How To Always Maintain Fluent English

First of all (and probably most importantly!) – always have a successful mindset!

This is absolutely crucial if you want to succeed with achieving English fluency. When you think positive and don’t allow little mistakes and failures during your speech irritate and annoy you, you’re already one step closer to improving your spoken English!

When you worry you self-program yourself in a subconscious level that you speak poorly and that creates a vicious circle that is very hard to quit. It is difficult to maintain a positive outlook on something that is an issue for you, there’s no doubt about that.

However, you must try. Let it go. Don’t reproach yourself and don’t start frantically thinking – what’s wrong, what’s wrong with me?

The first thing you have to program in your mind instead is – I KNOW that I CAN speak very well, and I don’t allow anyone and anything make me feel embarrassed when I speak English!

Once you’ve programmed yourself that way you have done some 30% of the job!

The next thing you have to do to make your English speech more natural and easy - forget about words you have to force yourself to look up in your virtual vocabulary.

Most of them will be some difficult words you’ve learnt by memorizing. You can learn hundreds of words by heart but when it comes to a real life chat – we can’t just speak those words out because they haven’t been learnt as a part of a live language. In fact the language doesn’t consist of words – it consists of word combinations!

When a natural English speaker says: “How could you do that to me?” he doesn’t think about the separate words making up the sentence and how to stick them together. The whole sentence comes into parts – “how could you”, and “do that to me”. These things have been heard in the very childhood when mom told her child “How could you?” and the child’s mind memorizes the whole thing as one – “howcouldyou”.

When we, non-native English speakers speak English, we tend more to think about the things before we speak them out, we organize them into our mind, unwillingly translate from our native language (here I’m talking about us who haven’t learn the language the natural way and experience lack of English fluency!). This is why it is very important to learn new words as part of a live conversation.

I’m not telling here that all the vocabulary you have learnt by self-studies is useless, of course, it isn’t. Your mind is going to put everything in its places and the more time you spend in an English environment, the better the words will settle in your consciousness and will be associated with an abstract meaning rather than with a word from your own language.

What I’m telling is that while you experience the English fluency problem stick with simpler words which don’t require much of your will to speak out and don’t give a damn about how simply it sounds and what others might think about you.

So – when speaking English, feel completely free to use “go up” instead of “increase” and “drop” instead of “reduced”. By the way, it sometimes is quite surprising how simply some things can be said by a natural English speaker!

At work on many occasions the e-mails sent by my Irish boss sound as if written by a non-national worker and vice versa. Remember it and never feel embarrassed when choosing a simple way to explain something.

The two things mentioned above are very important if you really want to improve your English fluency!

Robby

P.S. Are you ready to get on the fast track to spoken English fluency? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!

What’s Wrong With Traditional English Studies?

We all started with English differently. Others started with self studying because of pure interest, like me. For some it was a necessity after moving to another country. However, as my website is  dedicated to people having difficulties with maintaining a consistent level of spoken English, it is most likely that your journey into the world of English started with written language.

And actually this is where the biggest problems are hidden!

When we learned the language by writing words and memorizing them, we needed to write down the meaning in our native tongue. And this means having to translate the word from our native language to English, which is quite a natural thing, isn’t it? It is indeed. Only if it wasn’t stressed too much!

Learning English at school means learning written English.

Let’s be honest – how much of all the time spent in the English class we were taught to speak the language? I’m afraid – not too much. Teachers have to devote attention to all the students, have to explain grammar rules, new words and have to tell what new beautiful learning methods have come out recently…and as a result our English language develops as almost pure written language – and we can write well, don’t we?

We form nice, correct sentences and we have all the time in the world to think of what words to use, in what order and what grammar rules apply in the particular case. And when it comes to the speaking part in the exam, or class practice we speak slowly and create nice English sentences in our head! OK, not all of the students are the same but I’m addressing us folks, the ones that share this issue of wave-like occurring lack of English speaking skills.

So – in other words – no one teaches us to really SPEAK English!

No one even mentions about how the very language is formed in our brain – native English speakers use blocks of words as they speak rather than linking seperate words together!

Now try to analyze the processes in your head when you speak English.

If your speech is unhindered at this moment and you can speak fluently – everything is fine. The words just flow out of your mouth just as the thoughts appear in you mind and you even don’t notice the very existence of thoughts. You just speak. Wonderful! If we always could perform like this…

But now let’s see what’s happening in our head when the English speech issue takes place.

You try to speak but the words get mixed up, the grammar is a mess, and the thoughts don’t flow naturally.

Well – this is your mind gone into the translation mode! Sometimes you have some odd English words trying to push themselves into the wrong places, sometimes it’s your own language – you speak English, but some pieces of your native tongue’s thoughts just wouldn’t leave you.

