Let's talk about it. Today I have a special treat for you. I'm going to help you learn

seven things that you should avoid if you want to be a fluent English speaker. Don't

do these seven things if you want to be fluent. If you focus on these seven things, you're

going to be wasting your time. It's not going to be efficient. Instead, you're just going

to be wasting your time. So, to talk about these seven things, I thought, "Who can help

me the most to talk about learning language?" Well, I have a special guest for you. Today,

I'm going to be talking with two brothers, Fran and Carlos, who run the YouTube channel

YouTalkTV, and they have completely learned English starting at the age of 25. It's pretty

incredible to completely learn a language as an adult. Most of us think if you're going

to be fluent, you should start as a kid, but that's not the reality for a lot of us.

For a lot of us, maybe for you too, you are starting now as an adult. You're kind of turning

a fresh page. "I don't want to learn like I did as a kid. Now, I have to start over."

Is it possible, can you really become fluent as an adult? Well, In today's lesson you're

going to learn seven things that didn't work for me in my second language, which is French,

and seven things that didn't work for Fran and Carlos, so hopefully you can avoid those

things. Instead, you can focus your time wisely. You can hear their story. Be inspired to realize,

"I can do this as an adult. I can successfully learn to speak English." I hope you'll enjoy

our conversation. Feel free to click CC to view the full subtitles

for today's lesson. That will help you to catch every word. They use a lot of great

expressions. They talk about a lot of pronunciation and linking and some specific tips. So, I

hope that the subtitles will help you as an English learner as well to catch everything

that they say. All right. Thanks so much for joining me Fran and Carlos. Let's meet them.

Hi Fran and Carlos, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about this interesting,

important topic of what to avoid, don't do these things if you want to be fluent.

Vanessa: To get started, would you like to briefly introduce yourselves? I've mentioned

you just a moment ago, but would you like to share with my audience something about

yourself? YouTalkTV: Yes, Fran and Carlos Monaj, we're

brothers. So we're from Spain, from Spain and the thing is that we're running a YouTube

channel called YouTalkTV. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

The funny thing is we both learned at age 25 or later on in life and we were self-taught.

Now what we kind of selling is if we did it, then you can do it too. Just try to follow

us. If you like the way we talk, we can take you to our level or above, its pure logic,

and that is the only thing we do, yes. Vanessa: So you bring a completely different

perspective to the table for people who are learning, they can feel inspired by you, a

role model and now you're teaching and when you teach something, you need to really know

it. So- YouTalkTV: Oh yeah, absolutely. You need to

reflect on how you learned that, what difficulties you have... Yeah, big time. We've taught over

10,000 hours each. Oh, by the way Vanessa, we have a surprise

for your audience, for your subscribers, which is-

Yeah, well the thing is that they're going to have free access to our course on YouTalkTV

plus course where they can improve your English. Yeah. We're giving away a full year for free.

And now it costs close to $300 a year. I'm saying close because I don't know the conversion.

But anyways, we're going to give it away for free and the condition is going to be that

you guys need to be subscribed to Vanessa's channel, Speak English With Vanessa, and go

ahead and subscribe to our channel- YouTalkTV. Exactly. And so it's going to be a raffle

and among those subscribers that are in both channels, then you going to have a full year

free. Yeah, we'll take it okay.

Vanessa: Thanks so much for offering that to my subscribers. Great.

YouTalkTV: You're welcome. Thank you.

Vanessa: You've done a lot of things successfully with English and I imagine there were things

that you've tried that probably didn't work over time or maybe for your students, you

see, oh no, they're focusing on this thing that isn't going to help them. So I thought

we could talk about that together. Some things that you tried, but that just didn't work

for you because nobody wants to waste their time. You don't want to waste your time. Our

students don't want to waste their time and we don't want to waste our time telling them-

YouTalkTV: Absolutely. Vanessa: You should do this. I thought today

we could talk about seven things that our students should avoid doing, so that they

can really focus on what will work. So would you like to get started with the first point

and then we can kind of share our opinions from our-

YouTalkTV: Absolutely. Yeah. Go ahead. Vanessa: Both of our experiences?

YouTalkTV: Yes. Vanessa: Cool. Well, my first tip for something

that I did wrong when I was a beginner learning French, which is the language that I successfully

learned as a second language and maybe you guys did this as well with English is, don't

dive into material that's too difficult right away. If you just start watching, I don't

know, Avatar or Titanic, something that's so long and so complex, there's so much vocabulary

that you don't know. You can just easily feel overwhelmed and frustrated and kind of want

to give up. I'm never going to do this. It's just too much. So starting small is going

to be more helpful. You can feel that small win I did it, I watched this five minute video

and I understood it. I got some new vocabulary instead of a whole 45 minute TV episode or

two hour movie. That can be so overwhelming if it's too much for you. So don't do too

much too soon. Take it slowly. YouTalkTV: Yeah. Plus it can be really frustrating

and maybe it's going to make you give up or something and that connects pretty well with

one of our other mottos, which says which says keep it simple and that's an American

saying and we love it. Just keep it simple and this year in the Spanish approach of teaching

English, they are always picking their more, the most difficult approach, the most grammar

complicated explanation. And we want to keep it simple. There is a lot of difficult approaches

to teaching grammar. And of course what you're saying, don't go for movies, songs, because

they constantly putting those sentences together like, "Hey, do you mind if I sit down?" It

is impossible for you to pick up. Don't do you mind if I sit down and they're not going

to say that. So prior to that, you may want to make sure your students know some more

simple structures or just go through easier material.

Vanessa: Yeah. When you finally, as English learners, when you finally watched a TV show

or a movie without subtitles, you'd probably been you starting smaller first and then working

up to that or maybe watching the TV show with some titles in English first. You're slowly

working up to that and not just diving in and then thinking, oh my goodness, that feeling

of dread and fear though yeah if you start small then it's going to be a lot easier to

approach and to get beyond that. YouTalkTV: Absolutely.

