You're studying English every day, but you're still not fluent.
It's not because you're bad at languages.
Your study plan is wrong.
I've been teaching English for over 30 years.
Today I will help you break out of the intermediate level, finally achieve, finally reach advanced level English of English speaking and listening.
You know 95, I'd say, of intermediate English learners are using the same broken system and that's why they're stuck.
They keep doing the same things over and over, and they're not getting a better result.
Today I'm going to give you an exact 90-day plan to go from intermediate level to advanced level.
I'll show you what actually works.
Okay, what you'll learn today is a three-part system, okay?
And this is in my book.
I'll give you links in the description below.
Get my book for free, and it discusses this system in much more detail.
Number one, we need to discuss why your current plan is not working, right?
I can't remember who the quote's from, but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result, right?
And we all get stuck in this where we're doing the same thing and we think oh, if I just do this same thing more or harder, well then I'll finally get a different result, a better result.
Instead, we just keep getting the same result.
So we got to change what we're doing to get a better result.
And sometimes what we need at beginner level is different than what we need at intermediate level or advanced levels.
Number two what I'll give you in this video is the three-part system.
The three-part system which you can use.
You know how to do it, what to do differently.
And then number three.
What I'll give you today is an exact daily schedule how many minutes per day, how to break it up, what to do in each part of the day to break out of the intermediate level and achieve advanced levels of English speaking.
I'm also going to reveal.
You know the secret, the one mistake that kills more English learning.
You know advancement improvements than anything else.
And stay tuned to the end.
I'll discuss that method and that secret of really the big mistake.
Okay, the intermediate step.
The plateau.
This is called a plateau.
A plateau is like, you know, it's like a hill, but it's flat.
Right?
It's flat at the top.
Remember, I was walking in Spain.
I was walking, doing the Camino de Santiago.
And there's a section of Spain called the Meseta, the meseta, and it's a giant plateau.
You go up, kind of this long rise and then you get to the top and then it's just flat for a long time walking, several days and days walking on that plateau.
It's the same thing if you picture your english learning like as a graph, as a line, and going up means you're getting better, you're getting better, and then what happens?
It gets flat and you're still doing the same things.
You're working hard but you're not improving at all.
It just stays flat, and that's called a plateau.
Okay, so here's why you're stuck.
Of course, you know, you're probably translating in your head still.
This is one of the key features of being advanced is that you're not translating anymore.
It's just flowing out, right?
That's why I call this effortless English.
It's flowing out.
That's what fluency really means.
Fluency comes from the word fluid, right? which is the idea of water flowing.
Water moves effortlessly, right?
Number two, you probably fear mistakes, right?
This is, again, part of thinking too much in your head.
Instead of the language coming out just automatically and effortlessly.
What happens is you start thinking and you get worried about mistakes.
This also keeps you stuck.
Number three, wrong inputs, right?
This keeps you stuck.
Inputs, what's that?
That's the English that's coming into, right, in, input, into, into your brain.
And there are two kinds, right?
The input of English can come into your ears that's listening or it can come in through your eyes reading.
You're probably using the wrong ones, right?
Most people at the intermediate level, they get stuck.
They're reading textbooks.
They're trying to memorize word lists.
They're studying grammar rules.
They may be listening, but they're listening to kind of what I would call fake English school English exercises lessons things, academic type of things.
And these do not build fluency at all.
You can eventually start doing those more academic things if you need them.
But It's sort of a later step, an advanced step, not an intermediate step.
So here's another problem.
A balanced study plan does not work.
Balanced.
This is an idea you'll find in so many textbooks in schools and English teachers this idea of balance.
What does that mean?
It means okay, I'll do 25 speaking practice, 25 listening practice, 25 writing and 25 reading, right.
And you're going to try to balance that out over these four skills of English, these four skills of language.
And actually, this does not work.
It doesn't work.
What actually does work much, much better is something called focal skills.
I remember I was teaching in a town called Gainesville, Georgia, kind of a smaller town.
It's a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia in the United States.
And I'm teaching a class of immigrants from lots of different countries.
And I had a begin more of a beginner class and I had an intermediate class and I was teaching them.
And you know I had.
I was stuck in a plateau too as a teacher, because I hadn't proved I was a beginner teacher.
Didn't know what I was doing.
Terrible.
But then over a few years, I got better and better and better.
And I go into class and I open up the textbook again.
This was before Effortless English, so I was still using the old methods, but I had a lot of energy.
I really cared about my students.
I talked to them after class.
I would take the lesson from the textbook and try to make it as understandable as possible.
I'd do my best to make it understandable, to explain everything clearly.
And I said, hi, how are you?
Hey, welcome everybody.
A lot of energy, right?
I was giving all of my energy and focus and intelligence, doing my best to make the class interesting fun, understandable and useful.
And yet, I remember sitting there one time and just thinking, I'm stuck.
They're not really getting better.
They are stuck at intermediate level, and I'm stuck.
I'm at an intermediate level of a teacher.
I'm kind of the same as a lot of other teachers who have been teaching for years and years.
