so you've been studying a new language for a while now you know tons of words you spend hours going over grammar rules but every time you try to speak it's like nothing so what's going on today I'm breaking down the real reasons why so many language Learners get stuck when it comes to speaking and spoiler it's not how many words you know and how perfectly you can conjugate verbs so the first thing I want to start with is that knowing words isn't enough because honestly I hear it all the time if you know a lot
of words you you'll be able to speak fluently but fluency is using words in real conversations not just memorizing them these two words are really important using and memorizing it's all about how you can use all of these words you learned and not just about how many words you can memorize it's not a memorizing competition cuz I was that person too a few years back when I was in college I literally tried to stockpile vocabulary in English I wanted to memorize all the complicated advanced words in English because I thought that's what fluency was but
obviously in real conversations I couldn't use any of these words because I either forgot them or I learned them out of context and so I didn't know how to use them in real life and so over time what I dis discovered is memorizing high frequency words and learning how to use them in real conversations is the key because for ashle speaking we usually don't use a lot of advanced vocabulary and when we do idioms Expressions phrases and so when that happens when you already have a good base of vocabulary that you can use use is
the most important word here it's going to be much easier to add idms to add phrasal verbs add some interesting Expressions the next thing I see a lot of language Learners do is you wait to feel ready and I honestly think that that's the biggest trap just thinking that one day you will wake up and suddenly you're ready to speak and suddenly you feel so confident and you don't care about making mistakes unfortunately that's a skill and you will only be able to have that skill if you practice enough when you start speaking when you
jump into conversations even if you're not 100% prepared and obviously because I don't want your first speaking experience to be super important super nerve-wracking like a presentation at work I recommend creating those small opportunities to speak early on can be talking to yourself try to look at an object in your apartment for example here I have my bed and try to talk about it in English try to retrieve all of this vocabulary all of this information from your passive vocabulary move it to your active vocabulary and building your confidence in those small opportunities will help
you so much later on the next thing that makes it super hard for language Learners to start speaking is over focusing on grammar rules like this thing about being perfect about being a perfectionist if your grammar is not perfect you become completely paralyzed and what happens in those moments obviously your priority is no longer communicating it's more about focusing on forming perfectly curated sentences you're not trying to have this perfect Royal English you're trying to communicate your thoughts effectively and yes communicating your thoughts effectively does include trying to figure out how to say the sentence
if you understand that you know you've been trying to use this grammar rule over and over again and you still can't get a right maybe it's time to actually sit down and try to understand it because I also don't really support that approach where you know it's fine I'm just going to say whatever I know and the other person has to figure it out it's not my responsibility no communication means trying to communicate your thoughts effectively and if at one point you realize that you're lacking some knowledge when it comes to grammar why not just
sit down open a textbook and try to learn this grammar rule to then be able to commun unicate your thoughts effectively and I'm sure you guys can agree with me here that consistency and planning are so important when it comes to language learning but even the most consistent Learners can feel stuck and unsure where to begin and that's where having the right tools and support can make all the difference and that is exactly where life XP comes in I want to say a huge thank you to them for sponsoring a portion of this video and
for providing a platform that has genually improve my language skills life XP is a language learning platform offering personalized one-on-one tutoring with professional teachers for the past year I've been using life XP to take private Spanish classes and the progress I've made has been so noticeable because for me having this opportunity to practice in real conversations improves my speaking skills so so much right now I feel a lot more confident engaging with native speakers in everyday situations it's just something that I can't achieve if I study alone all the time lxp offers lessons in over
30 languages including English and Spanish with access to more than 2,000 th experienced teachers you can be a beginner or an advanced learner life XP will help you find the right tutor for you recently they also introduced an AI powered personalized path for English Learners this feature customizes lessons to match your unique learning styles and helps with your grammar listening speaking and provides a clear structure to help you progress efficiently what makes CICS be so great is that they combine technology with a human touch yes their AI creates all the exercises but the core learning
experience has happens with professional teachers so if you want to give lxp a try you can book your first try lesson for only 99 cents plus you can enjoy a 30% discount on any subscription with my promo code Veronica english3 just click the link in my description and check out their platform the next possible reason why it might be hard for you to speak is because you compare yourself to native speakers and that honestly used to happen to me a lot I used to compare myself with native speakers so much because I wanted to sound
American I wanted to sound like a native speaker who was born in the United States of America and if I didn't I didn't even want to speak English and that's crazy and it's also connected to trying to be perfect and I know language Learners struggle with that all the time what helped me overcome this is realizing that yes I have an accent when I speak English because I'm not a native English speaker and that also means that I speak a different language so I already speak multiple languages and that's why I have an accident in
English if I was a native English speaker it would mean that I wasn't a native fresian speaker so now when I speak English when I speak Spanish I do have an accent in all of these languages but that just shows my International background that I'm learning a lot of different languages that I come from a different country and I'm trying to learn more things about this culture and honestly at one point I just realized that trying to be perfect is extremely tiring when I speak English and I try to sound perfect it makes me so
tired and when I try to be my myself Flaws and All mistakes and all I just feel so much better I feel alive this is who I am I'm not trying to pretend I'm not trying to fix in my head every single sentence I'm saying and make sure I'm saying it in the most advanced way possible I'm just speaking this language and I'm enjoying the fact that I can do it the next hidden reason that might make it more difficult for you to speak is because you're over relying on translation when I try to translate
every single word from my native language that really creates slow and chunky sentences and they feel really unnatural and so that's why in every single one of my videos I recommend moving away from translation as fast as possible you need to know how to translate the word Apple to your native language you can pretty much memorize all of the nouns without your native language because you can use a picture and this is the word Apple the same goes for verbs and adjectives and everything else and that is exactly how you're going to start thinking in
a foreign language because I see a lot of videos on YouTube about how to start thinking in English and Spanish and it's honestly pretty easy you just have to practice the language consistently listen a lot and also move away from translation stop translating every single word to your native language start diving deep into this new language and try explaining the new words with the words you already know and you're going to immediately start retrieving information from your brain in English in your forign language okay and finally something that might be hindering your speaking progress is
you probably focus on quantity over quality you try to memorize all the grammar rules at once you download a list of high frequency words and you just try to gram all of that I don't know about you guys but when I do that when I focus on quantity it just makes me feel overwhelmed because there are so many different grammer rules there's so many different exceptions so many new words that I can learn instead of actually focusing on intentional learning on the things that you need right here right now I think in life in general
I'm a huge proponent of asking yourself the question why more often why are you doing that instead of cramming everything mindlessly please be more intentional ask yourself this question why more often why are you trying to cram this list of new vocabulary what's the point of all of that I get it sometimes we have to do it because we have an exam so we don't really have a Choice here but when you do have a choice ask yourself the question why more often when you have a lot of different options to choose from why are
you choosing the option that makes you feel bad that makes you feel demotivated and that makes you feel like you don't want to study this language anymore so I think it's going to be it for this video if you liked it please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my YouTube channel I highly highly recommend live XP you can check them out in the description and plus with my promo code Veronica English 30 you can get a nice discount if you want to see what habits may be a successful language learner I highly recommend
this video just click right here and keep on watching