And especially talking about songs, songs I think they are more difficult than a real

conversation. I think so. People are very frustrated. They get very frustrated with

songs because they say, "Okay, what are they singing here? I don't understand. Oh my God,

am I learning English but I don't understand that." Songs are very difficult.

Vanessa: Yeah, songs are poetry. Poetry is tough. What about you guys? What is something

that you think doesn't work for your English students, but you see them doing anyway and

you don't want them to waste their time? YouTalkTV: Well, one of the recurrent mistakes

that people tend to make here in Spain, at least it's to just to focus a lot on degrees

and certificates and all that. It's kind of the, it's on the rates now. Like everybody

wants to have it, but that's not going to make you speak a better English. No. Most

likely you're going to get some idea but having a B1 B2 that's we call them here or even a

C1 level is not going to make you speak good English. It takes a lot more than that but

people are really focusing on those degrees and I think that's totally wrong because they

and don't get me wrong. It'd be great to have those degrees, but just as a result of you

having a really good level of English. Vanessa: Why do you think some people are

so focused on getting those certificates? Is that a hangover from our school years where

we need that grade to feel good or why are so many people focused on that.

YouTalkTV: It's also like Carlos said before, it's a kind of a requirement. It's required.

It's an institutional requirement. Most of the jobs, like if you want to be a civil servant.

Vanessa: Okay. YouTalkTV: In Spain, I don't know if you know

what it is. If you want to work like in public- Vanessa: Like a government employee?

YouTalkTV: Exactly. And here's explains a lot of related to it, like if you want to

be a teacher, you need to do kind of those, that kind of stuff and there's a lot of money

involved. There's a lot of money involved because you pay taxes and you do pay training

for those courses. It's a whole marketing behind that, marketing strategy-

Vanessa: Sure. YouTalkTV: I don't think that it's useful.

It's not good for our learners. Absolutely. So we're kind of fighting against that.

Vanessa: I feel like that leads into one of the other things that I recommend avoiding

when you're wanting to be a fluent speaker and that's just don't wait to start speaking.

If you feel like, for example, if you feel like you have to pass an exam for your future

interview, for a future job well, don't wait to do other real fluency activities before

that. So if you wait to start speaking, it's just going to be more stressful. It's going

to be such a new thing that it's a little bit weird. I don't know if you had this sensation

when you were first learning another language, but when I first heard my voice speaking in

French or I lived in South Korea for a couple of years, when I first heard my voice saying

some Korean words, it felt so weird but after a while it was completely normal.

YouTalkTV: Used to it, right? Yeah.

Vanessa: Getting used to it and hearing okay, this is my voice. I'm saying these words that

have some meaning now, but it's completely different. As you get used to that, it feels

more comfortable so don't wait to just jump into it and try to talk about what's around

you and drinking some water. There's a picture of an elephant on this glass-

YouTalkTV: Yeah plus- Vanessa: It looks like it needs to be washed-

YouTalkTV: Plus- Vanessa: You talking about it.

YouTalkTV: The sooner you start talking, this means you going to start making mistakes?

And the more mistakes you make the quicker you're going to learn.

Making mistakes here in our culture is kind of overrated.

Yeah. It is our case. Oh my God, I'm making a mistakes.

So you going to be penalized while in the Anglo-Saxon culture. It's like, I remember

playing volleyball and I was really bad. And at the end of the game everybody say hey,

good man. Good, good game. Good game? Vanessa: Sound positive?

YouTalkTV: No. Yeah. Okay, thank you but it's kind of a cultural

thing of making mistake is over penalized and I think that's something that's going

to hamper your learning process. Especially talking about English, about to

learning English and that if you practice and you talk, so then you're going to see

that it's useful. So I think that- The purpose-

because the way you study English is bad. You study the theory, you study the grammar

rules, you study the vocabulary but you don't feel that you're going to use it. You don't

feel that's something useful. Vanessa: So in your opinion, do you think

that there is a magic solution to learning all of these complex or maybe simple things

in English? YouTalkTV: Wooh. Magic solutions? Yeah. That's

a great topic. The thing is that as something we wanted to talk about is that about the

magical solutions about the miracles. A lot of companies are selling about English, right?

So yeah, people realizing that well, they can't learn English, they can't learn English

with just a 1000 words, just without effort, having a good time, while they're sleeping,

and that's impossible. Of course there are ways to make it simple, make it more simple

and to make it easier. But yeah, it's not easy. If people were receiving so easy, everybody

would speak English. It's not easy. You need to make a big effort and you need time. You

need to spend time and you should make a big effort. It's like for example, when you're

training for a marathon, it's something very hard and have people say, "Hey, how can you

do that? Are you going to run 30 kilometers alone with this cold in an hour? How can you

do that?" Well, but you have a goal, your motivator.

Vanessa: Yeah. So having that motivation? YouTalkTV: It's difficult and you need a big

effort. If it were easy, nobody would be watching this video here.

Absolutely. We wouldn't be here

And it's a long process and it's an ongoing process and there's a, there's some method,

there's a couple of three companies here in Spain they're competing and one of them is

saying, 'Oh, learn English. Learn very good English in only 15 minutes a day."

Yeah. That's crazy. There's another one says Learn English only

in 10 minutes a day, but there's another one that says learn English in only five minutes.

Five minutes. They're huge companies with millions of dollars

behind and trying to sell something that it's- They don't tell you if you're going to a couple

of thousands of years so. It does. I think the underlying things that he's going to take

you 80 years, a hundred years, the approach of the, they're focusing on, on showing or

presenting English as something that is not fun or you just get rid of.