In the worst case scenario your mind switches to a mode of preparing the speech even before you speak it out! This one is really bad because it’s the hardest to fight with. Once I had this kind of an issue and couldn’t get rid of it for days – no matter how I tried to speak I had the second mind in my head working on its own and making the sentences up a moment before I spoke the very words.

It feels as if you have two minds indeed. Imagine how the head feels like to work at a double of its capacity!

Some of these symptoms have much in common; some are unique – like preparing the speech before the actual conversation. Anyway, the actual cause is the same – this is all because we’ve been taught to think in our language and even now when you can speak fluent English the reflex just wouldn’t give up!

To put is simply – the English language we use is mostly acquired by studies in the classroom, or by writing, memorizing, reading…in other words – doing everything but learning the language the natural way – like children do, for example.

When I moved to an English speaking country my daughters were four. They started attending the school and soon enough they had picked up the basics of the colloquial English. Did they keep a dictionary, or jotted down grammar rules to memorize? No – all they did was – they chatted with the teacher and the classmates and the English language settled itself in their brain as a separate language – not as a translation version of their native language!

I know this feeling very well – I speak another foreign language – Russian. I learnt it while being a little child and it has settled in my brain naturally. And the most funny thing – although my Russian vocabulary is actually smaller than the English one, I never experience a similar issue while speaking Russian. Even despite the fact that I haven’t actively spoken in this language for years.

Even when I struggle for a word there are never some stupid thoughts nor words in Russian messing in my head – and as a result – I don’t experience this issue.

But don’t despair – we’ll sort everything out and take the control of the language – just keep on reading and soon you’ll see what this is all about!

Another really worrying indication of wrong English studies manifests itself the following way. Quite often I would imagine the word as it is written at the moment of speech. And why? I guess it’s because I used to keep a dictionary and repeat the words every now and then and memorize them as they stand in it.

And what happens now is – instead of associating the word with abstract thought my mind just looks it up from my dictionary notebook. In other words – you can’t just speak out that word straight away; you have to spend a split moment to translate its meaning from your native language.

This is less likely going to happen when the vocabulary is built not memorizing separate words but in real conversations – the very abstract meaning settles in your brain and there’s no need for your mind to look for something in the entries of your virtual vocabulary.

But this all is especially visible at school English lessons – we all tend to think that writing down words and mechanically memorizing them will make our language better and more fluent.

So wrong, it is all so wrong!

A language consists of thoughts, of phrases. Learning words and sticking them together is not going to make your English fluent! It’s all about the translation – if you try to use separate words as links to build the chain – sentence – you will use your native tongue in your mind. But you’ve got to think the language to speak it!

OK – now we’re grown ups, we can speak very well and all the previously mentioned stuff shouldn’t present any problems…Still sometimes it does!

So, how to fight this reflex and move permanently into a state of confident English? Is this issue purely based on anxiety and can you by calming down resolve it? My experience has taught me quite a different thing. I would sometimes experience incredible drops in the ability to communicate without the slightest touch of worrying or anxiety whatsoever!

Well, I think you now got the main point – we have to eradicate the subconscious habit of translating from our native tongue into English!

Robby

P.S. Are you ready to get on the fast track to spoken English fluency? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!

How English Fluency Issue Manifests Itself

You suddenly can’t pronounce the words normally – although you know how a particular word sounds, it seemingly comes out of your mouth and distorts itself – letters get mixed, endings change and you have an impression that it’s another person speaking – not you!
You can’t find the right words as you speak – you know what you want to say and normally you even don’t have to force yourself to consciously think about the words as such. However, when this English fluency issue is present, you seem to have lost it all and as you keep on speaking you can lose the whole concept of what you wanted to say – all because you concentrate on finding the right words!
You can’t maintain the clearness of thoughts – you are struggling to stick the words together but as a result the sentences coming out of your mouth are often hard to understand and lack the logical structure;
No matter how good your English grammar is, sometimes you get everything wrong – tenses mixed up, incorrect forms of the verbs replacing the ones you needed to use and so on
You have a notion as if hundreds and hundreds of English words are floating in your mind and it becomes nearly impossible to pick the right ones and form a proper speech. On the contrary, when your English speech is normal you just speak without having anything else in your mind!
To your utter dismay you can clearly notice that you think in your mother’s tongue and the resulting speech is a translation – not a normal speech!
Even if you don’t think in your native tongue you experience an odd thing – as you speak, wrong words replace the right ones – even if they don’t sound similarly and there’s no other obvious connection between them!
And, of course, the most devastating thing of all – your confidence is just literally draining away when you feel these symptoms take place! You won’t experience all the things simultaneously, that’s for sure. Most likely it’s going to be the first four things from the list and then one of the remaining four.

