Share Your Humiliating English Conversation Experiences & Get Advice!

Hi Nandkishor,

And thanks a lot for asking the question!

Actually we can separate two types of English fluency improvement:

1. Improving English for specific occasions – such as interviews and meetings.

2. Overall fluency improvement.

While the latter will take a longer period of time to accomplish, you can actually prepare for specific events much faster than you think it’s possible.

You simply have to:

* Write a possible interview scenario including questions you may get asked as well as your answers;

* Do plenty of spoken self-practice whereby you act both as the interviewer and yourself;

* Over a few days you’ll become very comfortable talking about your work experience, qualifications and other kind of things discussed during job interviews simply because you’ll have memorized a lot of relevant phrases etc.

Here’s a good article in relation to job interview preparation you should definitely read: http://englishharmony.com/job-seeking/

As for the overall fluency improvement – well, there are no magic bullets there!

LOADS of spoken English practice will do the trick and you can do it all by yourself by doing plenty of speaking about various subjects OR using products such as the English Harmony System: http://englishharmony.com/improve-spoken-english.php where the speech exercising is fully automated and made much easier.

Bottom line: SPEAKING a lot is the key, learning English phrases and expressions as opposed to grammar studies is a MUST, and then you can realistically expect a great improvement to your spoken fluency within a few months!

Regards,

Robby

Hi Mohammad and thanks for your questions!

So, first things first – pronunciation.

You see – the thing is that no matter how much you practice you’ll still say things like Leks instead of Let’s so it’s really no big deal – it still happens to me sometimes! 😉

If you’re really serious about your pronunciation improvement however and you think you really need to be working on it, you have to do very regular practice. I mean – not just some but ALL THE TIME.

You may want to check out my other blog http://accentadventure.com/ where I’m touching upon pronunciation improvement related matters.

Now, speaking of your second question – spoken English practice is a MUST.

Nothing else is going to do the trick.

If you can’t think in English, then obviously you need to bring about the word flow which is only really possible when you speak, and you have to make all possible mistakes and say things in all possible stupid ways before you get them right – but the bottom line is – you have to DO it.

Gradually over time you’ll improve, and provided you’ll also learn plenty of idioms and phrases and use them in your practice sessions – you should do just fine in a year or so!

Regards,

Robby

Thanks for the comment David – and tell us please if you’ve had any embarrassing moments when speaking in Czech with locals – I mean, have you ever gotten stuck in a middle of a conversation and felt really embarrassed about the whole situation?

Hi Juhapekka,

Here’s the video I recorded as a response to your previous comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0wb1njP7mM

I hope you’ll enjoy it! 😉

Regards,

Robby

It seems as if it’s surprisingly common getting stuck with some simple question or sentence and I have had similar experience in this year, too: Some foreigner in the street asked me to tell what time is it and the weird thing was that I immediately remembered how to say it in German language and I started to say accidentally something like that “Es ist…is’t…it’s fünf…it’s fifteen…past five” and the result was hesitating answer. I have studied German but this was weird because my German is much, much weaker than my English and I have never spoken German in real life. Of course, how frequently someone experiences that kind of problems with simple sentences depends on many factors like how much you have speaking or conversation experience or how deeply some phrases or other naturally occurring English speech patterns have imprinted into your mind or how confident you are when you are speaking English or when you have last spoken English etc.
I’m also curious to see what kind of video or article you, Robby, are going to make in the answer of my previous comment.

Thanks for the comment Ruzanna, and I’m sure you’ll improve your spoken English a great deal if you keep doing the lessons and also do plenty of spoken English practice aside from that!

Also, please understand that making mistakes is totally fine – it’s something none of use can avoid so if you’re trying to sound perfect at all costs, it may actually backfire on you and make your speech even more erroneous! Read more on it here: http://englishharmony.com/reverse-psychology/

Regards,

Robby

Hi Robby,

My goal is to master English really well that enable me
to express what I want to say. You know, sometimes I want to say more difficult
things like my opinion about something or my feeling towards something or
somebody and usually I get stuck and nervous. I am afraid even to start because I can’t
choose the right words to say and get myself in stupid situation. In case that
I should call or speak with someone here in Canada, I need to prepare in
advance in my thoughts. So, it is really frustrate me and I WANT to speak
fluently without mistakes. I am hard-worker and never give up. Recently, I have
started to study your Speech Master program and hop that it will help me to
speak with confidence and without hesitation.