And I decided I have to get serious.
I need to get serious, and I've got to do something different.
Something's wrong.
At that time I decided to get a master's in teaching English as a second language.
TESOL T-E-S-O-L.
Some people call it T-E-F-L, teaching English as a foreign language.
Anyway, I get an application and I fill it out.
The school I choose is called Shenandoah University.
A little program, little master's degree program in West Virginia in the United States.
Actually, so I think Virginia now that I think, but sorry, Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.
Uh, and I enroll, I start taking the classes and I'm so fortunate because, although a very small program, it was very, very innovative, very creative, led by a couple of professors at that time.
Um, Dr. Murphy and Dr. Hastings.
And they taught me a system they developed called focal skills.
And they did a lot of research about focal skills.
And the idea of focal skills is you focus, focal focus, you focus on only one skill at a time.
You don't try to balance some speaking, some listening, some reading, some writing.
Instead, what they decided to try was Let's focus on one skill first.
And just total focus.
Have the students focus only on, for example, listening.
And listening is the first one and the most important.
This is what kids do with their own native language.
It's what I did, what you probably did, right?
Listening is first.
Babies listen.
Babies don't read.
Babies don't really speak.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right?
And they certainly don't write.
So the first skill...
The foundation of all language, including English, is listening, listening, listening.
So first, you get your listening to a very, very high advanced level.
You focus completely and totally on listening, 100% on listening, focal skills.
What's really cool about this?
They did a lot of research, Dr Hastings and Dr Murphy, and what's so cool about this is that They had students focusing.
I think they did it about three to six months.
I know they played with different lengths of time.
But of course the students listening improved tremendously very quickly, because that's all they were doing.
They were focused so much on listening.
The students listening shot up and improved very quickly and they got to advanced levels of listening.
But what's very interesting is that the students in the listening-only, the listening-focused class also improve their speaking a lot.
They even improve their reading and they even improve their writing ability.
The other skills still improved even though the students were totally focused on listening.
You can call this a spillover effect or a...
I don't know what you would call it, but it's real.
So I think students they fear.
Oh, if I focus on listening only, my other skills aren't going to improve.
That's not true.
They will improve.
It's very cool.
You don't even need to think about speaking or reading or writing, and they'll still get better.
And of course, your listening will get better incredibly fast.
Then the second skill, once listening is at an advanced level, then you focus on reading.
You notice we're focusing on the input skills first, right?
The understanding skills.
First, we're going to focus on with the ears, and then next you go to the eyes, right?
And then?
So this next part of the focal skills approach is you focus on reading reading reading, tons and tons of tons of reading.
A lot of reading for pleasure, but just huge amounts of reading.
Again, they found that, even though students were focused on reading, their other skills still improved.
Of course, reading shot up and became advanced.
Their listening was already advanced, but it still got better even during the reading focus.
And speaking and writing also improved during that reading focus as well.
Now, here's what's really cool.
Now we have audiobooks.
It's so easy to find audiobooks, right?
You can actually do reading.
When you're doing your reading focus, you can also still be listening.
You could be listening to the audio books, but also scan with your eyes as you listen.
It's like a two for one effect.
So you're focused on reading, but you're reading with both your eyes and ears at the same time.
Extra powerful.
What's the third focal skill to focus on after your listening's advanced, your reading's advanced?
Then it's time for speaking.
Speaking, speaking, speaking, speaking.
And this is where you finally will really focus on the output.
You can use AI to start chatting with AI, chatbots and things like that.
That's great.
Once you feel comfortable with that, start talking to real people.
You know, go on italki or any other conversation connection site.
Join my VIP program.
Any of my programs, actually.
You join our community.
You can meet people there and set up Zoom calls for chatting and talking and practicing.
So speak, speak, speak, speak, speak.
And then finally, writing is the very last one.
Don't even think about writing until the end.
That's an advanced skill.
Your listening is advanced.
Your reading is advanced.
Your speaking is advanced.
And speaking can also include pronunciation.
And then when all three of those are advanced, now it's time to focus on writing.
It's the last skill to focus on, okay?
But we're not going to worry about writing today.
I don't really focus too much on writing.
Okay, so now let's get into the three-part system to use during this 90 days to jump up.
Okay, I'm going to give you, we're going to keep this focal skills idea in mind.
Number one is the fuel, the psychology, the energy, the part that is neglected, that is forgotten by so many.
Okay, the fuel, the energy.
If your energy is low, if your motivation is low, if you just think ah, I don't like English, you're not enjoying it, You're not motivated to do much.
You're not going to succeed.
It doesn't matter what method.
You can use any method in the world.
And if you're unmotivated and you have low energy, you're not focused.
You're not concentrating, you're going to fail.
Okay?
So you've got to get that energy up every day, every morning, every single time you are listening to English, reading English, speaking English, anything.
Okay, so here's how you do it.
You start with a morning energy ritual.
My VIP members learn this in detail.
I'll give you the quick idea.
Okay, in five to ten minutes in the morning, when you get up right before you start listening to English, you're going to put yourself in a peak state, a peak emotional state.
Peak means top, right?
A peak is a mountaintop, top of a mountain, it's the very top.
So top energy, that means positive, high energy, not i'll listen to some english and you're half half awake right, or you're bored.
No, peak energy, peak energy, right.
And here's another important point emotion equals memory, right.
Many times, if you think of your long-term memories from your life, anything that happened to you in life, Usually your strongest memories are events or things that happen where you have a strong emotion and that could be negative or positive, right.
Something terrible happens to you.
You have all these terrible, strong, negative emotions, fear, for example.
You remember that event.
You remember what happened, right?
Now, of course, we want to focus on the positive, not the negative.
I don't want you feeling afraid of English.
So what you're going to do, it's very simple.
You play some energetic, motivational music that you love.
Any kind of music that just makes you feel like jumping in.
Yeah, you feel great.
You just play one song, five minutes.
While you're doing it, you go into like...
People call this a power pose.
But basically, you want your arms up in the air.
You want your chin up.
Don't be looking down.
You don't need looking up.
You want to put a big smile on your face, even if it's fake.
Just pretend.
Maybe it's a bad morning.
Just pretend, okay?
Do your best.
Be an actor, okay?
And yeah, you're going to jump up and down while you listen to that great music that you love, right?
And you can jump and punch and whatever.
Do it how you want.
The whole point is just get yourself into an energized positive, excited state, emotional state, emotional feeling.
Right.
This is so important.
This is the fuel.
This is the energy that's going to help you break through from intermediate to advanced.
Now, after you do that, then you actually start doing English learning and you're going to use the method, the effortless English method that follows my seven rules and uses the methods that I discuss.
Key parts of the method number one, we're going to focus on listening, listening, listening.
You're going to get that listening ability up to a very advanced level.
You're going to focus on that first.
Don't worry, your speaking is going to improve too.
Your speaking will improve even while you're focusing on listening.
And I want you to do two hours a day.
Okay, for this 90-day plan to really get a breakthrough, one hour is good for slow and steady.
But I think you need two hours to really make a jump.
You're going to use my methods, which focus on real audio articles.
OK, not fake textbook stuff like the kind of thing you might listen to on a podcast, or even like a section, a chapter of an audio book.
You're going to focus on the mini story method.
So important for getting that automatic understanding, instant understanding and quick understanding responses right.
Quick, automatic English mini stories point of view stories.
Point of view stories are stories that are told with different grammar, different points of view.
So, for example, you tell one, you listen to one story.
It's in the present, it's told as if it's happening now.
Then you listen to the same exact story, but it's told as if it happened already, so in the past.
And then you might listen to the same story again.
Now it's about the future.
Maybe it's going to happen.
It might happen.
And so, you know, obviously the grammar will change.
You don't need to think about the grammar.
It's just you'll start to get it automatically.
And number three, so, so, so important.
Real English only.
You want to go from intermediate to advanced.
You need real English only.
Just burn the textbooks.
Burn them.
Throw them away.
Get rid of them.
You're going to reel real real, real.
So you know audio articles podcasts movies, you know these kind of lessons that use real stories, not just some, like you know, fake grammar exercise.
Okay now finally, part three, the actual schedule.
How do you do this each day?
This is 90 days.
You're going to do it every single day.
No days off.
No breaks.
Sorry.
You want to make a breakthrough?
No days off.
Two hours every day strictly for 90 days.
You start with a morning routine.
The morning routine.
You can do this while you're getting ready for work or school or whatever.
Get up a little earlier before your kids if you need to.
So you get up, get some coffee or food, whatever you need, and then do that morning ritual.
Jump, play that music.
Use headphones if you don't want to wake everybody up.
Jump, jump, jump, shout, boom, power pose, peak state.
Immediately after that, boom, you turn on your mini story lessons, your audio articles.
You listen for 30 minutes.
30 minutes in the morning, before you leave home.
Okay, you're in a peak state.
You listen for 30 minutes.
That's 30 minutes.
Your next 30 minutes, your commute, when you're going, when you're going somewhere in the day, if you're working or going to school.
You've probably got about 30 minutes.
Some people have more, some people less.
You're going to listen.
Again, I'd say focus on the mini stories and the point of view stories during this time.
While you're sitting in a bus, while you're in your car, On a train, walking, right?
Just use headphones.
Shopping, anything like that, right?
While you're out and about during your day, moving around, another 30 minutes.
Now you've got an hour.
You're going to do that again when you're coming home on your commute, right?
After work, after school, after shopping, whatever.
On your way back, you've got another 30 minutes.
Same thing, listening to audios.
Now, you might not want to jump.
If you're out around other people, you're probably not going to jump and shout and play crazy music.
But at least keep your head up.
Keep your shoulders back.
Put a little small smile on your face.
Try to keep your energy and your emotion positive and higher, right?
Don't let yourself get your shoulders down and start feeling your energy drop.
Bad, bad, bad.
Not good.
All right.
