there are three major mistakes that you might be making right now that are killing your confidence in learning English in learning to speak English and this is something that I have been seeing in my own Learners and in my YouTube comments lately and it's just it's killing me it's making me very sad to see and so I want to talk about these three things today in this video this video will probably be more casual um because I want to get it out to you as quickly as possible so that you can begin to solve these
problems in your life if you are having trouble especially with confidence and with speaking English my name is Britney I'm an English teacher um welcome to my channel if this is the first video you are seeing okay so the first thing I want to warn warn you about is something that um affected me personally recently the other day I was watching a YouTube video and in this YouTube video there was an American excuse me an American man speaking French even though it's not his first language he was kind of um maybe a advanced beginner or
intermediate level student and my first reaction when I started listening to this video was to get really tense I realized that I felt kind of embarrassed for him um I felt I was judging him I was judging his French a lot um because he was making the same mistakes that I do he has the same kind of accent that I do when I speak French and I was being so critical of him in my head it it was not good it was a negative feeling and then I went to read the comments under the video
and all of the comments were so positive all of the comments were from French people native French speakers who were congratulating him on how well he was doing and congrat ating him for trying for being brave um telling him that his French was really good and I just felt bad I felt really bad that I had judged him and that I had criticized him because really I was just criticizing myself and I realized that I do this in real life too when I hear other American English speakers um or Canadian English speakers people that have
an accent similar to mine trying to speak French I I maybe cringe a little bit I get a little bit nervous for them or a little bit embarrassed for them and I hate this why do I do this um it's it's me being very judgmental and critical of myself that's that was a a very hard realization that I had and so I want you to avoid this um if you are doing this maybe this is not a problem for you but if you find yourself making fun of in your head or criticizing or judging other
people from your language background who are trying to speak English this is holding you back this is blocking you from becoming a confident English speaker of course it's okay to learn from other people's mistakes we should learn from each other's mistakes but to to judge other people who are trying to learn language H it is so so detrimental for our own confidence when we make fun of other people when we think critically about other people we are only hurting our own confidence so lesson for me lesson for me to keep in mind all right and
the second thing I have here this is another one that I am personally guilty of so many Learners say to me I want to be fluent in English speaking is my number one goal I want to be able to have everyday fluent conversations spoken conversations however when I look at their program or their um their study time or their study materials if I imagine a pie chart of their day and how much time is spent speaking um usually it's about zero zero minutes spent speaking zero minutes of English words coming out of their mouths or
maybe just a few hours a week this was my case in high school we only had maybe two or three hours of Class A Week learning French uh and then we almost never spoke there was no speaking practice you could spend 20 years watching professional basketball players play basketball right you could spend your whole life watching professional basketball players play basketball but that will never make you a good basketball player you'll probably learn the rules really well but you will never be able to dribble a basketball shoot a basketball or play the game if speaking
is your number one goal you got to make make time for speaking even if it's just speaking to yourself speaking to an object in your house having pretend conversations with your toothbrush talking to chat GPT on your phone imagining conversations with your imaginary friend repeating sentences out loud as you're watching a TV show or a YouTube video but English words must must must be formed by the muscles of your mouth and come out of your mouth if speaking is your number one goal I actually made a five day speaking challenge if you want to try
it it's totally free I'll leave a link down below for you okay and the third one I need to show you something for this so this um this is a textbook an English textbook for a school that I used to work for um so let me just show you animals and nature don't get me wrong I love animals and nature but are you going to be a zookeeper are you going to be speaking English in the jungle if not why is the first set of vocabulary that we're learning and teaching about animals and nature I
find it so frustrating as a teacher and as a language student to concentrate so much time and energy on vocabulary that is not relevant not important to our real lives starting today carry a little notebook around all day long and pay attention to the conversations that you have in your first language every time you say a phrase um that you feel like you use often write it down write it in your first language in your notebook when you go home at the end of the day look at all of the vocabulary that you used in
your first language all day long translate those phrases those words those sentences into English and study that list of vocabulary and by study I mean try to use that vocabulary even if it's just by yourself in your home that's the real vocabulary that is that is the real vocabulary that you need to be concentrating on okay I hope these tips were helpful I will see you again very very soon please let me know if you enjoy this type of video much more to come soon guys I'm sorry I have just been so busy all of
January and now into febru February um just haven't had a lot of time um but more more videos more stuff to come if you're not on my email newsletter down below please sign up I send a really really special email every week sometimes with extra videos all right guys have a great day bye
