This Is the *Only* Method to Become Fluent in English

fluency after all isn't the ability to know every word and grammatical pattern in a language it's the ability to communicate your thoughts without stopping every time you run into a problem when I first started learning English I believed fluency had to be hard that it had to be earned through boring drills grammar charts and exhausting study sessions i thought I had to suffer to get fluent but it doesn't have to be this way when it comes to language learning if something feels easy lazy but it works that's a sign you're doing it right that's a

sign of efficiency in this video I want to show you exactly how I used comprehensible input watching videos listening to podcasts reading stories I actually enjoyed to become fluent in English and by fluency I don't mean knowing every single word and every single grammar rule i mean being able to express yourself even when you face a challenge hi friends and welcome to my channel i'm Veronica and here I share my language learning journey to help you become fluent and more confident in your target language not through pressure or perfection but with real practical habits that

actually fit into your life and if you're currently on your language journey and want some extra support you're going to love my language learning notion template it's designed to organize your study routine keep track of all of the vocabulary you're learning and have all of your languages in one place the link to check out the template is going to be in the description okay so let's begin today's video and talk about why you probably haven't heard of comprehensible input last week after yoga I had a conversation with some of my friends about our Spanish learning

journeys because we all live in Mexico City even though we're not originally from Mexico and my friends were sharing their methods how they're taking classes and they're learning grammar and grammar in Spanish is so complicated and it's really boring for them and they don't really like it and so when they asked me this question how are you learning Spanish Veronica i just said the exact same way I learned English the exact same way I became fluent in English with comprehensible input and you know what my friends had no idea what I was talking about they

have never heard this phrase before and I talk about this method so much on my channel because I believe that it is extremely effective but still a lot of people are just not familiar with it and I think right now language learning channels on YouTube are starting to talk about comprehensible input more and more and I'm really happy to see that but the thing is the reason why this method is not taught in schools is because traditional language learning is built around teaching you a language anguage not helping you acquire this language naturally that means

you're doing grammar you're learning vocabulary lists and you're doing a lot of textbook exercises and those systems are designed for classrooms not real life communication and maybe you're wondering okay if we know this why can't schools just teach us languages differently why can't they make it more real more human more effective the truth is a lot of schools are trying to change but the traditional classroom model has its limitations when you have one teacher and 30 students it's hard to give each student the exact kind of exposure and context their brain needs to acquire the

language naturally plus many school systems are focused on testing not real world communication that means students are often learning to pass an exam not to have a conversation not to acquire a language and even though the science has been around for a while the systems just move slowly and honestly that's why so many of us still feel like we studied English for years but still can't speak but the good news is you don't have to wait for the school systems to change you can change your own method starting today you can take the responsibility back

and own it create your own language learning journey and I know that this idea of just listening to things you actually enjoy can feel almost too simple because a lot of us have been taught that struggle equals to learning if you're struggling if you're sweating if you're working hard that means you're learning if something feels too easy no learning cannot be done this way but neuroscience tells us a completely different story and that's true for language learning and honestly for productivity too and one tool that has helped me build systems that actually support me without

burning me out is AUFlow and I want to say a huge thank you to them for sponsoring a portion of today's video because lately AUFlow has been helping me organize my time in a way that feels easy but is actually efficient aflow is a digital planner and calendar that takes all of your events and tasks from different apps like Gmail Notion Zoom Slack and brings them into one organized space to simplify for you guys AIFlow is a hub for all of your daily organization all of your productivity apps and planning tools my favorite feature of

AIFlow is that you can pull different tasks from different apps and see everything in one organized space your universal inbox their main goal is to save your time and reduce switching from one app to another you can drag and drop tasks directly into your calendar which makes it super easy to see where your time is going what you're doing all day and how to protect your energy their stats feature shows me how I'm actually spending my time what tasks and events take up my days which has been eyeopening especially when I say I'm busy but

haven't done anything that is actually super important to me work-wise and life-wise their AI co-pilot learns how I work and starts autosculing tasks for me it's like having a digital assistant who understands what I do every single day and keeps me on track without making me feel overwhelmed so if you're working on simplifying your productivity systems I highly recommend giving AIFlow a try i leave my link so that you can explore it for yourself and you can also get access to a one-on-one onboarding call to help you get set up all right let's now move

on to comprehensible input and why I think it is so important why I think it's the most important method to become fluent in any language so comprehensible input is a method where you immerse yourself in a language that is just slightly above your current level not too hard not too easy the key word here is comprehensible you can mostly understand it thanks to visuals or maybe context or familiarity think of when you're watching a YouTube video maybe a vlog and you can't understand everything that is happening there because the YouTuber is showing you everything you

know they're having breakfast they're showing you what they're having for breakfast so even if you don't know every single word you can still get what they're talking about your brain starts to fill in the gaps and this method is so great because it mimics how children learn their first language they don't get grammar lessons when they're very little they just listen watch and then slowly start repeating and that's the thing children get a lot of comprehensible input for free you know adults talk to them their parents their teachers there's no pressure everyone is just talking

to them and in the process they are absorbing this language they are starting to understand more and more but for some reason what I see happen very often is that adults don't want to do that for free children get a lot of comprehensible input for free everyone is talking to them everyone is showing them videos and reading books to them but adults prefer to pay someone else like a teacher to create this environment for them there's nothing wrong in taking classes but I really want you to think about it if you only take English classes

once per week and that is your only source of comprehensible input that's just not enough you can create this environment for yourself every single day the point is not to never ever take language classes the point is to be brutally honest with yourself do you create this language environment for yourself every single day or are you only relying on your language classes that happen once a week if you are then that is the reason why your progress is not happening as fast as you would like it to happen because your language classes shouldn't be the

only place you get your comprehensible input from i mean technically you can start taking classes every single day but the problem with that is that you will have to pay for your language classes every single day and a lot of us just don't have the budget for that and so instead of trying to take classes every single day why not create this comprehensible input environment for yourself every single day absolutely for free this idea of comprehensible input comes from the work of linguist Steven Crashen who developed the input hypothesis he found that the way we

actually learn the language the way we acquire the language is through understanding messages not through memorization in this video I'm going to show you guys he shares an amazing example to actually explain why comprehensible input is so powerful we acquire language in one way and only one way when we understand messages we call this comprehensible input a lot of us often feel obligated to start speaking from the very beginning and that means that we're going to start feeling very worried very anxious but we still push ourselves to speak even in the situations when we're not

surrounding ourselves with enough comprehensible input and I really like his idea that speaking is not the beginning of your language acquisition it is the result of all the comprehensible input you get over the months and years of you learning the language if you want to improve your speaking guys you have to focus on your comprehensible input first because a lot of you always ask me this question how can I improve my speaking skills in English the question that you guys should be asking yourself is are you getting enough comprehensible input every single day on a

regular basis is this language a part of your daily life or is it something that just happens once a week during your class and that's it and if that is the case that is also okay but you have to be honest with yourself and realize that if you're only studying the language once a week in a classroom you're doing grammar drills and grammar exercises and you're reading your textbook you're not actually enjoying the whole process the process of language acquisition is going to be slower for you again it's not good it's not bad it's just

a fact and if you want to you can accept it if you don't you have to change something about it and now let's talk about why input sometimes doesn't work because there is actually a concept that explains why comprehensible input sometimes doesn't seem to work even if you're doing everything right it's something that I personally wish more people knew about because it's something that I struggle with like 5 years ago i felt like I was getting enough comprehensible input but something was still not right something was not working and I didn't know what it was

and it's called the effective filter hypothesis and it was actually also developed by Steven Crashation a lot of people know his comprehensible input theory but not a lot of people talk about this other super important theory the effective filter hypothesis let me try to explain this idea in very simple words because I know this video is already very sciency so your brain has this little machine inside responsible for your language acquisition and this machine is called your language acquisition device and so now imagine you're getting all of this comprehensible input every single day you're watching

something listening to something and you're getting all of this information into your brain into your language acquisition device all of the comprehensible input is trying to get to there but between all of this comprehensible input and the machine inside your brain there is a filter and this filter is your effective filter hypothesis this filter is made of your emotions things like stress anxiety boredom sometimes a lack of motivation all of those things can act as blockers and actually block all of this amazing comprehensible input from reaching your language acquisition device and maybe first when you

just hear this you're like I don't know Veronica i don't think that's the reason but think about it a little bit more when you have to do something in your target language that you don't really like you're experiencing some emotions maybe you feel bored you have to do this grammar exercise and you feel extremely bored so you're not actually acquiring the language in this process because there is this filter this filter of negative emotions i remember when I first moved to Mexico I was so stressed out i was extremely anxious and so for the first

