Let’s assume that you’re a non-native English speaker.

If you’re forcing yourself to adapt to thinking in English… then you have it all wrong.

In fact, I don’t recommend you to practise/adapt yourself to thinking in English at all.

That’s just the wrong way to actually learn English.

What you should do instead is to just speak English. Just do it. Don’t think about it and just speak English.

Because if you keep trying to think in English, you’re just trying to force something to happen… and that’s just not the best way to learn English. What will happen is your brain will just resist, and you’ll likely create more problems for yourself (i.e., get more bad habits). But when you train yourself in the right kind of way, thinking in English just happens as a by-product. (You can read more about this in my book, “Think English, Speak English”.)

But what you can do is nudge your brain towards thinking in English by encouraging it to do the things that it wants to do anyway… just in English.

Here’s a good example of this:

You’re at a grocery store thinking of stuff to buy. So, you pick up some cooking items thinking about what to cook tonight. Instead of thinking of the ingredients, recipe, or cooking methods you’ll do in your native language… do it in English. Because this way, you’re not exactly forcing your brain to think in English, you’re just giving it a little nudge to do what you would do anyway in your first language.

So, again, don’t force yourself to think in English. You’re not going to learn English if you’re forcing your brain to do it. Instead, what you need to do is adapt to a good English-learning method. In fact, you can start with the one-hour free training that I created here.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook