Ep. 1 Independently improve your English

This podcast is for French learners of English who want to improve their skills and learn about Anglophone culture. The host discusses ways to improve English independently, citing frustration among French students and the importance of passion for language learning. Three scientifically-backed methods are mentioned: the comprehensive input method, the speak from day one method, and the fluent forever spaced repetition method. The host explains the input hypothesis by Stephen Krashen, which suggests acquiring language naturally through receiving input slightly beyond one's current level of competence. The host also talks about Benny Lewis's approach of speaking from day one and Gabriel Weiner's fluent forever method, which focuses on pronunciation and sounds. Hello and welcome to our first episode of L'Angliciste. This is the podcast for intermediate and advanced French learners of the English language who want to improve their English listening and speaking skills while learning more about Anglophone culture and current events. In today's first episode, I want to discuss one of the most important topics for students of language which is how to independently improve your English. Many of my French students over the years have expressed to me their frustration with English learning. They cite a lack of confidence in speaking and often have a weaker level compared to other European countries. Maybe they did too much grammar in school and their classes were boring. Sometimes they feel overwhelmed by the language. We often say with language that you use it or you lose it. So, with this in mind, today I want to discuss some scientifically proven methods that can help you not only improve your English but also enjoy the process along the way. I want to start by talking about polyglots. Now, if you're not familiar with the term, a polyglot is someone who is proficient in multiple languages. This means that they speak four or five, maybe more languages fluently. There are many ways of becoming a polyglot. Some are born into international families where their home is multilingual and they grow up bilingual. Maybe they go to school in a different language than what they speak at home or they go and live in a different country. This was my situation, for example. Maybe they move to a different country later in life or study a language at school and university. Maybe they need a different language for work. Maybe they just really like being a nerd and studying languages for fun. Whatever it is, there are no one or two ways of becoming a polyglot. Instead, there are millions. However, one thing that all of these speakers of many languages, these polyglots have in common is that they have a passion for it. They love learning language. They love the process of learning it. They find joy in discovering new words, phrases and ways of communicating with different cultures including the nuances and different traditions and thoughts behind a culture and a language. Another thing that they love is talking about how they learn a language and sharing the process and the techniques that they use, which is really helpful for us when we want to explore new ways of enjoying the process and of accessing new forms of language learning. So, as I mentioned, there are no one or two ways of learning new languages. And if you find a method that works for you, that you enjoy, it's not my job to tell you not to do it. But instead, I am going to suggest three big ways in which you can approach your language learning differently to how you did at school. And these are three scientifically backed ways developed by neuroscientists and professional linguists. Linguists are people who study not just specific languages, but language itself. So, the three specific methods I want to discuss today are the comprehensive input method developed by Stephen Krashen, the speak from day one method developed by Benny Lewis, and the fluent forever spaced repetition method by Gabriel Weiner. So, let's discuss my favourite of these three methods, which is the comprehensive input method, also called Krashen's hypothesis. Stephen Krashen, who was a famous linguistics professor, creates this hypothesis, the input hypothesis. And this is a theory that suggests that language learners acquire language best when they receive input that is just slightly beyond their current level of competence. First of all, I want to make a distinction between language learning and language acquisition. Language learning is probably what you have done your entire life. When you go to school and your teacher says, today we are going to learn the preterits, the past simple. You learn the rules, you do a few exercises, and you practice using that skill. And this is great because you learn the language skill for a period of time. Then you sit an exam and hopefully you remember it for the rest of your life. This is great if it works for you. However, you may notice that this is very different from the way that you learnt your mother tongue, your main language, possibly French. When you were a really young child, you learnt to speak at home by talking to your parents, to your family and to their friends. Going to the park and learning through experience. When you first start school or maternelle, you already speak your first language. Yet you have never touched a book or been formally taught the language in the way that you are at school. This is because you have acquired the language. Acquiring means to get something, to receive something naturally. So Stephen Krashen, in his hypothesis, makes this distinction between learning a language and acquiring language. And he argues that acquiring language naturally is a superior method because it comes closer to what we do as children. And the best way he proposes to acquire a language is to receive input that is slightly beyond your current level of competence. So this means that if you watch an episode of Friends and you understand 70% of the episode and you watch it many times, you will acquire additional vocabulary because it's slightly harder than your current level. However, if you have a beginner level in English and you start with something that is too complicated, too advanced, the level of difficulty is too high and this