6 months I could not learn Spanish like nothing was working i was trying to memorize things i was trying to acquire the language as hard as I could but because that filter was so strong nothing was really working like all of this comprehensible input wasn't really getting into my language acquisition device and so often the problem isn't comprehensible input because this method is amazing i truly believe it's one of the best methods there is to learn a language to acquire a foreign language i think it's the emotional state you're in while you're trying to learn

this language and that is why I always tell you guys you have to choose the materials that you genuinely love because when you're choosing the things that you actually enjoy you often forget that you're even learning a foreign language because the message becomes more important than the language it's you know how sometimes you talk to a person in a foreign language and the conversation is so interesting you're so engaged and so focused on this person that you don't really feel self-conscious like if you make a mistake you make a mistake it doesn't really matter because

the language is not the most important thing right now the most important thing is communicating with this amazing person because you're enjoying the conversation so much and I remember when I was still in high school and middle school and I had to talk in class I had to practice English in a classroom i was so anxious i was so scared i was scared of making mistakes the language was definitely way more important than the message because all of the exercises I had to do like the speaking practice exercises they were boring like I actually did

not like the message and when you become more focused on the message than on the language that's when real learning real language acquisition starts to happen so if you want comprehensible input to actually work you need to start choosing content that lights you up that you would still would want to consume even if you weren't learning a foreign language i remember that time when I started making the most amount of progress in my English it was in around 2019 and that was the time when I became deeply passionate obsessed with veganism i was literally reading

every single book on becoming vegan on veganism I could lay my hands on and obviously all of those books weren't translated into Russian russian is my native language so I had to read those books in English because for me the message was so much more important than the language in 2019 my English level was definitely lower than it is right now so reading books in English was in general more challenging for me but because I was so deeply interested in this topic I did not care i wanted to understand the message and for me English

was just a tool to actually get all of this knowledge and to learn everything I could about this topic as fast as I could and so what I'm trying to communicate to you guys here is that I really don't want the language to stop you from getting the message from getting the knowledge you want to get or maybe the entertainment you want to get because earlier probably in 2015 I became very interested in watching American YouTubers and their vlogs and it was really entertaining for me and since we're talking a lot about a comprehensible input

and input means all of the information you're putting into your brain I think we also have to talk about output because a lot of people push themselves to speak too fast when they feel too anxious and too uncomfortable when I dug deeper into the concept of comprehensible input I learned that Steven Crashen tells everyone to wait like don't worry about speaking don't worry about writing because those things will come eventually and this may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you certainly came as a surprise to me talking is not practicing speaking

and writing are the result of acquiring a language they are not the starting point because when at the beginning of your language learning journey you're fully focused on comprehensible input what happens is you're feeding your brain you're feeding your language acquisition device and just like a sponge it starts to absorb everything quietly and gradually but it is happening and it is only possible when this effective filter is low when you're in a calm state when you're actually interested in what you're doing when the message becomes more important than the language so now imagine what happens

when you force yourself to do something that you don't want to do when you force yourself to speak and write even though you're not ready even though you don't want to again I'm talking about at the very beginning of your language learning journey because when you become more and more advanced obviously speaking and writing those things starts to happen naturally because this language starts to become a part of your life so here I'm talking about forcing yourself to speak to create complex sentences when all you really know how to say is hello how are you

so what you're doing is you're trying to speak and write without enough input you feel nervous your mind blanks you start translating well those things happen naturally because there's not enough comprehensible input inside of your language acquisition device yet and so what does this do it raises your effective filter which means that the input that you are receiving can't really reach your brain it's blocked it's blocked by this effective filter by all of the negative emotions you're experiencing in the moment so instead of learning instead of continuing your amazing language learning journey you tense up

you feel anxious and you stop you start turning something natural into a very stressful situation and so that is why the message I want to share in this video is let your output your speaking and writing come naturally speak when you feel ready write when you feel curious if you keep feeding your brain the right kind of input meaningful interesting and just a little bit challenging your brain will start to produce output you will start to speak you will start to write and those things will happen naturally they will feel effortless because you are ready

and you will start creating sentences that just flow and that is fluency being born okay guys I think it's going to be it for today's video if you liked it please don't forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel if you have some feedback to share with me some comments anything you want to share please leave me a comment don't forget to check out my language learning notion template if you want to organize your study routine and keep track of everything you're learning also if you want to simplify your productivity systems

I highly recommend AIFlow you can use my link in the description and get access to their one-on-one onboarding call to help you get set up okay so today I said that comprehensible input is the most important method to become fluent in English in any language you're learning and you can practice comprehensible input by reading something or watching something or listening to something and I actually have a video on my YouTube channel where I talk about why listening is the only skill you need to become fluent and so if you want to learn more make sure

to click right here and keep on watching