Filed Under: thinking in English

How do I adapt myself to thinking in English?

August 31, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

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

Filed Under: English fluency, English Grammar

Is it possible to improve my English fluency without learning grammar?

August 27, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

Yes, it is possible to improve your English fluency without learning grammar.

In fact, there are circumstances (though there are exceptions to this) where it’s actually quite advisable not to learn grammar.

And this is because English learners tend to focus too much on grammar. You tend to have this over-reliance on grammar rules. Teachers in your school probably taught you English like how you should solve mathematical equations. And if you get the answer wrong, you’re immediately screwed and your grades are going to tank. But this is an absolutely horrible way to teach (and learn) English.

The reality is, native English speakers don’t even speak the way students were taught in school. Instead, we native English speakers store large blocks of English which we call “chunks” in our long-term memory (I talk more about “chunks” in this video). Then, when it’s time to use these blocks of English, we just pull them out of memory and use them.

Now, of course, this isn’t to say that grammar rules aren’t completely useless. They’re not. You just need the proper time and place to learn and study them. But that’s when you’re already fluent in English, and you need to just polish it up a bit more by learning about grammar and whatnot.

So, again, yes, it is possible to improve your English without grammar. And instead of overthinking grammar, what you should do instead is to change the way you learn.  Find out better ways to approach learning English. In fact, you can start learning more about the best methods to learn English with the free one-hour training that I created. You’ll learn the 5 key changes that my best clients made to get fluent in English… which I know will help you too.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: English fluency, English learning, Speaking English

Why conversation apps might not help you be fluent in English?

August 26, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

A lot of people make the huge mistake of thinking that conversation apps will magically make them fluent in English.

But that’s not normally true at all.




See, relying on conversation apps ALONE is probably not enough to make you fluent in English.

And it’s the same with just relying on conversations with your teacher or with somebody on italki. And the reason why you won’t get automatically fluent by using apps or speaking with your English teacher/peer is that you’re in a comfortable setting. You feel relaxed when you’re talking to them. And that comfortable setting gives you a false sense of just how good your English is, when in reality… it’s probably not as good as you think it is.

Instead, what you need to do is start with the hardest things, the difficult conversations. Because if you find yourself in high-pressure situations, everything else becomes easier.

Let’s take this analogy for example:

I used to run marathons. I had years of practice with running. I trained in the nice, flat, paved streets of Tokyo. It was so beautiful and everything was easy! I didn’t have to stumble and fall while training, so that was great. But then I ran a marathon for the first time in West Cork, Ireland.. and it was an absolute shit show. I ran through hills, mountains, flooded sections everywhere, and it was even raining! It was absolutely horrible. But after all of those, did I perform well? Hell no. However, when I trained in that environment (no matter how absolutely horrific it was) every other marathon I ran was easy in comparison. And that was because I already got through the worst one.

And the same can be said with learning English. You’ve got to go through difficult, high-pressure situations so everything else becomes easy. But apart from going through hard situations in English, you’ve also got to find the balance between focus intensive learning and using English in relaxed settings.

In fact, you can learn more about this approach (or what I call the Two Track Method) and other useful ways to learn English efficiently. You can start with the free one-hour training I created, which will tell you more about learning English the best way.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: English learning, Speaking English

How can I avoid sounding monotonous in English?

August 25, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

There are quite a few things you can do, and several exercises that I use with my ESL clients for doing just this.

For example, three of the top ones:

  1. First, learn to chunk your English properly (this is the number one big thing; native speakers don’t speak in words and rules – they speak in chunks and pronounce language in chunks. Until you learn to articulate your English in the same way, you’ll always sound flat and monotonous — if you’re not sure what “chunking” is or how to do it, have a look at the free training I created here).
  2. Learn to vary the speed of your voice for effect (it’s not true native speakers speaker “fast” – we speed up and slow down all the time.
  3. Practise extremes: one of my favourite is reading aloud in an exaggerated, extreme way. You wouldn’t speak like this in an actual conversation, but by exaggerating in your practise, displaying emotion, anger, excitement, drama etc. in your speech will feel more comfortable.

There are more, but that’ll get you started.

Best,
Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: English Improvement, English learning

I found that my English stops improving. What can I do with it?

August 24, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

When you were first learning English, sure you’ll see that you’re improving very fast.

But that’s only because you actually don’t really know anything then. You didn’t even know one English word.

And let’s say you only know a couple of English words as a beginner. And then you learn more words (either during your relaxed time or in your focused intensive learning). That’s already a lot of English! And of course that’s huge!

But see, learning English (as in any language) is exponential.

This means that the difference in the amount of learning you have to do increases more and more the bigger your progress is.

But to a certain extent, the answer to what you can do to improve your English depends on your situation… because everybody’s situation is different.

On its simplest level, if you want to improve your English (as my coaching clients did), you can start with a two-step process. It’s what I like to call the “Two Track Approach” which is:

  1. Focused intensive study (grow your bank of phrases, expressions, chunks, etc.)
  2. Relaxed usage and exposure (i.e., watching English TV programmes, reading English books, etc.)

But again, this depends on what level of English you’re in and what you’re actually aiming to improve on.

If you want to learn more about the Two Track approach (and other useful English-learning methods), you can start with the free training I created.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

Filed Under: English Improvement, English learning

How can I improve my English to an advanced level in a short period of time at home?

August 23, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

I learned Japanese to a very high level (fluent enough that I worked in a Japanese company, in Japanese) “at home”, and it’s also what I teach my clients.

When I say “at home” I guess you mean without classes. But honestly? Classes or no classes is simply a preference.

They’re neither sufficient nor necessary to improve in English, anyway. Or, in my experience very effective. The quality of ESL schools in most countries is fairly dubious at best…

So-called English teachers who’ve never learned a second language themselves, who still think “grammar and words” is the best way to teach, who have no clue about any of the developments in second-language research and who are reliant on textbooks (whether they’re appropriate to the student or not) so he (or she) doesn’t have to put any real effort into lesson planning…. yeah, you get the idea.

Anyway… I digress.

To improve in English two things have to happen:

  1. You’ve got to put time into learning and growing your English (study).
  2. And you’ve got to do stuff with that English (preferably real things, in the real world – none of this “speaking to practise” rubbish, which is just kinda pointless).
    If you do those two things every day, you’ll improve.

Find some good learning materials that match what you want to do in English (so if you want to speak well in conversation, find materials that give you natural, accurate samples of dialogues and conversations) and spend time every single day studying them. Then take the English you’ve used and use it in the real world (again, use… none of this “speaking to practise” bullshit).

Improving is as simple as that.

But BOTH steps are 100% necessary.

And of course, make sure you’re using high-quality materials to learn from. Textbooks and notoriously crap, and you should avoid anything that’s basically just “grammar and words” teaching. Ultimately, if you’re learning the wrong thing it’s all a waste of time anyway.

Also, if you have mindset/ confidence issues, you’ll also need to sort those out (you can use the best method in the world and the most amazing learning materials… but if you don’t do anything with it because you don’t have the confidence or think you can’t, well, it’s all a waste of time).

If you want more detail on what method you should use, what materials are best as well as the mindset side of things, I created a free training which shows you the 5 key changes you’ll need to make to see faster progress — you can access it by going here.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook