How I became fluent in English (my 3 strategies)

hi guys Willis here from the language scientist.com and in today's video I want to talk about how I became fluent in English on my own so first of all as you can see I'm wearing those orange glasses is because now it's 7 p.m and you know it's dark outside I don't want to get that blue light so I'm wearing those orange glasses I hope that you'll forgive me for that but so in today's video I'm going to talk about exactly what I did to get to my current English level which is you know I hope

you'll agree it's pretty decent and it took me a long time to get there and I think I haven't shared the strategies that I have used to get to that point because if you're new to this channel you know my name is Lewis again and I'm a native French speaker I was born and raised here in Tahiti in French Polynesia so a lot of you guys may not know what Tahiti is it's a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and so you know no one speaks English here everyone speaks French or Tahitian

I could only speak French and uh so I've never lived in an english-speak entry in you know in the U.S or in England never been there I've actually been to the us a few times for a very short periods of time just you know holidays and stuff like that but I've never spent any kind of you know more than like two weeks certainly in an English-speaking speaking country so I had to actually learn uh English on my own so there are mainly three things I want to call them three uh strategies that I use to

get to uh to my current level and two of them are things that I actually did to um get to that point and then the last strategy is something that I wish I did something that if I had done it I would have got to where I am a lot faster and the journey would have been a lot smoother so first of all I just want to give you a little bit of background about me so as I said I'm from Tahiti in French Polynesia you know when I got out of school just like you

know everyone basically who goes the who goes through the uh French uh education system I studied English for seven years and at the end of the seven years I could not have a proper conversation in English with a with a native speaker I could not you know watch a TV show and actually understand uh most of it so I'm not saying that you know school doesn't work as as far as like English classes but all I'm saying is that it's it's nowhere near enough it's not sufficient and school doesn't expose you to sort of the

quantity of uh English that you actually need in order to be fluent I'll get into that in a moment so I got out of school and I thought I was pretty good but I still could not have conversations in English I still could not understand uh you know TV shows and movies in English certainly and so one example is that of that is when I went to college I was in Switzerland and uh you know there were a lot of exchange students in in my University and so one of those guys a British guy he

was talking with uh um an Irish guy and we were in a train and so you know they were talking pretty fast and there was a lot of background noise because it was a train and so whenever they tried to talk to me I didn't really understand and I realized that even after you know seven years of studying English in school My Level was really low so I really needed needed to do something about it uh same story is you know a similar story is I was watching a movie I think it was The Hunger

Game I don't know if it was the first one or the second one I really don't know because I watched the movie and I I didn't understand much because there were no subtitles I didn't understand what they were saying so that's when I realized that I need a lot more practice and so I started using strategies I can't say it was really intentional I know that on my channel I now I put I upload a lot of Channel a lot of videos showing strategies that um I have experimented with and that I think are are

extremely effective but the truth is uh most of the strategies that I use to learn English where um not really intentional that there's stuff that I stumbled upon or stuff that I just naturally gravitated towards and they ended up making me fluent so I can't say it was intentional but my hope is that by telling you about this then it's going to inspire you and show you that you can learn English in any other language that you may be learning up to a very fluent level so these are the three strategies that I would use

if I were you trying to learn English or any other language the first one is repetitive listening I think by far this is the most um the method that really made me that really got me perhaps I would say 80 percent of the weight there so I'm perhaps exaggerating but I think this is the most valuable method and the reason why it's so valuable is because it's very easy so let me explain I think naturally I'm the kind of person who uh you know when I watch a movie when I watch when I listen to

a podcast episode when I read something and I really like it I tend to go back and actually re-listen or re-watch or reread that thing multiple times over the course of you know multiple days multiple weeks multiple months I go back to what I like even year after year and so you know as I was learning English I was actually listening to a lot of podcasts uh watching a lot of movies and TV shows in English reading a lot of stuff in English and you know I would say especially with podcasts uh podcasts and videos

that really helped me because I would listen to podcasts things like you know Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss and you know Joe Rogan it's really not easy for non-native speakers because you know they use a lot of slang it goes very fast and a lot of times they don't explain sort of the underlying context it's like you're jumping right into the conversation sometimes so it's very complicated but I don't know I was kind of just fascinated with this uh this uh podcast and I saw that it was extremely successful even in even like five ten

years ago and so I continued just listening to the same episodes I also listened to uh London reel you know back in the days and I just listened to the same episodes again and again and again and again and I don't think it was you know I'm pretty sure it was not uh sort of uh for me a really an intentional sort of uh will to to actually learn English I was just fascinated with it and so the result of that was that I was exposed to the same words the same grammatical constructions the same

pronunciation patterns over and over and over again and now I realize that repetition really is the name of the game when you know when it comes to language learning when it comes to learning English or learning any language repetition is the name of the game it's extremely important I've talked about that in many many videos and I can't emphasize that enough and repetitive listening that is the act of listening to the same stuff over and over again over the course of multiple days weeks months and potentially years has had a huge benefit on my English

you know speaking and listening ability certainly so that's the first thing you know repetitive listening and the way that you can do this it's pretty easy just you know listen to the same stuff over and over again now second strategy I want to talk about uh I I would say it's like just you know making the switch so what I'm trying to say here is that I switched my way of living as if I was living in an English-speaking country so I'm talking specifically about the period when I was in Switzerland I was in Switzerland

