By Robby
If you are new here please read this first.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Here’s how to improve your English listening skills when listening to my video: put the headphones on, playback the video and write it all down while listening to it!
Video Transcript Below:
Hi guys! Hello boys and girls and hello my dear fellow foreign English speakers! It’s Robby here from EnglishHarmony.com obviously. And welcome – I was going to say velcome. This is one of those typical mistakes that some of us make. Instead of welcome we would say velcome. Basically instead of the “wa” sound we’d be saying “w” for some reason or another, you know.
And it does happen to me on the rare occasion and now you actually witnessed that occasion but I’m not going to delete it out from the video. I’m just going to leave there on record just to prove you guys that making mistakes is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a – I would even say an integral part of your development as a foreign English speaker, you know. Because getting rid of mistakes altogether is not possible, right?
Anyhow, now I’m having my Saturday afternoon green tea. Cheers. And to a healthy lifestyle, right? Instead of coffee these days I’m rolling with green tea pretty much all the time, and especially when I’m at work, the workload is really, really big I would say. Sometimes even overwhelming so green tea keeps me energized and focused and I would really suggest you start doing the same thing, right? If you’re drinking coffee, switch over to green tea and you’re going to feel the effects of it immediately!
Combine Slow Speech With Improvisation!
Anyway, today’s topic is about combining the strategy of slow speech, right? You may want to click on this link to find out more about the benefits of slow speech as opposed to trying to speak very fast and you basically can combine that strategy with another strategy which is improvisation. And you may want to click on this link here to hear and read more about improvisation. That’s obviously when you’ve become really comfortable with your speech and you can just improvise on the go, right?
You can, you can – and now this is actually the moment when I’m going to put that combined strategy of the two strategies into practice, right? I was saying “when you can” and actually I didn’t know what was going to follow, right? So it’s the improvisation coming into play, right?
But why the slower speech also comes in handy in this particular strategy is because if I were to be speaking – I said it wrong. If I were to speak – I could have probably said if I were to be speaking but it doesn’t sound right. This is how I question myself, you see, when I say things sometimes I realize that I might have said something wrong and then I actually question myself and analyze my speech a little bit but I don’t analyze it beforehand. I don’t analyze before speaking out loud because that’s when your fluency goes out the window.
Anyway, going back to the subject, if I were to speak very fast I wouldn’t be able to stop the flow of words and I would have definitely said something totally wrong. I would have messed up my speech altogether. But now that I’m speaking slowly I can pause for a split second and I can actually think of something new to say to continue on the same note.
So basically I said “and then you can” and then I realized kind of okay, I didn’t really intend to use the word “can”, it just came out of my mouth by itself somehow, you know, these things happen but I’m going to take advantage of the fact that I can improvise and I’m going to take advantage of the fact that I’m speaking quite slowly, right? And I don’t have to be freaking out about it but I can just take a moment to break and figure out what I can say to continue on that note, right?
Basically I said – I actually forgot what I said, I would have to rewind it back in my head. So I was saying I can combine the two strategies and then I can or you can, I forgot the exact wording, then you can implement that strategy in situations when you say something unexpected to yourself, when a word comes out of your mind by itself but it’s the wrong word which doesn’t kind of go together with the thought process that you had previously in your head so here you go.
And I was going to give you more examples so that you can actually clearly see what I’m talking about, right? So for instance if I want to say that I would never think even about doing a certain thing, right? And then I start the sentence by saying “Listen, this is definitely something that I would never do, you know.” But imagine if I said the word “will” instead of the word “would”, right? So my thought is – the thought process is as follows: I would never do such a thing, right? So it’s something that I would never do.
But it could happen so that the word “will” comes out of my mouth for some reason instead of “would”, right? So the sentence starts as for my intention so I’m saying “This is something that I never will…” and then I realize, hold on a second if I were to say it’s something that I will never do, it’s not really on, you know, because if I say “it’s something that I would never do” basically you’re talking about something that hasn’t even happened, right? You’re just contemplating various possibilities, okay, with regards to the future.
Whereas if you were to say “it’s something that I will never do”, yeah, it’s kind of the same meaning but it kind of implies that there is a certain possibility that you would do it at some stage in the future and then you’re saying that “no, I will not actually do it”, right?
So if I started the sentence “this is something that I never…” and then said the word “will” then I would probably change the continuation of the train of thoughts, right? I would kind of switch over to something slightly different and say things like “this is something that I never will even contemplate”, right? In other words, it’s something that I would never do, you know.
So I hope you get the drift basically. By combining the slower speech and your innate ability to improvise, I actually believe that every one of us has that ability to improvise. We just have to reach a certain English fluency development and then provided obviously that we do a lot of spoken English practice and everything we can develop that ability, you know. And then that improvisation combined with slower speech avails you of correcting your speech so that the other person doesn’t even know that you said something wrong.
Well, not necessarily wrong in grammar terms or whatever but wrong in terms of you saying something that you didn’t really intend to say in the first place as you opened your mouth. For the first time you never intended to say certain words and then they just come out of your mouth and then you can stop for a split second and change your sentence, change the flow of thoughts and maybe even change the whole conversation, you know. Because sometimes these things happen for a reason. You say something and you think why did I even say that word? But it does happen for a reason maybe.
And I hope that you got the drift. I hope that I got the message across quite successfully and obviously if you have more questions about this particular strategy and how it works maybe you can actually mention some of your own examples. I’m pretty sure that some of you guys might have experienced something similar while speaking in English yourself. So feel free to publish everything in the comment section below. Thanks for checking in, thanks for watching the video and chat to you soon again, my friends. Bye-bye!
Robby
P.S. Would you like to find out why I’m highlighting some of the text in red? Read this article and you’ll learn why it’s so important to learn idiomatic expressions and how it will help you to improve your spoken English!
P.S.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!
P.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out the English Harmony System HERE!