Until you can think in English, you won't truly become fluent. Do you translate from your native language into English while you're speaking in conversation? It slows you down, doesn't it?
It creates unnatural pauses and it increases your stress levels while you're speaking because you panic when you realise you're taking too long to translate words in your head. All of this stops you from being able to communicate easily and naturally in English so today I want to share some simple exercises and techniques to train your brain to think in English. I'm Emma and here at Hey Lady!
we are passionate about helping women to speak up and say yes to more new opportunities as English speakers. You can find out more about us by visiting our website or find us on our socials. Thinking in English is so related and connected to feeling fluent in English, being able to speak without pause or hesitation, just to have the words ready on the tip of your tongue.
So how do you get from where you are right now to that magical place? How can you train your brain to think in English? One of the core principles of learning to think in English is to immerse yourself consistently and that makes sense.
You surround yourself with the language that you're learning as much as possible. If you haven't already made the switch to English speaking news, start there. Learn the lyrics to English songs and listen or sing to them as much as you can.
Watch movies or TV shows if that's your thing or read books or listen to audiobooks or podcasts. While you're doing any of these things, you're hearing words and useful grammatical structures in context which helps you to understand how they're used in real life situations and it makes it easier for you to recall them when you need to use them in your own thoughts or your own conversations. I recommend allocating about thirty minutes every day to immersing yourself in English and the wonderful thing about doing it daily is that the results compound over time.
You'll reach your goal of thinking in English much faster if you practise every day rather than practising for five hours once a fortnight and that's because you are progressively building on what you did the day before. Think about when you go to the gym and you work out. You feel good, right?
But if you don't go again for two whole weeks, your muscle and your stamina reverts. It starts to go backwards. So the next time that you're there, you're actually just building up the strength that you lost during that period where you weren't working out.
But if you keep working out every day, you're going to be progressively building that lasting strength and muscle, right? It's the same with your English training. Now listening and immersion are so good!
You can walk around all day, every day receiving English through your headphones, right? And that exposure to the language is great but in order to train your brain to be thinking in English, you need to work a little bit harder. You need to activate the ideas, the language and the grammatical structures in your mind so that you can really easily access them while you're thinking in English.
You need to keep that language super active. Now I've got a few specific exercises that you can do to train your brain to think in English and I've designed these activities to be short and manageable. You'll be able to do these tasks in thirty minutes or less each day.
Let's use a podcast as the source. Six Minute English is fantastic because their episodes are short and sweet, and they're focused on a clear specific context. Before you press play, spend 60 seconds brainstorming words and ideas that you already know about the podcast topic.
The trick here is not to translate. If you catch yourself trying to translate a word from your native language into English, stop and move on. Just write down the English words that come to you.
Then you're going to play the episode through. Now I really want you to give your full focus to the episode while you're doing this activity. And that's why the Six Minute episodes are great.
They're short, they're sweet. Once you finish listening, use an ideas map to quickly record the story or the main ideas from the podcast in English. Do this straight after you finish listening and intentionally focus on recalling the words and the ideas in English.
It doesn't need to be in any particular order. But write down what you recall from the episode as soon as those things pop into your mind. What's great about this is that you're making these neurological connections between the language that you've just been listening to and the English words that you need to talk about the topic or to share these ideas again.
To take it one step further, meet with your speaking partner to discuss the podcast episode. And here's the thing, the more you practise doing it, the easier it becomes to think in the language, to think in English. So more and more opportunities to activate English words, ideas and thoughts in your mind, more power to you!
Let me give you another exercise to try. This time we're going to use a YouTube video as the source. At the time of filming this video, our conversation topic inside Hey Lady!
is about fast fashion so we're learning lots of vocabulary and ideas about the fashion industry, about sustainability and the environmental impacts. So we're going to use one of the recommended resources inside the platform. It's a video about the fast fashion industry.
Before we do anything else, we're just going to watch the first one minute of the video without the sound on. We're going to use this video to prompt your brain to think in English because there's a lot of visual imagery related to this topic so make sure you have a piece of paper in front of you so that you can write down what you see or you don't need to write it down, you could say it out loud or even just think them in English, that's okay. Now in this video, the images move really quickly so I'm gonna slow down the playback speed.
Down to zero point five just to allow your brain a bit more time, a natural amount of time to react. And we're going to watch the first full minute of the video. If there were some things that you saw on the screen as you were watching but you couldn't quite think of the word in English, take a moment to look them up once you finish that first minute.
Try to avoid translating directly from your own language and instead, search for the word in English. This will help you keep your brain in English and connect other words or ideas to the vocabulary that you're trying to lock into your brain. Then if you have time, watch the video again, complete the same activity again because on the second time, you're going to see those words that you didn't have in your mind before.
That prompt on the screen is going to help you to quickly retrieve the word that you know, strengthening that neurological pathway. There are so many things that you can do to practise like this on your own or to practise with your speaking partner or your study group to help reinforce those words and bring them to your thoughts. The more that you repeat and you hone a specific topic, the stronger you make those pathways in your brain and the easier it's going to be to think in English.
The next strategy that's going to train your brain to think in English is to engage in English conversations and actually speak. Although you might be nervous, although you might be anxious, practise speaking as much as possible because it's in these real conversations that you're actually forced to think on your feet and to respond really quickly in English. Now this activity is made much, much easier if what you were doing in the previous exercises is actually what you are talking about as well so that the ideas, the vocabulary, everything you need is connected.
Now if you're a regular viewer of this channel, you'll know that inside the Hey Lady! Community there are conversation events about our topic happening every day and as a member, you can join as many of them as you like so it makes it really easy to to speak regularly and to practise consistently. And finally, you can train your brain to think in English by setting a fixed amount of time, just five minutes.
You can set a timer and simply describe what is happening around you in the world. If you're on a walk, on the bus, in your office, the best thing about this activity is you can do it anytime, anywhere. And during that time, your only task is to mentally focus on pulling your brain away from your native language and towards English.
Describe the world around you, narrate your actions, what you're doing, express your thoughts or your opinions about what's happening around you in that moment. And you can start with words, then build up to simple sentences about actions and gradually start to increase the complexity. You can shift some of the tenses you're using, talk about what happened at the same time yesterday or what you hope will happen in the future.
Now the short time frame here is really important, it can be even less because this activity is really exhausting. Don't push it too far that it becomes unfun or boring. This skill is like flexibility, you know it gradually builds up over time, it becomes easier if you do it regularly.
So just make a habit of it. Consistency is so so important so make sure you set aside a dedicated amount of time each day to engage in English and to complete one of these exercises. I recommend using a podcast series or an audiobook and I've left a few recommendations down in the description or if you're a Hey Lady!
member, you can use the extra resources associated with our conversation topic and I'm recommending these things because you can keep coming back to the same place to get those materials, to get the next episode, to get the next chapter. Stay motivated! Keep practising and eventually, thinking in English is going to become second nature for you.
I'll see you in the next video.
