Because if you do, there's a good chance

that what you're doing to improve your English

is actually making it worse and not better.

Watch on.

Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingEnglish.com.

If you are stuck thinking in your native language,

translating everything in your head word by word,

rule by rule,

painstakingly computing your English sentences as you go,

there's a good chance what are you doing

to improve your English is making the situation worse

and not better.

You see, we get good at what we practise and many people,

although they think they are doing what they should be doing

to improve their English,

are actually practising these mental gymnastics

that make you do what you are doing.

First of all, let's think about what you probably did

when you were at school.

If you had English classes

and if you didn't like the classes

that typically people in Japan have

and certainly what I had when I studied French in the UK,

there's a good chance that you learned by

memorising lists of vocabulary, studying grammar rules,

translating sentences back and forth.

Learning to take the grammar that you learned,

slot in words, and construct and compute sentences.

And of course, your teacher would put you on the spot.

Hey, Julian!

She would say, stand up, tell me how to say

"I have a green apple" in French.

And then I would be expected to produce the sentence,

which of course I had no fucking clue how to do anyway,

but in my head I would trying to make it work.

I'd have apple.

(speaks foreign language)

No, that's potato.

(speaks foreign language)

I don't know pom.

You get the idea.

And I would all be a total mess in them.

Most people have English lessons like this.

What you are actually doing there is practising

thinking about what you're saying as you're saying it.

And of course in that situation,

if you get it wrong, what happens?

Your teacher punishes you by saying no, that's wrong!

Or by giving you bad scores on a test.

So that reinforces the feeling that you've got to

spend more time thinking about these things,

more carefully to compute them properly.

And then we get older, we struggle with our English.

We start thinking in our native language,

translating, not speaking as fluently as we'd like.

So what do we do?

We think well okay, obviously I need to memorise more words.

I need to study more grammar.

And a little bit at a time you train yourself

to think about everything as you are saying it.

The way you are learning, although you think

you are doing what you need to do to get more fluent,

you're actually making the problem worse,

because what you are practising is

not what you need to be able to do and that is

to be able to speak fluently and spontaneously

without all the mental gymnastics going on in your head

that are slowing you down in the first place.

And the first thing that you need to do is to

understand that very fact that what you are doing

is probably making the problem worse,

so that you are able to let go

and to start training yourself a little bit over time

to start speaking directly in English

without thinking in your native language

or having to you know, having to construct and compute,

and gymnasti-cize these sentences and all words.

It doesn't matter.

You get the idea as you go.

I will make more videos about this.

Talking about how you can actually do this,

but if you want to get into straight away,

I recommend you check out my book

Think English, Speak English:

How to Stop Performing Mental Gymnastics

Every Time You Speak English.

It's on Kindle.

It also comes in paperback.

Also via Amazon.

You can read the first chapter for free

and it comes with a complete audio version

and it only costs like $2.99 or something stupid like that.

If you wanna fix this problem that you are struggling with,

if you are struggling with it,

go to ThinkEnglishSpeakEnglish.com and check that out.

Otherwise this is me, Julian Northbrook,

signing out from other video.

Give it a thumbs up if you found it useful.

If you hated it, whatever, give me a thumbs up anyway

and I will see you in the next video

and I will talk more about this in future videos

so stay tuned.

Buh-bye.

(upbeat music)

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