Now you're at 90 minutes.
Congratulations.
You've got 90 minutes and you've done it in little free points in your day.
The last is your evening time.
Evening time.
This is where I think, for you who are trying to jump to advanced, this is a great time to do the movie technique.
The movie technique.
That's where you watch one movie scene, not the whole movie.
You watch one scene with the subtitles.
Then you go back, watch it again with the subtitles, write down any vocab you might not understand.
Then go back again, turn the subtitles off.
Now you're just listening.
You're not reading it.
See if you can catch it, understand what's going on.
Go back again.
So you're kind of reviewing one scene, one section, depending on how much talking there is.
It might be three to five minutes, something like that.
And try to choose scenes that have talking, right?
Yeah.
Not an action scene.
There's no use.
Action scenes and action movies are probably not very good for this.
You want movies that have a good amount of talking.
Romantic comedies are good.
Dramas are good.
Things like that.
I have a whole video about how to do the movie technique.
Get on my YouTube channel and you can search movie technique and Watch that to get more information.
But basically 30 minutes in the evening using the movie technique.
That's two hours.
That's your basic daily plan.
30 minutes in the morning with that ritual to keep you energized.
30 minutes when you're commuting, going to work, school, or going out.
Another 30 minutes when you're coming back.
And a final 30 minutes using the movie technique in the evening.
Two hours a day.
Now, if you like, on Saturdays and Sundays, you could change things a little bit.
You could just follow this plan every single day.
Or Saturdays, you could make a movie focus.
So you just do the movie technique for two hours.
Again, you can break it up.
Do 30 minutes in the morning.
30 minutes at lunch, 30 minutes in the afternoon, and 30 minutes in the evening, right?
But just focus only on that movie technique on Saturdays.
And then Sundays, maybe make it a relaxed day.
Listen to podcasts.
Listen to YouTube videos.
Listen to lessons if you want.
Basically, anything you want.
It needs to be real English.
And again, two hours total on Sunday.
That's a nice plan.
Gives you a little variety.
And you can do it.
You break it up during the day.
This plan will jump you up to advanced level when you follow it for 90 days.
But you have to do it every single day.
No days off.
Sorry.
And you can't do it with low energy.
That energy part, the fuel, the motivation, the peak emotional state, is one of the most important parts of this.
So don't skip it.
Okay.
Okay.
All right, how do you stick with this?
Because let me just say things that people say, oh, problems people have.
Let me just address some of those.
Number one, boredom.
Oh, AJ, you want me to repeat these same lessons, these same movie scenes.
You want all this repetition.
Yes, I do.
Deep learning.
That's the whole point.
How do you keep it interesting?
Well, one way you do it is that peak emotional state.
Because if you let your energy drop, it will start to feel boring and it's harder to concentrate.
But when you find yourself getting bored again, you know, shoulders back, chest up, smile.
You can play that music again for a couple minutes and jump around, whatever you got to do.
And now you're ready to go back and do some more repetition and focus on this plan again.
Second thing is each time you listen, you can focus on something a little different.
Maybe you listen to the mini story the first time.
And you focus on just understanding, maybe the first few times.
Just try to catch the vocab.
Catch what's the general meaning.
Another time you might focus on just when you're repeating again.
Focus on giving those quick, short answers.
But try to make sure you focus on the answers and giving them quickly.
So you try to improve your speed of answering.
Faster and faster and faster.
Right?
And another time you might focus on the pronunciation.
Another time you could try shadowing if you want to just make it a little different and more interesting, okay.
But you've got to repeat.
To get better at something, you have to repeat.
You want to get good at shooting baskets in basketball?
You can't do it just once, right?
You've got to do it hundreds and hundreds of times.
It's just life.
It's how we learn.
Lack of time is another thing.
Oh, two hours is a lot.
You know, kind of.
I know we're all busy.
I'm busy.
We're all busy.
But that's why we break it up during the day.
Yeah, finding a free two hours at one time can be tough.
But if you break it up like this, you can do it.
For sure you can do it.
If you feel like, I'm not getting results, people panic after one week.
I haven't improved yet.
Relax.
Your brain needs time to take all this information in, and then you'll make a jump.
This is how plateaus work.
You're going along flat, and then you make a jump, and you start going up quickly.
If you're following the 90-day plan, for two months, you might not feel like much is happening.
You should start to see and feel better. a big improvement happening in that third month.
And, you know, sometimes people try to do too much.
You don't need to go over two hours if you're enjoying it.
If you can keep your energy up, if you have the time, then sure, do three hours, do four hours, do 10 hours a day if you have the time.
But, you know, you don't have to do too much.
I'd say two hours is the sweet spot.
It's just right.
Okay, you need to commit, don't quit.
This is a big part too, okay?
You just got to do it.
And once you decide to do it, you're not going to quit.
You're not going to change.
You're not going to say, oh, today I'm lazy, so I'll do an easy day today.
Nope, 90 days.
Commit to 90 days.
That's why I said 90 days and not 180 or 365.