will make learning a language too difficult. So he argues that the level of the language of comprehensible input should be one degree higher than your current ability. Input plus one or I plus one, as this theory is often called. Krashen argues that this will challenge learners just enough without overwhelming them. And it allows for natural acquisition to occur, to happen. It's quite similar to when you do sport or you go and do some weight training with weights. So if you've never done weight training before, maybe you don't start with the 50 kilogram but you start with the 5 kilogram weight and you push your muscles slightly more than your current level. Another element Krashen discusses in his hypothesis is natural order. So this suggests that when you learn a new language, you learn the same things in the same order. You will naturally progress from simpler to more complex language structures as you are exposed to comprehensible input. This is the reason that when children learn their mother tongue, their first language, they will make the same errors at the same ages. This shows that we learn grammar naturally when we are children. So why wouldn't this not be the case as an adult as well? The third part of his hypothesis is what he calls the effective filter. So effective, it's from the same root as affection. De l'affection pour quelque chose, your emotions. And he argues that your emotional and psychological motivations will influence how you acquire a language. He says that learners who are motivated, relaxed and attentive are more likely to learn a language successfully than someone who is anxious, stressed or unmotivated. So to summarise, Krashen's input hypothesis or comprehensive input suggests that to learn a language successfully, you need to have meaningful and comprehensible input. Something that has importance to you, that you're interested in and that is slightly above your current ability. As well as being in a supportive and low anxiety environment. I think that podcasts are an excellent way of doing this, for example. Because you can put on a podcast while doing something that is relaxing to you. The second theory that I want to talk about to learn a language is the Benny Lewis speak from day one approach. Benny Lewis is a famous Irish polyglot. You may know him from YouTube as Benny the Irish polyglot or from his book, Fluent in Three Months. Benny's story is really interesting because most of you will be able to empathise with it. Benny grew up in Ireland and studied foreign languages, including French and Spanish at school. But when he went to Spain on an Erasmus, he found that he couldn't communicate despite having learnt the language for many years. He didn't have the confidence to speak because he was so scared of making mistakes. That this worked as a psychological barrier from him communicating with people. So, Benny decided to start afresh and he made a pact with himself that he would speak to people as much as possible. And he wouldn't care about any errors or any bad grammar, any missing vocabulary in his language. Unsurprisingly, he made very rapid progress and he started to use this same method with new languages. He calls his method language hacking, where he finds shortcuts to learn a language more effectively and efficiently. Today, Benny can speak 20 languages to varying degrees of fluency, which he has learnt to do just from speaking to people. He doesn't do the boring grammar exercises and he's not interested in having a very academic, studious approach to languages. Yet, he's one of the most successful language learners on the planet. Benny's attitude to language learning is really helpful if you are someone who wants to use English to travel or to learn other languages to communicate with new people. Benny argues that with as little as a few words in a new language, you are able to communicate important and meaningful content. And it's also a great reminder to us that so much of language is non-verbal. This brings us to the third theory and another great favourite of mine, which is the fluent forever method. Fluent Forever is a book written by Gabriel Weiner, an American opera singer who has had to learn foreign languages to a very high level. As an opera singer, being able to communicate and understand the language is not enough for Gabriel. One of the most important aspects for him is working on the pronunciation and the sounds of a language, which is so important to his career as a singer. So, Gabriel's story is very entertaining and fascinating and I highly recommend you to watch his TED Talk, which I will link to this podcast. Gabriel needed to complete a more advanced French course at university, but he had a problem. He had never studied the language before. He signed himself up to the advanced course anyway and over the summer, he began to intensively learn what he thought to be the most important vocabulary in French. He learnt key sentences and phrases to be able to properly introduce himself and talk about himself. And he took a frequency dictionary, which is a dictionary in a language which shows the most common words in that language and studied the most common words in French. When he went to his interview to decide which group he would be in at university, he surprised himself because his studying had been so effective that for the first time in his life, he was able to respond in French. And he describes it as having been halting, so slow and hesitant, but before this course of study, he had never spoken the language before. His method can be broken down into three parts, the first being the use of frequency lists and useful vocabulary. Instead of learning le chat est dans l'arbre et le singe est sur la chaise, as English comic Eddie Izzard likes to parody the way that people learn French, he started with what he thought would be the most useful expressions and worked backwards. So frequency lists are key to his method. The second part of his method that I personally think is extremely effective is the use of spaced repetition. So what is spaced repetition? Well, it's not a new technique and people who study difficult subjects like medicine and law may already be familiar with this technique. In short, spaced repetition is a technique that involves reviewing, revising