Filed Under: Communication Skills, English Conversation, Speaking English

How can I know if what I say is offensive or not?

July 19, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

Potentially, anything can be offensive or rude.

At the same time, even the rudest of things that you say can be perfectly acceptable and not rude… if the context is right.




A good example of this is a question one of my coaching clients asked recently in a call:

“Is it rude to sigh in a meeting?”

She said someone sighed at something halfway through, and she thought it was rude and improper. And well, yes, it is rude to sigh in a meeting, but it depends on how it’s done. If you sound irritated when you do it because of something someone said… that’s rude. But if it’s lighthearted (for example you struggled to explain something, now you’re done and you’re like, “phew!”), then that’s not rude.

Context is everything.

Finding something offensive is more to do with a sensitivity to culture and social dynamics.

There’s just no easy way to manoeuvre around it other than really learning to understand whatever it is you’re saying.

For example, in very casual British culture, it’s common to swear and call each other the most horrifically disgusting names. But it’s a part of Britain’s social bonding culture; totally in good humour.

Finding something offensive also depends on how you say things in different ways. If it’s confrontational or aggressive, it may sound offensive. Again, context is important.

However, there would be instances where anything that you say can always be rude to somebody. It’s not necessarily that you’re rude, but some will just see you as is.

I have a fantastic example of this:

Some time ago, I sent an email about the topic of the meaning of life. I talked about the concept of cosmic meaning i.e., is there a God, a creator of the world, that kind of stuff. And one person obviously did not like that email. She sent me a reply saying “oh well in that case, you should just have a pint of Guinness, sit down, and die because life is meaningless.” So I thought I’d reply to them by saying “I don’t believe there has to be a point to life for us to be able to live a meaningful life”. But I really shouldn’t have replied at all because she sent back a reply with the most horrendous insults. The point is, for me, it was an interesting discussion, but to that person, it was incredibly offensive.

So, yes, anything can be offensive. Some things are obviously going to be offensive if you use words out of context and in the wrong way. There’s really no easy way to learn what is offensive and what is not aside from understanding people, psychology, and social values in different cultures.

Hope this helps.

I help high-level English as second-language speakers live freer in their work and day to day life without English becoming a barrier. If that’s you, you might like to sign up for my daily English tips to speak better English.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: Improve in English, Listening, Reading, Speaking, Writing

Which is better for improving my English, reading, writing, listening, or speaking?

July 16, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

Reading, writing, listening, and speaking are (in a way) connected with each other.

But if you’re asking which skill is better than the other… then you’re just asking the wrong questions.




What you should think of instead, is your goal in learning English.

Think of what you’re trying to achieve.

Because if you’re only thinking of things such as, “I need to improve my English so I should read”, then you’re really just forming bad habits which are completely counterproductive.

So rather than forming bad habits, create good habits.

Try thinking along the lines of, “Here’s a book that I want to read, it just so happens that it’s in English”. Or “Here’s a radio show or audiobook in English that I really want to listen to.” And if you do that consistently, you’ll find yourself forming the right habits over time.

And again, all these skills are connected to each other. But varying the way you use English is better than just doing any one thing.

When you’re in your focused study time and you come across the expression “push the boat out”. After some time, you watch a show on TV, and someone says, “Oh, I’m going to push the boat out today, this is going to be the best party of my life!”. And essentially, that’s the same thing… just from a different type of usage.

Now, all of that exposure, whether it’s from reading, speaking, listening is all just as good as any other. In fact, it’s even better for your memory to hear and see the same thing over and over again, in varying ways. That will actually create the strongest kind of memory for whatever it is you’re trying to learn.

So, in that sense, all your skills are kind of interconnected because they help each other so you can learn more. And the best way to learn English is still focused intensive learning and usage in relaxed settings.

If you want to improve your English more, the best place to start would be the free training I created. You’ll learn the 5 key changes my best clients make to improve their English as higher-level English learners.

Here’s the link if this interests you.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: English confidence, Presentation, Public Speaking, Speaking English

How can I become more confident when I present ideas in English?

July 15, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

Presenting ideas in English can be intimidating.

This is why you feel less confident about presenting your ideas in English in front of people.




It happens to the best of us, hell even me.

But what you need to do, first and foremost, is to focus on what you do well rather than what you don’t do well. And you know, this is similar to the conversations I’ve had with my coaching clients. They tell me that they feel devastated because they completely messed up their 3-hour presentation in English.

And when I ask them “how many things did you mess up within those three hours?” and they reply with: “well, just one”… and of course you’re going to feel like you messed it up if you’re only going to focus on that one mistake!

Again, it’s human nature to focus on that tiny percentage that we can’t do. But it’s important to recognise the things that you’re doing well. Because chances are, 98% of what you’re doing is already spectacularly good. It’s just that 2% that’s still not quite as good yet.