Because in 365, it's hard to keep going without taking a little break.
But 90 days, you can do it.
Three months is a nice amount of time where you can commit and do not quit.
Every single day you follow the plan, no days off.
No, no, no.
Commit.
Don't quit.
And this will build confidence.
Each time you do this, each day you'll do it, you'll start to feel better and better and better.
I promised you at the beginning the number one mistake people make when they get stuck at the intermediate level.
And it's switching systems all the time.
So they try like one set of textbooks.
I'm going to try the Oxford textbooks.
And then they try that for a few months.
And it's not working.
And then they jump to something else.
And they jump to something else.
I understand you're trying to find something that works.
You're not getting the results you want.
But it's a big mistake because you start to build maybe a little momentum, even with a bad system going to be slower, but at least you're kind of.
And then you jump and you jump and you jump.
Look, focus on this for 90 days.
Don't try to mix in other stuff during this 90 days.
Do not study for the ielts exam and study test books.
Do not try to study other grammar books.
Do not try to mix in a bunch of stuff.
Okay, it's 90 days.
Do this only.
Only this method, only this plan for 90 days.
And after that, you can decide, did I get good results or not?
And if you did, well, guess what?
Keep going.
Keep going.
And maybe later I'll do a video about once you're advanced, how do you get even more advanced?
Where do you go after that?
People have a dream.
I want to be advanced, advanced, advanced.
Well, what happens when you are advanced?
Well, then what?
That'll be another video.
Okay, you know, as always, you know, like and share this video if people like it.
Get my book for free.
It's in the description below.
Put a link.
Giving my whole book away now, Effortless English, Learn to Speak English Like a Native.
It's back here somewhere.
There it is.
Giving it away for free now because I want you to have the full system.
So get the book.
It's obviously more detailed now.
And I can't do everything in one show, so get the book.
And then finally, when you're ready to actually get the lessons.
If you want the lessons, I've made mini stories, point of view stories, audio articles, vocab taught in a natural way, and all of this together start with my Power English course on my website, EffortlessEnglishClubcom.
It's on the screen if you're watching.
There'll be a link down in the description too.
EffortlessEnglishClub.com.
Commit, don't quit.
All right, let's do some live questions.
We're live now.
Live on YouTube.
Let me move my screen around here a little bit.
All right, let's take a look at our live.
We've got a lot of people live.
Okay.
Okay, pal paluz cow.
Oh, my good lord, these your profile names are so long now it's almost impossible for me to read a lot of them.
Hey, ibrahima lee, from egypt, good to see you, as always great great, great member, vip member.
Haven't met you in person yet, face to face, i hope i will someday.
Eventually i'll get back to traveling, get over to that area of the world, the mediterranean.
But anyway, Palouse Cowell, join YouTube.
Welcome to Basic.
If you just want to support this channel, if you can't afford my courses or something and you just want to have a little support, you can be a member on YouTube and that's a nice way to support the show.
So I appreciate people who do that.
Thank you so much.
So thank you.
Okay, let's see.
Just looking at the comments, guys.
Takes me a minute to read them.
Okay, Luis Gonzalez says, I need a friend to talk to and improve my speaking.
He's wanting to focus on speaking.
Start with AI.
Chat GPT.
You just need the audio, right?
So you want to be able to hear it, not just reading off the screen.
But there's a bunch of them out there.
I'll do a video about that soon, reviewing some of them.
Here's a key point.
When you use AI for chatting, do not, do not, do not ask it to correct you.
It's going to give you bad corrections.
I've been playing with these and I promise it's going to hurt more than it helps.
So just chat with it.
You can give it a situation, tell it, I also recommend tell it to use casual English.
The AI chats usually are using too formal.
You know, I think they're trained on academic things and textbooks and stuff.
And so they give you that formal kind of fake.
It's real English, but it's fake, meaning that it's not the kind of English we actually use.
Right.
So you get.
I tried it with a restaurant situation and it's giving me this super formal English like I'm at the most expensive restaurant in the entire world.
And I was like, this is like nothing.
I don't eat it.
I've been to Michelin restaurants and I've paid 300 or more for a meal a couple times because I was curious.
But even at those restaurants, they didn't talk that way.
Okay, so you're going to have to instruct.
Tell the chatbot, you know, Speak in a very casual conversational style.
Do not correct my English.
And then you can start practicing a little bit.
After that, if you join one of my courses, you become part of our community.
That's a great place to meet people.
And you can just connect and do Zoom calls together, practicing and chatting.
And that's free.
If you want to pay to talk to someone online using Zoom or something, There's sites, like you know italki and others.
There's lots of them out there.
And then shadowing is the final thing you can do.
And that's something you can do alone to help with speaking.
Jackal says, do you offer any English courses that teach through movies?
I have one.
It's called the Red Pill English course.
But it's kind of a special thing.
You have to have another course first.
I don't sell that on my main website, EnglishClub.com.
It's only for members.
So you can definitely buy that course, but only if you're a member.
It's for members only.
Okay.
Okay.
Proven late says, hi, AJ, I am from India.
Please keep coming regularly.
I was waiting for you for long.
How is your son now?
My son's doing very well.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I haven't been to India in a long time.
I've been three times.
I'd like to go again.
Love to go to Vrindavan, especially for personal reasons.
But hopefully I'll get back to India fairly soon.
Here's a nice plan.
So stay as you are.
The profile says I read five pages every day.
I do 20 minutes of shadowing daily.
I listen for one hour every day.
I memorize 20 sentences every day.
After how long will I reach comfortable overall understanding?
I don't know, but that's a decent plan.
It's a decent plan.
Now you are mixing it.
You're not doing the focal skills approach.
You're kind of trying to do that balanced approach.
I recommend you focus in just on listening.
And follow this plan I gave you.
90 days just listening.
After 90 days, if you're happy with your listening and yes, your speaking will get better too then if you want the next 90 days focus on speaking.
And make that your focus.
Focus on one skill at a time.
Focal skills.
You should check it out.
It's called the Focal Skills Method.
I don't know.
And it's...
Comes from a university called Shenandoah University.
I don't know if they're still doing it.
I know Dr. Hastings retired.
I'm not sure if Dr. Murphy, she may have retired already too.
So they might not be doing that anymore at the university.
I'm not sure.
Samuel says, hey AJ, it's great.
It's a great pleasure to find you here live.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Okay, this is good.
Diep Trung says, I would like to ask you if you plan to create new lessons in the future.
Your lessons have helped many people improve their English naturally.
You know, yes, I do.
The next thing I'm looking at now is maybe getting trained.
Let me focus here on my camera a little bit.
There.
Is that focused?
No, now I'm out of focus.
Manual focus.
Sorry, guys.
All right.
So I'm thinking of adding an AI chat conversation practice bot on our member website so that You'll have the option.
People who get Power English or VIP or business English or pronunciation course any of them can add AI, an AI chat partner for free.
Or for, and for free, here's what I'm thinking.
I'm not sure yet.
You can tell me what you think.
We can have a free plan, but it would be limited because it's quite expensive for our business to do this.
We get charged for the AI thing.
I'm not going to write it myself, okay?
So I'm going to train it.
I'm going to tell you how I want to do it.
So you can maybe have like a free package, but then if you want to use it more, then you would have like an add-on package.
So that's another way we might do.
It is you could buy Power English and just pay the normal price, or you could buy Power English plus AI chat, and then that would add a cost, and then you get both together.
Now, the key thing is I've been playing with AI chats and language apps and things and I'm kind of disappointed because they have kind of the same mindset.
So instead of a grammar translation teacher or software, now you have an AI that's using the same mentality.
But the good thing is we could train it.
So train it and program it to use my methods.
We could train it to use my courses, etc., etc.
So it would be more like talking to me.
Not exactly like talking to me, but at least close.
Close enough for you to practice for a while.
So that's what I'm thinking of doing next.
Yeah, Ibrahim Ali, and you should listen to him, because he achieved great results with Effortless English.
He says, I totally agree with you, AJ.
When I first started, I tried to do an hour a day.
In the beginning, it was too hard to repeat the same lesson every day for a week.
But after a while, I did two hours.
It became a habit.
My appetite increased as I kept going.
Then I did three hours a day.
Four and five hours a day.
In schools, we used to just rush hours.
Right?
Hurry.
And put a lot of info on our heads without any repetition.
Right?
This is the problem.
That's why one of the rules, the seven rules of Everett Singlish, one of them is deep learning.
Because this is the problem.
I saw this.
You know, at that moment when I'm teaching and I'm teaching my classes in Gainesville, Georgia.
This is one thing I realized.
I realized, okay, I do this.
So every week we're doing a new chapter.
Right?
Come into class, open up chapter two, the past tense, teach them the past tense.
Come back to class, chapter three, the present perfect.
Like they got one week on the past tense.
Like we use it constantly all the time.
That's not enough time to get that repetition.
It's crazy.
It's madness, right?
Do something a little bit and then move to the next, and move to the next, and move to the next, and move to the next and move to the next.
It gives this fake feeling that you're getting a lot, but you're not mastering any of it.
You can't actually do any of it.
It's crazy.
So he's right, too.
You might have to start.
You've got to use these techniques, these methods for peak emotion.
So important.
And yeah, it might be tough.
The two hours.
If you're following this 90-day plan the two hours and doing all that repetition, it might feel tough for the first month.
But Abraham's right.
Your brain will get used to it.
And eventually you get where, oh, two hours isn't even that much.
I can do more than two hours a day.
And you start liking the repetition because you start to realize everything.
I'm really getting it.
I'm really learning.
This is actually helping.
And then your motivation goes up and you start to enjoy it.
This is what pro athletes do, right?
They actually enjoy that repetition.
They enjoy the practice.
Samuel says, I have followed AJ for eight years.
He is a coach for a good life.
That's nice.
Thank you.
Jackal says, I want to say, I wish you would live stream every day.