Thank you for your valuable job that help a lot of people
to communicate and express their ideas, opinion and feeling free and easy.

Ruzanna

Hi Sunny,

The real problem here is you being UNCOMFORTABLE and it’s got nothing to do with your conversational English falling short of your expected standards!

So here are a couple of things you just have to convince yourself of:

#1: Your spoken English is ALWAYS going to be different from your writing simply because that’s the nature of things. When you write, you’ve got an awful lot more time to consider how and what you’re going to write; when you speak you just say the first thing that comes to you and quite naturally all that content is going to be of a lesser quality, so to speak. But the thing you have to tell yourself is that it’s totally FINE!!!

#2: Discomfort of your English standards arises only because you compare your own English with someone else’s. DON’T DO IT. There’s nothing wrong with speaking in simple, short sentences, and there’s nothing wrong with being succinct and to-the-point when talking to people.

Lastly, allow me to remind you that your English is going to improve throughout the rest of your life for as long as you keep practicing, but for the time being just try and force yourself to be OK with your current state of English.

I know it’s not that easy, but that’s the ONLY way out – just be OK with the way you speak while at the same time keeping up your practice and improving your English on a constant, ongoing basis.

Regards,

Robby

Hi Mikhail,

I think in your position (and it actually applies to any English learner) you have to lower your expectations and embrace the concept of simplicity!

It’s way too often that foreigners try to maintain high English standards and set their expectations too high and in the case of failure to understand or say a certain thing they feel as underachievers.

It’s way more productive to learn very simple phrases and conversational sentences and use them in your conversations (and try to suppress the inner voice within you trying to tell you that your English is too simple and childish) than trying to speak in a way you IMAGINE you SHOULD speak but being actually unable to maintain that standard.

Basically don’t FORCE yourself to say something you think you SHOULD say or understand – instead focus on things you can understand and can say.

It may seem like an insignificant change in attitude, but it will really change everything for you if you truly embrace the concept of simplicity.

I hope it helps a bit,

Regards,

Robby

At first, I thought that I have nothing to share because I don’t have much English conversation experience (I live in Finland where isn’t always much opportunities to speak English and I’m not that kind of person who take every opportunity to speak English because I have been very unsure about my English and I’m not good speaker even in my native language) but then I remembered a case which bothered me much. That day became as clear as yesterday to me when I remembered it. It happened about few months ago and it was degrading experience that reduced my self-confidence when it happened. I start my story from the beginning: I had met few international
students and I had conversation with them in English because they weren’t able to speak my native language. I understood their every word very well and when they asked me questions I was able to respond. We had good conversation and I hadn’t much troubles to discuss with them and finally the conversation experience was pleasant to me. I was very pleased that I had dealt with the conversation so easily but then my troubles began. Later in the same day I met one student from South Africa and he spoke very good English (maybe English was his native language because I have understood that English is one of the official languages in South Africa and he spoke
English really well). In the beginning of the conversation I noticed that I have troubles to understand him even though his words were familiar to me. I understood something but as much I didn’t understand some other things he said to me. However, I perhaps understood some main ideas he was talking about but then he asked me one question and I didn’t understand the question at all (in fact, I couldn’t be able to distinguish any word in his question). I asked him to repeat the question and when he repeated it, I didn’t understand it. Then I asked him to speak slower and when he repeated his question again, the result was the same: even then, I didn’t understand it any better. Then I asked him to explain his question but he spoke too fast and I didn’t understand him at all. I really didn’t understand anything what he is explaining. I asked him repeat again more carefully and slower but he began to speak faster and I didn’t understand anything what he is saying. I couldn’t understand him and finally he said that he is busy and he has to leave. The conversation was interesting but it was also awkward because he repeated the same thing
five or six times for me and I didn’t understand anything and also in the same time my confidence in English conversations dropped dramatically and suddenly I lost my ability to speak English properly. That’s weird because ability to understand and ability to speak are two different things but anyway my momentary inability to understand the South African reduced my confidence so much that I felt I was unable to speak English anymore. I really felt that I was the worst English conversationalist in the world which is, of course, irrational because I had spoken English properly before in the same day.