I guess by now you have certainly recalled nearly all the symptoms having manifested themselves at some stage.
This whole English fluency issue seems to be something like a mental syndrome and probably only a psychotherapist could help with it…

Once I had such a thought as well, yes, but since I dealt with this speech problem myself – I can assure you that you also do it without attending a doctor!

But now let’s talk about what’s happening behind the scenes when this issue occurs and let’s analyze the very roots of these sudden changes in ability to speak English normally.

Robby

P.S. Are you ready to get on the fast track to spoken English fluency? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!

English Fluency Problem

Let’s first talk about this English fluency problem so that you can analyze it a little bit and understand its nature.

Let’s say, you wake up in the morning and while doing something you just have an odd thought in English in your mind. And…you realize that you just can’t express yourself in English language as you’d normally do!

You try to say something in English to yourself and you feel that you can’t stick the thoughts together – your mind is full of different words and images floating and messing…

Another example. You go to work and greet the first person you meet. “How are you! I’m fine, what was the weekend like?” – And then you suddenly feel that you have to force yourself to get even these simple things right! And when you start chatting to your workmate at your desk, you feel that you can’t speak normally as you could before, although only yesterday you could speak fluently as a native speaker!

The usual mistakes you make when experiencing the speech problem are the following:

Not being able to find the right words
Mispronouncing words
Not being able to say the thought clearly!

You start a sentence, and then the very thread of the thought vanishes, and something like a blackout takes place in your head.

And then you get really anxious and nervous and it affects your whole day – your mood drops below zero, the self-esteem is gone, the confidence… well, it’s a disaster! I don’t exaggerate, I know the feeling all too well and I guess, so do you.

The most baffling thing in this all is that no matter how often you speak, no matter how long you’ve been living among English speaking folks, the things don’t change! It keeps on repeating constantly and with no obvious reason at all!

I remember myself being a job-seeker at one stage and I attended many job interviews. One day I could speak perfectly creating a really good impression about myself. The next day going to a different place I’d experience the issue described above – and, of course, I’d feel really low because the interviewer most likely thought – well, this guy can’t get the English right in the first place, what job is he dreaming about then?

And I know you have gone through a number of really embarrassing situations similar to previously described and you’d be more than happy to deal with the issue once and for all, wouldn’t you?

So first let’s list all the characteristics of this English fluency issue so that we can clearly see what we are trying to get resolved here!

Robby

P.S. Are you ready to get on the fast track to spoken English fluency? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!

The Harsh Reality About Improving Spoken English

Dear English speaker!

I want to tell you about a really annoying English speech problem that was troubling me for years! Now I’ve successfully overcome it but until just a couple of years ago I felt devastated when I had to speak English at certain times.

Does this sound familiar to you – you KNOW that you can speak English normally but when you have to do it – you just CAN’T?

Yes, the problem we’re talking about here is the sudden inability to speak English properly that prevents you from fully enjoying the social life, move up the carrier ladder and most importantly – it damages your self-confidence.

And the funniest thing about this issue is – it happens only SOMETIMES!

The previous day you had a chat with your boss and you could speak just about everything – but today you just can’t tell the simplest thing to your English speaking work-mate without hesitating, forgetting words and making stupid grammar mistakes!

At the very beginning – when I became fully aware of this strange inability to speak English fluently only on some occasions – I thought I had to focus on improving spoken English.

Well – I guess you’re quite familiar with what they say you have to do to improve spoken English and English fluency in general. Read a lot, study grammar a lot and practice English in real life as much as possible. Do you think I didn’t do all this and even more?

As I happen to live in an English speaking country – namely, Ireland, English was all around me! At work, on the street, in shops – everywhere! But apart from the majority of foreigners who spent little time on improving their English speaking skills I literally immersed myself in English studies!

I was constantly reading English fiction, newspapers, magazines, I learnt hundreds upon hundreds of new English words – my hand-written vocabulary was always with me! All these things improved my general English fluency a great deal, that’s true.

However, there would always be days when I just couldn’t speak normally! Blushing, confusion – I just felt like a total looser!

Ultimately I came to understand that fluent spoken English has little to do with how hard you study. Of course – you need to have a solid vocabulary not to mention grammar and practicing.

But I think you got the point – no matter how fluent my English was, I’d still experience this stupid issue – inability to speak normal English on certain days…

Are you now curious enough to find out HOW exactly I overcame this mind-boggling problem and started enjoying life in an English speaking society at its full?

Then read on – I’ll give you plenty of advice!

Robby

P.S. Are you ready to get on the fast track to spoken English fluency? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!