Simultaneously, you also want to learn from those things that you couldn’t do.

A good method to learn how to deal with this is something called “retrodictive learning”. It’s where you interpret your past actions and then you figure out an alternate solution to it. And it can be as simple as writing it down and then spotting things you could have said instead.

But next time you present in English, perhaps you can try this:

When you feel like you forgot a word or two and you’re not confident in saying it… DO IT ANYWAY.

You might even surprise yourself by explaining it better than you expected. Or not.

But, the point is, treat it as a learning experience either way.

So that’s what I would suggest you do, alongside being kind to yourself. Give yourself the credit you deserve and notice the good things. Don’t just focus on the bad things.

If you need some help in doing this, you can start with the one-hour free training that I created. You’ll learn the 5 key changes my best clients make to improve their English as higher-level English learners. You can go to this link if this interests you.

Hope this helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: English confidence, English learning

Why do I lose confidence the better I get at English?

July 14, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

If you feel like you’re losing confidence the better you get at English, it’s actually perfectly normal.




It’s human nature.

We’re designed to find the negative in anything and not notice the positive.

You may have heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger curve. This is a graph that shows confidence on one axis and knowledge on the other:

So what happens is this: when you’re learning any kind of skill, you start high in the confidence axis, thinking you know it all. But as you gain more knowledge about that thing, your line at the top suddenly curves down. You start to lose confidence because you start to realise that you actually don’t know anything at all.

The more you learn, the less you know. It’s cliché, but it’s true.

A good example of this is when I was first teaching in secondary school in Japan, I actually said “if you just let me do everything I wanted to do, I can have these kids fluent in a year!”.

Except that’s impossible.

The reality was, I had no idea what I was doing.

So I decided to study second language acquisition and applied linguistics. It made me realise just how unbelievably wrong I was. My confidence plummeted. I started questioning myself like “how can these people let me teach these kids in class?”.

But then I started to gain more and more knowledge about what I was teaching and my confidence went back up again.

And it’s true of anything you’re trying to learn, including, of course, English.

So understand the fact that when you feel like you’re losing confidence when speaking English — it’s actually a positive thing. Because it means you’re progressing through the Dunning-Kruger curve, and your confidence will start to go back up.

If need some help improving in English faster, I can help.

The best place to start would be the free training I created. You’ll learn the 5 key changes my best clients make to improve their English as higher-level English learners.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: Learning English

What should I know before studying English more?

July 13, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

First, you have to be clear about what your goal is.

Because if you’re not clear about what your goal is, you’re just going to be all over the place and learning in an unstructured, messy kind of way, not really knowing what you’re doing.

I know this all too well because I was just as messy and unstructured when I was trying to learn Japanese. I eventually fixed that mess but only because I made my goals clear.




So before you start learning English any more, ask yourself these questions:

  1. What do I want to do?
  2. What countries do I want to go to and what do I want to see there?
  3. What experiences do I want to have?

You might wonder “why does this even matter?” but the point is, if you’re not clear about what exactly you want to do with your English, then you’ll never be able to get the rest right because you won’t know what to learn.

Be clear about your direction and focus on your goal. That’s my advice.

Hope that helps.

I help high-level English as second-language speakers live freer in their work and day to day life without English becoming a barrier. If that’s you, you might like to sign up for my daily English tips to speak better English.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: Improving in English, Listening

Why is just listening to podcasts ineffective for improving in English?

July 12, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

If you’re trying to improve your level and you’re only listening to podcasts, of course, it’s not going to do much to improve your English at all.

And the reason why is because listening to podcasts is just passive exposure. And passive exposure is not going to improve your English much, especially if your English is already at a higher level.

Here’s an extract:




What you need to do is:

  1. Put intensive study into your English every day
  2. and in addition, use English extensively (i.e. passive exposure).

You see, when you study, you’re actually opening the door for passive exposure (i.e., podcasts in this case) to let it do its job. Once you’ve studied something, passive exposure can make it fluent.

But ONLY passive exposure will not help you grow your English.

It’s extremely ineffective, especially if your English is already at a higher level.

Let’s put it this way:

Think of passive exposure as droplets of water. If you put droplets of water in a tiny puddle, it gets bigger quickly. So you learn more if you don’t have much knowledge of English yet. But if you put droplets of water into the ocean, it’s not going to add anything much since the ocean is already big. This goes the same as when you already have a lot of knowledge of English. The better you get, the less any word or chunk has an impact on your English because your knowledge of English is just bigger.

For most people, the fastest way to improve in English is this balance of study and exposure, or what I call the “Two Track Approach”.

If you want to learn more about this method and how to do it, go here and study the free training.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook