10 Things I Would Do Differently If I Had to Learn English Again – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.10 things I would do differently if I had to learn English all over again Number one I would focus on pronunciation right from the beginning If you have a good pronunciation people will understand you and you will like what you hear when you speak So you will be inclined to do it more Number two I would not focus on vocabulary words that I would never use I would probably pick like three topics that I like and then I would just focus on that Let's say it's travel food and work and I would only make an effort to learn phrases or words from those three topics at first Number three I would not learn conversations from textbooks The textbook dialogues are so robotic They're like "This is John John is 30 years old John is from London." No no one talks like that Real speech is emotional messy People use a lot of filler words It's just textbooks are just not realistic Just follow this rule If nobody would say this in real life don't learn it Number four I would make my house my speaking partner I know that sounds weird but basically I would make my house an English zone For example when I'm inside my house everything that I do everything that I see I will say that in English You open the fridge you say "I am opening the fridge." You look at the milk you say "Oh the milk is expired." So narrate everything you're doing Write your grocery list in English Write your to-do list in English If you're doing your makeup narrate that Imagine you're a vlogger If you're cooking explain what you're doing You'll be surprised how many words you don't know how many words you thought you knew So just refresh those constantly Number five I believe I would listen to real people For example somebody on YouTube is venting about a problem that they had with customer service whatever Amazing Somebody is ranting about a friend on TikTok telling a crazy story Gold Because these are real people using real English real speech that you will hear every time you go outside Pay attention to the slang Pay attention to the sarcasm Pay attention to the jokes Pay attention to facial expressions gestures everything The next thing I would do differently and I think this should have been on the first or second place but anyway I would stop translating everything I would forget about my native language and I would focus on English It's a different language it's a foreign language It has nothing to do with my own language I would focus on understanding the idea behind that word or the meaning behind that expression instead of finding the exact equivalent or the translation in my own language I don't need that Why do I need that i would try to connect the words and their meaning to some sort of context or emotion or image in my head translation will only slow you down because every time you translate something the next time you're going to want to do the reverse thing you're going to think about the word in your native language or the expression in your native language and you're going to want to translate it back into English You're not going to use that expression that you wrote in your vocabulary list You're going to try to translate word for word for something else and it's going to sound weird Okay The next thing I would do differently just because I simply didn't have access to a phone or the internet This was 25 years ago Okay Now you have this beautiful device that you're holding and you have a lot of AI apps You have a lot of apps that you can interact with humans on Um so what I would do I would find an app that I would train my English just to like feel comfortable and practice little grammar bits and whatnot and another app um where I would find somebody to talk to somebody real and apps that would pretty much give you like a speaking club dynamic so you can actually speak So you train your confidence and your ability to interact with human beings like you're learning some social skills as well Or if I had the means I would just hire somebody to talk to every day or a couple times a week Next thing I would do differently or I would change is my mindset around making mistakes I feel like as kids we became so terrified of making mistakes because you know our teacher would take our homework and our notebooks and would mark every single mistake with a red pen and then we would feel guilty about it and then we'd think about it and it it didn't feel good You know if you made a couple of mistakes your grade would go lower which is so dumb But anyway when you're speaking and you're making mistakes the person that you're talking to is not your teacher They're not taking your speech and analyzing it word by word and marking with red whatever you said wrong It's not like that They're just trying to understand what you're saying You notice those mistakes more because you've been learning every single piece of your speech but that person is just trying to get your message and have a conversation They don't want to be your teacher Trust me Okay next thing is I would stop waiting until I'm ready to speak I would never feel ready to do anything because to feel ready means what you're you're so confident that you're 100% perfect that you feel ready to start doing something You're never ready You just have to do it Bad English is better than silent English because every time you make a mistake you learn But if you're waiting to never make a mistake but you're not speaking and you're not making mistakes it's but you're it's it makes no sense Okay And last thing I would do differently I would record myself any chance I'd get Voice memos videos everything that I'm doing and I can record it I would because then I would be able to just look back a month or two and see my progress and be my own motivator A lot of people a lot of my students they don't really realize how they're improving and I have to be like "You're so much better than you were three months ago." And they're like "Oh really no I still suck." Because we never feel like we're good at anything So recording yourself and then looking back would be such an eyeopener It'll be inspiring And honestly you never know You might develop this love of recording things And social media is so big nowadays Maybe you'll become a vlogger Maybe you'll become a Tik Tocker You never know What do you think I'm doing right now i'm practicing English too So listen I learned English the hard way You can learn it a lot easier a lot faster nowadays The traditional textbook teaching method focuses a lot on writing and reading and maybe a little bit of listening So a lot of people have this illusion that they can speak English and when they want to speak it's just so hard because the words are not coming So I hope these tips will help you focus a little bit more on speaking