I lived in Switzerland in the french-speaking part of Switzerland and uh I don't know from one day to the next I just decided you know what I'm just going to do everything everything in English so I just you know every every time I looked up something on the Internet I would just you know look for it using English keywords on Google I would only go on uh you know English websites written in English I would only read stuff in English and I would only listen to stuff and watch stuff in English that's basically it and

I tended to uh gravitate around like exchange students for example you know that gave me the opportunity to speak English at all times although that was not exactly easy there you know there were plenty of opportunities to to speak French so it's not like I was completely you know living 100 in English but I did everything that I could to really be surrounded really be in this English uh environment I switched my computer's language to English I switched my smartphones language to English as well and that's basically it I just did everything in English I

even started thinking in English and it just becomes like it's something that's automatic and just by doing that like I don't know if people really realize how beneficial that can be because if you want to learn a language you know English or whatever like some any other language you need to really put in the hours especially if you want to get to a fluent level it's going to take thousands of hours I know that you know in some of my other videos I I try to sound a lot more um optimistic a lot more enthusiastic

saying that you know after a few hundred hours you can reach a very good level which is true you can get to a conversational level but if you want to really break through that barrier of you know being like near native or a native level in a language it's gonna take thousands of hours and there's no there's no hack there's no shortcut you need to put in the hours and switching your entire life to that language plus doing the repetitive repetitive uh listening dot just you know you're just putting in the hours it's extremely effective

and I think this is the only way to go to be honest now I want to move on to the third strategy and this is not something that that I did and this is something that I wish I had done because now I you know I've done a lot more research I have more experience as far as language learning I've learned Italian and I've learned Japanese to a pretty high level and uh especially you know learning Japanese it has improved the way in which I think about language learning in general because Japanese is just orders

of magnitude uh more difficult and more time consuming than than learning English because it's so much more different so I've thought about this a lot and you know as as I was saying I switched my life to English I did some repetitive listening as well in order to get as much input as possible so this was my my entire strategy although I can't really call it a strategy because it was not really intentional I just did it because I thought it was cool because I wanted to do it and so my entire strategy revolved around

uh doing a lot of input so listening a lot and reading a lot I would say listening was uh probably constituted the the bulk of my strategy and it still is it is the case right now for you know English and Japanese and so what I understand now is that the input that you receive so the stuff that you've listened to and the stuff that you read and you know the TV shows that you watch you're going to benefit from them you're going to become fluent from them only if that input is actually comprehensible to

you so what this means is that if you're watching stuff if you're listening to stuff that is just you know way above your level which is the case for you know most people watching a TV show in English are not going to understand most of it you know if you're at a beginner level in English or even intermediate level it's totally normal because all of that stuff is aimed at you know native speakers if you listen to The Joe Rogan Experience or Tim Ferriss you're not going to understand most of it as you know a

standard English learner and that's a problem because in order to really benefit from all of this input it needs to be at what Dr Stephen crashing I think he said it was n plus one or I plus one meaning that ideally in every sentence you want to have a maximum of like one word that you don't know that gives you an an idea of sort of the level that you should be uh looking for my point here is that a lot of English Learners are going to and you know a lot of language Learners in

general are going to get a lot of input through listening and reading but it's not going to be at the right level it's going to be too difficult so then what do you do what is the solution well the on the other hand on the other hand of the spectrum what you can do is get actually you know like much easier material material that is made for language learning like for example you know textbooks and that kind of stuff but that kind of stuff is pretty boring and so there's no way that you're going to

be able to put in hundreds or you know thousands of hours just consuming that kind of stuff so my advice and what I would have done is use a tool like link for example and I'm going to put a link in the description of this video to create a free account to the website called link which can help you greatly in learning so I'm going to explain what it is I just want to tell you first I'm 100 honest if you create a free account with the link in the description and you end up purchasing

a subscription I am an affiliate for link because I believe it's uh it's a great tool so I will get a small percentage of uh that sale but it's really up to you I want you to just try it out and if it helps you then you know go ahead so as I was as I was saying so if you're listening and reading stuff in English or any language in order to learn that language it needs to become comprehensible first so my suggestion would be for example let's say that you're watching something on Netflix and

you're learning English you're watching this TV show in English so what you can do is go on Netflix and you can use Link Link actually has a Chrome extension and so you can just click on a button in your browser and what it's going to do is that it's going to import all of the subtitles of that TV show or that movie in the link website and it's going to help you you're going to do assisted uh reading and you can click on certain words and it's going to give you the translation for them you

can select entire phrases you know sentences and it's going to give you the translation of those sentences so before actually watching the TV show or movie you can start reading and really start to understand the the vocabulary words and prepare yourself before you actually watch uh the the TV or the TV show or or the movie and you can do the same thing with podcasts if you can find you know transcripts you can do the same thing with uh with YouTube videos for example and so what I'm trying to convey here is that using link

or you can use another tool if you want but I find that link is actually very very practical and it's very cheap you can start preparing this uh this listening phase and this this whole you know input you can get a lot more comprehensible input which means that the input that you're going to get is going to benefit you a lot more than it did for me because most of the stuff I was listening to especially in the beginning I did not understand you know much of it so this is just an extra tip this

is something I wish I knew this is something I'm currently doing for Japanese but I didn't do it for English but so yeah so an extra tip just uh just to help you here so once again I have put a link in the description you can click on it and you will be able to use Link for free uh you you have you'll have a free account and if you want to learn more about some of my language learning strategies you can go to the language scientist.com and that's pretty much it I hope you like

this video and I'll see you in the next one