way, any mistake that you're making through your interactions with AI becomes a lesson for you without the shame of somebody else in real life judging you. The point here while you're practicing with AI is not to sound perfect. The point is to speak more often in English. And when you do that, you're able to build your confidence of speaking in English because with AI, you basically have a 24/7 conversation partner who never gets tired of helping you. Please, please, please use AI to your advantage because it is going to massively improve whatever skill you are trying to work on.
This brings me to step number two, building fluency through understanding patterns. Now, when people hear the word fluency, they often think it means speaking super fast or using big words or having a perfect accent. But that is not true. Real fluency is built on patterns. Patterns are basically small sentence structures that we repeat very, very often. So often that they become automatic, and they help us form larger sentences. So once you understand these patterns, you are very easily able to fit them in any situation and use them to your advantage.
And you will notice that you already do this in your native language, right? When you're speaking in your native language, that can be Hindi, that can be Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, whatever the language is, right? You do not pause to calculate grammar rules, right? You rely on familiar sentence blocks that roll off your tongue very, very easily. English works in the same way. Every language works in the same way. Once your brain learns these patterns, your brain doesn't have to think in that language. It automatically speaks in that language.
So even in my YouTube videos, you will notice that I use a lot of patterns constantly, right? For example, "is one pattern." Another one is "the truth is," or "here is the thing," and then I say the sentence after that, or "this is why," and then I say the sentence after that. These are my patterns, the patterns that my brain is used to. So they come out very, very effortlessly for me. And because they are familiar, I can focus on communicating the idea that I want to communicate instead of actually struggling to form a sentence in my brain.
Once again, you can actually use AI to learn and recognize patterns. I would suggest doing a five-minute evening exercise every single day for the next 30 days where you ask the AI to give you five to six common English sentence patterns to talk about a topic, and every day give it a different topic. So let's say today I wanted to find out sentence patterns about travel. Okay? And this is the prompt that I give to the AI.
"Give me five travel-related sentence patterns where I can fill in the blanks and complete the sentences."
"Sure thing. Here are five sentence patterns for you.
1. I'm planning a trip to ______ next summer.
2. I can't wait to try the local food in ______.
3. My dream destination is ______ because of its ______.
4. I always pack ______ when traveling to ______.
5. The best part of traveling is ______ in ______."
"Feel free to fill in the blanks with your own travel experiences."
So, here are the sentence patterns. It also gives you like a typed response so that you can actually use it to go back and study. It's not just all verbal. Okay.
"So, I'm planning a trip to Vietnam next summer."
"Yeah, I'm planning a trip to Japan next summer."
"The next one is, I can't wait to try the local food in Japan."
"I can't wait to try the local food in Osaka."
"My dream destination is ______ because of its ______."
"So, my dream destination is Italy because of its art."
"I always pack ______ when traveling to ______."
"I always pack bathing suits when traveling to beach destinations."
Now, I can just fill in the blanks.
"How do I get to ______?"
"How do I get to this hotel?"
"Can I book a room at this hotel?"
"Can I book a cab from the airport?"
"What is the best way to ______?"
"What is the best way to travel from India to Australia?"
"What is the best way to get from London to Paris?"
"Do you have any recommendations for ______?"
"Do you have any recommendations for restaurants in New Delhi?"
You will notice that with sentence patterns, they often share the most commonly used phrases when it comes to that niche or that topic. Right? So when you're traveling and when you're interacting with strangers, these five or six patterns are probably the ones that you are going to use. One of these five questions is what you're going to ask.
Once you answer these, you can ask AI to generate even more structures. Another exercise that you can do is for each phrase that the AI generates, you can try and come up with five to six fill-in-the-blanks. So let's say the phrase is "how do I get to." I can say, "How do I get to the airport? How do I get to this hotel? How do I get to this restaurant? How do I get to this bus station? How do I get to the library?" And the list becomes endless. Multiple questions, multiple sentences with just one pattern.
This brings me to step number three, shadowing and accent training. Now, once you have spent a few weeks, I would ideally want you to spend like 30 days, at least four weeks, doing the first two steps in this series. After that, it is time to level up and work on your accent. This is where you're basically training your brain to think in English so that speaking becomes automatic and natural instead of sounding forced.
So for this, we practice something called shadowing. Here is how this works. You are going to pick a short 30-second to one-minute clip. It could be from a movie, a show, even a podcast you love. I would recommend picking this clip from a YouTube video or an Instagram reel is even better because this way you can put the link of this reel in the AI tool. You can also put your voice recording in the AI tool, and it will give you feedback on where you went wrong.
So essentially, what you're going to do, you're going to open this video clip. Let's say you found this Instagram reel, okay? And you are going to listen to this Instagram reel carefully. Once you've listened to it all the way through, you are then going to play it again. You're going to listen to the first sentence, and then you are going to simply repeat what that person has said in the first sentence, line by line. First sentence repeated, then you pause, you play the second sentence, then you repeat the second sentence. And when you are repeating these sentences, you are going to try and copy their exact rhythm, their exact intonation, even the pauses that they make. Don't just say the words. Mirror the music of how it is said. And you can do this. You can repeat these sentences as many times as you want till you feel like you've gotten to a place where you can perfectly narrate what the other person is saying.
Once you've repeated each sentence line by line, then you're going to listen to the entire reel once again. And then you're going to repeat the whole thing from memory without listening to it again. It also helps if you, for this exercise, pick one person to try and copy the accent training from. Right? So let's say you pick Ali Abdaal's videos, right? You would want to keep watching and repeating Ali Abdaal's language and language model for the next 30 days because this also helps you develop your own speaking style. When you try and copy multiple different people, everybody has different ways of speaking. Everybody has different patterns of speaking. It can be confusing for you to pick up your accent and pick up, you know, the type of words that you want to say. But if you pick one person, it makes the process a lot smoother.
And at first, it is going to feel strange, like you're copying someone. Why will you do that? But just within a few days, you will notice that your mouth, your tongue, and your breath, everything starts to adjust to speaking in English. And suddenly, sentences that once felt very difficult will actually start feeling very, very smooth.
To make this practice even sharper, what you can do is record yourself while you're speaking things out loud. You can just record your voice. You can also record yourself on a video. Play it back. You can compare it to the original clip, or you can just put that recording in your AI tool and get feedback on clarity, whether you spoke the word correctly or not. It is like having a mirror, but for your voice.
This brings me to step number four, testing your learning in real life. Now, this is where the fun really begins. So, if you've been doing this for a month, if you've been practicing in your room, let's say you've been practicing ordering coffee in your room for a month, right? Introducing yourself, asking for directions, that is great. But at some point, you are going to need to step out to actually do it.
So, if you've practiced ordering coffee, I want you to walk into a real cafe or a coffee shop, look at the barista, the person who is taking the order, and order in English. The first time you're going to feel nervous, your heart might race, but that is when you know you are growing because real-world feedback is 100 times more powerful than practicing alone.
You will also notice that when you go and speak out in public, people don't really care about whether you're speaking in perfect English. What they care about is whether you are able to put your message across, right? And when you're speaking in the real world, you will also automatically tend to notice where you went wrong. "Oh, that was too fast. Oh, I could have said that word a little bit clearer." And that is how you make those small tweaks for the next time.
So, let's say that you've been practicing ordering at a cafe, you know, with AI. After you've done that for 30 days, I want you to go to a cafe for one week straight, like for the next seven days, go to a cafe every single day and practice ordering in English. Because the thing is, your grammar is not going to be perfect. Your accent may never fully match like an English speaker's accent, but it does not matter. I had a professor whose English was full of mistakes. Yet, when he spoke, the entire class listened because he owned every single word. His confidence was magnetic.
So when you practice these situations in real life, what you're building is confidence of speaking in English. People don't remember the slip-ups. They just remember your energy, your confidence, and whether you were able to communicate your point clearly. My favorite example of this is this guy on Instagram called Benjamin Jerry Gotham. Such a fun, peppy boy. He makes these little vlogs about his life. He's a delivery boy who's also studying right now. And every single vlog is in English. Is he the perfect English speaker in the world? No. You can tell he doesn't come from an English-speaking background. And he has so much fun doing it that you vibe with him. You don't care about his English. You care about what he is communicating. And that is how real-life communication works.
You can actually also try making reels. A lot of people make reels to document their weight loss journey. You can make reels to document your English speaking journey. And that also helps with confidence because it makes you put yourself out there.
And this brings me to step number five, make it a game. Because let's be honest, most of us in school were taught English through textbooks and grammar worksheets and endless writing exercises. And while that helped us pass exams, it did not really make us confident speakers because school focused on reading and writing, but barely on speaking. So that is where this gap comes from, where you're not able to speak properly in English in adulthood.
So, here is how to fix the problem. First of all, you want to consume English in a way that actually is fun to you. Which means watching YouTube videos or podcasts or movies that you really, really want, but watch them in English, right? Listen to podcasts on topics that you love in English. Read essays or short poems in English. The rule is simple: if you enjoy the input, your output will naturally be better.
The reason that I speak so well in English is because I exclusively, almost exclusively, only consume English media or media that has English speaking. All the shows that I watch are Hollywood shows or, you know, from the UK. All YouTube videos or YouTube creators I watch are from the West. And I'm not saying this like I don't have a West obsession or anything of that sort. I just feel that content there is a lot better, and what I want to learn in life is presented there a lot better. And so I by default end up watching a lot of creators who speak in English. And therefore, because I consume content in English, I continuously, my brain is continuously learning new ways to speak in English. And because I have fun watching that content, it never feels like I am purposely doing this to learn. But it just helps me become a better speaker. Because when you listen to something you actually care about, you pick up the vocabulary, you pick up the sentence structures, you pick up the expressions without forcing yourself. And this eventually improves your fluency and your confidence in the language.
Another thing you can do is use apps like Duolingo because they give you daily challenges. They give you points and streaks, and this just helps you stay consistent with learning a particular language. A lot of people have done this, I know, who have done this with Spanish. I have a friend who went on like a 580-day streak of Duolingo. Every single day, he did that one exercise that Duolingo gave, and right now he can actually speak in conversational Spanish, and that's a lot of fun.
And one more thing that you can do to gamify this process is to just pretend that you are a celebrity and that you have won an award. Imagine that you are Shah Rukh Khan who has won an award and you have to give a speech where you thank your parents and your best friend, and you just use something like this, which could be a remote, a shampoo bottle, whatever, and give that speech in English. The more you do it, the better you become at giving it, and it's also a fun way to boost your confidence. Practicing this way, when you gamify the process, basically builds your ability to think fast and respond confidently in English.
Now, before I let you go, I want to remind you of something. English is just a tool. Speaking in English does not make you smarter. It does not make you cooler or superior. It is just like a pen or your phone. It is a tool that you use to communicate. The only reason that English feels so important is because it is the language that the world agreed upon for global communication, and that's it.
Over the years, I have met so many brilliant people who sometimes fumble in English. In fact, when you go and you travel abroad, when you go to other countries like countries in Europe or countries even in South Asia, people only and only speak in their native language. I have met people from Germany and France, very hardly will you find them speaking in English. In fact, local people there don't know English properly, but it's never considered a taboo in their countries because they give importance to their native language. So, if you feel like you're not able to communicate as well in your native language, start by communicating well there, then move on to English. Language is just a medium of communication. Even if you're not able to speak it perfectly, as long as you're able to put your point across, that is all that matters. And not being able to speak a language does not make you any less intelligent. It just makes you human. You've grown up with a certain thing, and that is what you know.
So the point that I'm trying to make here is to stop attaching your self-worth to your English. Relax, because when you relax, your confidence and fluency become very, very natural. You're able to pick it up very, very easily. You stop overthinking every word, and you start focusing on what really matters, which is communicating your ideas clearly.
Now, on that note, if you need more help with English or if you want to practice your English better, I highly recommend you check out our last English speaking video because I have covered a lot more details in that, and they're very different from what we've spoken about in today's video. That's going to also help you massively. And also check out this playlist if you want to level up in life. And I'm going to see you guys very, very soon in the next one. Bye.