Well, that would be nice, but I have to run my business, homeschool my children, do extra therapy for one of my kids and live my life as well.
So, doing a live stream every single day right now.
I just don't have the time.
I'm trying to do two a week.
So I'm trying to do Wednesdays and Saturdays be more regular because I know I've been gone for a while.
So two a week, Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday.
Sometimes I might need to change that if I get busy doing something, but that's my goal.
Uh, Viet Ngoc says, I'm going to commit until I speak English fluently.
Exactly.
Commit.
Don't quit.
Yusuf asks, how can I join your course?
Effortlessenglishclub.com.
It's on the screen if you're watching on video, if you're listening to the audio on my podcast.
Any podcast app iTunes Spotify, any other podcast app, just search.
Effortless English Show with AJ Hogue.
Put all that in there.
You'll find it, and you can subscribe to the podcast.
If you prefer just audio, you don't want to look.
It uses less data on your phone if you just use audio, for one thing.
Ah, I mean, it says today is the first day of Ramadan.
Happy fasting!
Commit, don't quit to that too.
Fasting has huge numbers of benefits.
Done a lot of shows about it.
Enjoy your fasting.
Enjoy it.
All right.
Scanning the topics here.
Sometimes the top on my screen, the YouTube topics jump around on me.
I got to find them again.
Here we go.
Leo Borba says, AJ is the best for teaching English ever.
I did the Power English course.
I recommend it a lot.
Thanks, AJ.
Thank you, Leo.
That's great.
Thanks.
Oh, Abraham says they start tomorrow in Egypt with Ramadan.
Great.
Mirology says Hi AJ, I join your live streams whenever I can, but it's usually too late in my country when you go live.
Yeah, sorry.
I always watch them later.
I've been following you for years now.
Well, here's the good news that in a few months, let me see, where are we at?
February, March, April, May, June.
About four months from now, I'll be in a totally different time zone.
So the times will change.
I'll still do Wednesdays, Fridays.
Right now I'm in Japan.
I'm in Osaka, Japan.
So I stream in the morning in Japan, Wednesday and Saturday.
But in the summer, we'll go back to the United States, back to Indiana.
That's Eastern time, New York time.
And I'll be doing Indiana mornings.
So that may be more convenient.
Right now, I think that it's evening for Brazilians and people all through the Americas, probably for actually, for Abraham and those of you in Europe, the Middle East, it's probably quite quite, quite late or super early.
So right now, in the next few months, probably live streams will be convenient for people in Asia and the Americas and then when I switch over to Indiana, I think more use, more convenient time for still the Americas and also Europe, but the Then in Asia you'll probably have to watch the recordings.
Unless you like staying up till three in the morning.
Good.
Ricardo Jorge Klitske says, Hello, AJ.
I'm very happy to participate in this presentation.
I'm really happy to see you.
I am from Curitiba, Brazil.
I'm happy to be listening to AJ live.
I'm happy to have you here.
Thank you so much.
Of course, I have huge numbers of listeners and members and students in Brazil.
So, you know, one of many reasons I would like to visit Brazil.
I never have visited Brazil.
I've traveled a lot, a lot, a lot in my life, but there's still many countries and areas I have not been to yet.
Oh, and he says, I will go to Germany next month.
I study every day like crazy.
I have a meeting in Dresden.
So I'm assuming your meeting will be in English, right?
So good luck with your meeting.
Good luck.
Tell us how it goes after you do it.
Oh, and then Mario Lucio da Silva says, greetings from Brazil.
So as I said, lots of Brazilians.
Sri Lanka.
Gamini Kantha says, I am Gamini Kantha from Sri Lanka.
I'm still following your podcast.
I'm still not speaking English right now.
What should I do?
Okay.
This is why the mini stories and the point of view stories are very important, which are in my courses at the website effortlessenglishclubcom.
That's one thing you can do.
I think follow this plan that I just mentioned.
If you're just only looking for free methods and techniques, then I would recommend the movie technique.
It's really good for jumping things up.
And then the other part Gamini, is that if you think your listening is good, if you think ah, my listening is pretty advanced, I'm quite good at it, maybe it's time to focus on speaking.
Maybe you're ready for the next focus, which is reading or speaking.
I'd say do reading next.
If you're doing tons and tons of listening only and you feel my listening is quite good, I'd say, jump over to reading and do that for just, I'd say, three months.
Another 90-day plan.
But you can still use audiobooks, as I mentioned, so you're still getting listening practice, okay?
But the thing with reading and books in general, the vocabulary tends to be you know, there's more vocab.
There's just more words than we use.
In normal speech like this, you know, we have a smaller vocabulary usually, right?
You'll see studies, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 words, whatever people use in normal conversation every day.
But then in books, it's more.
So books are great and audio books too for learning more and more of our vocab, right?
And you also learn more complicated things.
Sentence patterns, phrases, and structures are used in books.
So they're good for jumping up to a higher level.
So do three months focusing on reading.
Do a lot of audiobooks with it.
And then finally, after that, then do your speaking focus.