information at increasing intervals over time. The basic idea is to revisit material at strategic intervals to reinforce memory and increase retention. So here's how it would typically work. You learn a word for the first time. It's the first time you learn this new information. For example, a vocabulary word, a grammar rule or another concept. Next, after a short period, you review it, typically within a few hours or a day. And this reinforces your memory, helping solidify the information in your mind. The next review session occurs after a slightly longer interval, usually a few days. By spacing out the review, you're challenging your brain to recall, to remember the information at just the right time, just before you forget it, to strengthen your memory. Then you continue to review the material with the intervals between each review gradually increasing. For example, you review the new word again after a week, then if you remember it, two weeks, then a month and so on. And you adapt the space of the reviews based on your performance. So, for example, if my new word is car and I remember it each time, then the time between the reviews gets longer. However, if after two weeks I forget the word car, it's not in my memory. I struggle to remember and the interval that I review that information decreases. It's quite complicated and I will include a description of this process of spaced repetition using resources from Gabriel Weiner's website in the description of this podcast. But it is an extremely useful tool, not just with languages, but with any studying you have to do. The third part of the Fluent Forever method that I find extremely useful is the phonology side, so the pronunciation side. As I mentioned, Gabriel Weiner is an opera singer and when he needs to learn new languages, he needs to also learn to pronounce them correctly in order to perform his songs to a high level. So, the principle of this section is what he calls minimal pairs and I will get to that in a second. But to explain the concept behind it, it's useful to revisit our brains when we are babies. When we are babies, our brain is created to absorb as much about our first language, our mother tongue, as possible. And in the first six months of our lives, we can hear all the sounds in all languages in the world. But your brain will begin to filter out those sounds, so it adapts to only hear the sounds of the languages you speak at home, your mother tongue. Gradually, the filter works so we stop hearing the differences in different languages. The example I would like to give for this is the sound I in English. So, in English we have what we call the short I sound, so the I, and the long I sound, so I. For example, if you say, I'm going to the beach, you would not want to use the short sound. I'll let you figure that one out. However, if your first language is French, you don't have this short I sound, because your brain has taught you to filter out this sound. It does not exist in French. As a result, you are less likely to distinguish between these two sounds when you speak. So, Gabriel Weiner has found a way of retraining your brain to hear the different sounds in different languages. And this is by using what he calls minimal pairs. By using minimal pairs and doing listening exercises, learners can improve their pronunciation and develop the ability to perceive and to produce the subtle differences, the distinctions between sounds in the language they want to learn. So, for example, learners are introduced to a pair of words that sound similar but have different meanings due to one sound difference. So, I used the example of going to the beach earlier on. In English, we have two words that are very similar, ship, un bateau, and sheep, un mouton. Ship, avec le I court, is S-H-I-P, et avec le I long, le I, S-H-E-E-P. To a French speaker, this difference is very discreet. So, you would do exercises where you would listen to these words, the ship, short sound, and sheep, long sound, to gradually train your brain to hear the difference. This is where it's also important to have an English teacher at your disposal because you would need to get proper feedback from someone with a good ear for the language. I'm deliberately not saying a native speaker because, as I'll discuss in a later episode, I don't think this is a necessary requirement. But it can include an audio recording of someone who speaks English as a first language or someone who is trained in this phonology. And they'll help you look at making the correct mouth shapes and tongue placement to produce the sound correctly. And then, by repeating this and reinforcing it over time, you can retrain your brain to hear the sounds of new languages. So, to summarise the three parts of the Gabriel Weiner Fluent Forever method that I think are particularly useful, we have this use of frequency lists and learning the most useful vocabulary in a language first as a priority. Then we have spaced repetition, so repeating new information over different intervals to commit it to the long-term memory. And finally, this pronunciation focus by using minimal pairs and training your ear to hear the new sounds of the language you want to study. So, finally, I'm going to talk about some of the tools you can use to start using these three methods in your own study of the English language. And some of these will be opportunities for you to improve your speaking using the Benny Lewis method or your listening and reading skills to put into practice this comprehensive input theory of Stephen Krashen's. And finally, some resources to help develop your vocabulary and solidify grammar rules using Gabriel Weiner's Fluent Forever method. So, for speaking, the main thing that I would recommend is that you find someone to speak to. I'm a big fan of Tandem, which is an application that allows you to find online speaking partners from different parts of the world. You can either do one-to-one conversations or group conversations. There are similar applications like HelloTalk as well and there's a few others that I will link below. The other really useful tool is to find a real-life language exchange partner or to go to a language exchange event. Again, I will add links to all of these to the podcast. But there are international groups that get