In nutshell my problem is how can you train your ear so that you can be sure you understand always native English speakers or foreign English speakers. My inability to understand the South African student was surprising and shocking for me because I usually understand spoken English perhaps 90 or 95 percently and Robby’s videos
are easy to understand. Many years ago I was very poor English listener (perhaps I understood under 25 percent) but I have practiced my comprehension skills so much that I understand English much better than ever before.

I have analysed why did this happen and I have concluded that I have still troubles to understand fast natural English which is linked and reduced and also unstressed quiet sounds can be very difficult to distinguish. That’s why, in order to improve my confidence in English conversations I have to improve my ability to understand fast natural spoken English and mimic those natural English sounds but advice in detail would be still very useful. And I’d want to ask also what is the best way to deal with situations when you don’t understand something at all (for example, my conversation with African student)? And secondly how can you prevent “English blackouts” when you suddenly lose your ability to speak at all.

By the way, I listened also video in your article “Do You Get Intimidated by Eloquent English Speakers? You Shouldn’t!” http://englishharmony.com/intimidation/. The
Chinese speaker in this video was quite easy to understand to me and I was able to distinguish every word in his speech but you were right that it was difficult to understand what was his main message he was going to say for his audience and I should watch the video again few times if I wanted to understand his main message. The Chinese speaker was eloquent and his speech was sophisticated but my South African wasn’t eloquent or sophisticated: he spoke much faster than the Chinese speaker in the video and he used some kind of slang expressions which was very difficult to distinguish or understand. He spoke too fast even if I asked him to slow down his speech. So, what is the best way to deal with these kind of situations? Thanks, Robby for your efforts to help English learners and improvers. I know that your site is
mostly for English improvers but it’s useful also for learners. I think I’m both: I’m both English learner and improver.

Thanks Sachin for sharing your story with us, and I can only imagine how you felt during the interview when asked all those questions you didn’t expect at all!

You see – the funny thing is that when we can’t answer an unexpected question, our foreign background is immediately blamed (the person stutters and hesitates ->he/she is a foreigner -> he/she mustn’t be able to express themselves in English properly) yet when native English speakers find themselves in similar situations no-one would even dare to question their English skills because they’re born English speakers!

It’s unfair, but it’s a fact, and here’s how to make it easier for yourself to answer unexpected questions: http://englishharmony.com/planning/

I know it’s not that easy in real life, but believe me – a lot of these situations could be managed much easier if we perceived the issue for what it is (not knowing enough about the matter asked and then simply admitting it) instead of trying to say something about something we haven’t got a clue about.

Thanks Sachin!

Robby

Hi Komal,

It may sound counter-productive, but in order to improve your conversational grammar you need to… STOP focusing on grammar so much!!!

All those years ago I used to dedicate pretty much the entire English study time to learning grammar rules and memorizing individual vocabulary words both of which are really damaging to one’s fluency.

Why?

Please read more here:

http://englishharmony.com/speak-fluently-no-grammar/

Regards,

Robby

Hmmm, not 1, I have many such experiences, being a teacher of international school, they have lots of expectations from me, I have good degrees, b.ed. mba, I was the brightest student in my class, I got this job on my degrees, but after working there, I realises that degrees isn’t enough now, speaking good engligh, with good phrases, proper grammer z must, I had many bad experiences at school, I was confident enough for the 1st 2 days, but everyone started ignoring me. No one talked to me, I felt little hesitant and Started stuttering, not even with my colleagues and my student’s parent as well… I want to improve my English, want to speak in proper tense, want to speekup during meetings, plz help… sorry it went bit long.. ..