together in cities and towns all over the world to practice languages. A thing that I often recommend to exam students is to record yourself daily and play the recording back to listen for errors. Where are you missing a word or where are you hesitating? Where do you think your pronunciation is off? This can help you give yourself feedback on your speaking. And finally, if you need public speaking as part of your job or your studies, I would recommend the organization Toastmasters, which specializes in public speaking in English. Again, I'll link it below. For listening, I've already mentioned my belief in podcasts being an excellent method. Obviously, it would be great if you choose to listen to this one again. But I'll put some other good podcasts like the BBC Six Minute English. If you want something a bit more advanced, maybe you could look at BBC Radio 4's online archive, which is free to listen to. And I will again link a few radio stations to the description here. Finally, a tool that I could not live without is Language Reactor, which is a Google Chrome extension and allows you to put bilingual subtitles on any YouTube or Netflix video. So, for example, if you're watching Friends, again, in English, you would have the subtitles in English and in French or German or Arabic or whatever language. If you see a new word, you can click on it and get a definition and add it to a vocabulary list, which is an amazing tool. Another application that I would recommend for listening but also for reading is LingQ. So, L-I-N-G-Q, LingQ, developed by another famous polyglot, Steve Kaufman. And this will build in a dictionary of the words that you know and are learning to help with comprehensive input. Again, super useful tool. I use it every day for German and Russian, for example. If you're someone who likes reading, I would also recommend choosing kind of whatever book you're interested in. LingQ is useful for this because it allows you to have a digital version that's adapted to your existing level. But if you prefer reading a paper book, I can link some recommendations for not too difficult and quite short, but amazing classics that are about 100 pages long. I'm also a big fan of short stories. You could start with something like the Sherlock Holmes stories or Harry Potter, obviously the classic. Maybe something by Agatha Christie, like And Then There Were None. Or something more political, like Animal Farm by George Orwell. Maybe the comical short stories, Jeeves and Worcester. Or if you're more interested in what we call post-colonial or Commonwealth literature, which is my area, maybe something like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart or Nadine Gordimer's Jump stories. Anything by Shakespeare, obviously, is always brilliant as well. The advantage of reading play scripts is that you can listen along with recording or go and watch a performance. And these can be brilliant for improving your pronunciation. Same goes for poetry. Finally, if you've been interested in the spaced repetition aspect, you've got Gabriel Weiner's app, Fluent Forever, which allows you to associate pictures with new vocabulary, as described in his method. Otherwise, you've got the more standard paper version of making small cards, small flash cards. Or you can use the Anki app. A-N-K-I. Again, I will link it below. I usually do five minutes first thing in the morning with new vocabulary that I'm learning. Lastly, I want to summarise today's podcast by saying that the most important thing when it comes to learning a language is that you enjoy what you're doing, that you do something that interests you, that you're passionate about. I'll give you the example of my boyfriend, Tim, who works as a football journalist. And when we met, he had never lived in an English-speaking country or spent extended time in an Anglophone environment. But his English was more fluent than 95% of French people I had met, because he just became obsessed with watching comedians, humoristes in English, and watching football-related YouTube content and video editing content. So, he learnt through things that he was already passionate about. I really can't recommend this method enough. And the irony is, he would not be able to answer a single question on English grammar. But he's acquired it just from listening and being engaged in the language in relation to things that he was already passionate about. The final thing that I will link to this podcast is the Independently Improve Your English booklet that I give to all of my students at university, in schools, private students, language students. I do a lot of English literature and law teaching. But I find that people need to really be passionate about what they're consuming to improve. So, in this booklet, you'll have 10 different activities that you need to do in English, including watching a film in English, listening to a podcast, listening to a song, reading a news article, watching a TV show, a YouTube video, reading a book or a poem, reading an academic article, having a conversation with a native speaker and with a non-native speaker of English, finding a new comedian that they want to listen to. And what they then do is they produce a short summary of the activity, so a description of the film, what was the conversation about, what was the TV show about. And finally, they would write down a few new things that they've learned by consuming this media. Again, this is very based on comprehensive input as a method. So, that's where I'm going to leave you today. I hope that you enjoyed the format of this podcast. Please, if you have any thoughts or comments on today's podcast, I invite you to comment. If you enjoyed it, please share, subscribe. I will be doing weekly podcasts from now on. Next week, I want to discuss the historical origins of the English language and the influence of French on English before building into an episode in two weeks about the global use of English or globish as we now call it and talking about native speakers, non-native speakers and how English is transforming today as a result of colonialism, globalization and the Internet. Thank you for listening. Do check out the links in the description and the vocabulary list as well. And I hope you come back to listen again to future episodes. Bye.