And then you're going to focus on shadowing, chatting with people AI, real people and talking talking, talking pronunciation.
I have a pronunciation course if you want that or just do it yourself.
But so I would follow the focal skills approach.
It seems like you've been doing a lot of listening.
Maybe it's time for three months of reading intensely, only focusing on reading.
And then after that, just focus on speaking, speaking, speaking.
Okay, Husam says, I work in a port in a container area.
Oh, where is he?
Just jumped again.
Yeah, I would like to speak English fluently.
How can I subscribe?
Well, it's great.
You can subscribe to the YouTube channel here first.
It's easy.
Then just go to my website if you actually want a course, effortlessenglishclub.com.
I recommend the one that's on the homepage.
Power English is the best one to start with.
If you're still not sure, if you want to do that, Go down to the bottom of the page in the description here.
You can find it and get my book for free.
Read the book.
If you think this is for me, then get a course.
Come to Brazil, says Compta.
I do.
I want to go to Brazil.
I do.
I do.
You have a lot of learners in Brazil.
Yes, I know.
Oh, that's an interesting question.
Han Yan says, how's it going, AJ?
Could you share how your twins I have two twins, they're seven years, almost seven how they learned and absorbed English from birth to seven years old?
How did they acquire and immerse themselves in English naturally?
You save our life.
Well, it's the same as with babies in any other language, right?
So you know, when they're little babies, you just we don't really, as parents, we don't have to do much.
You just talk to them, right?
You talk to them right, so we just talk to them.
And, of course, with babies, we naturally use super simple language and we use a lot of actions right, and we don't try to force them to speak.
You know they're one month old.
Say something, repeat this phrase, right?
We don't do that.
That's crazy.
They just listen.
They naturally have a listening focus, listening only for many months right, and then they start to babble.
They kind of copying, but it's not really a language, not english, but it's.
They're getting the tone, they're copying the tone.
My son's doing this now with japanese.
So he's been listening to more and more japanese and he's not he.
He uses a few phrases, but what he really does a lot is he he'll go, you know, and he'll copy the kind of like rhythm and tone of japanese that he's hearing, but he's not quite got the words in there yet.
A little, but not quite.
And my daughter did that too.
She's, she's a little higher level japanese, she actually speaking it fluently now but um, but same idea, same idea okay, so you just the second thing we i did as i i read story books to my kids uh, from when they were a little baby, even though they probably could not understand the language much, but they were getting that tone.
And of course, little kids' storybooks have pictures, so I would read it.
And then I would also point to things and just say you know squirrel, like if there's a picture of a squirrel, oh a squirrel, this is a squirrel.
What's he doing?
Oh, he's eating this nut, right?
So really simple stuff like that.
And then it just starts popping out and it just naturally goes.
You don't have to, really there's no effort involved.
It really is effortless, right?
Certainly for the parents, it's effortless, as long as you talk to them.
So, you know, the key thing is, as a parent, you focus on communication, not on language.
You're not trying to teach them grammar.
You're not trying to teach them lots of vocab.
You're just pointing to stuff.
But it's all just going back and forth, trying to connect with them communication, and then the language part happens naturally, which is a nice principle, i think, yeah.
Well, eunice talib says aj, will you use ai in your, in your platforms and methods?
Well, I was just talking about this Eunice, I am thinking of doing it, of having like a, an AI chat bot.
You know, for people who buy my courses, if they want to add an AI chat, they can do that.
So I am, I got, I'm looking at it, but I want the AI chat to teach the way I teach, talk the way I talk and use my methods I.
I don't want it correcting your grammar and making you crazy trying to remember grammar rules.
And that's what a lot of them do that I've been playing with.
And I don't want it speaking super formal textbook unnatural English, which pretty much they all do.
Why?
Because then you're going to practice with the AI, but then you meet a real person and they don't talk the way the AI talks.
They don't say...
Welcome to the Chateau Jeblah.
Would you care to consider one of our appetizers today?
Right.
What real servers in 99 of the restaurants I've been to in the United States and in other countries.
But in the United States they come and say you know hi, I'm Jen.
I'm your server today.
You know, what would you like to drink?
Really simple.
Right.
And you say, I have a water.
You'll have a Coke.
You'll have a Gatorade.
Right.
And then you say, oh, OK, I'll be right back with your drinks.
Take a few minutes and look at the menu.
Like it's very casual, very quick and casual.
That's how they talk.
It's polite, but it's casual.
Right.
It's not this.
It's not an academic type of.
Or super formal.
I don't know.
Nobody talks that way anymore.
I don't know if they ever did, right?
You don't want to sound like you're in a Jane Austen novel.
Amanda says, I've known you for 10 years, AJ.
This is the first time I've joined you live.
Well, finally.
Welcome.
Welcome.
Uh, MrStraderX says, what do you think about merging this with the Pomerod method?
The Pomerod method, that's the one where you use the little timer and you like time for 10 minutes and then you focus and it tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and then it stops and then you, yeah, you can do that.
That's a nice little motivator if you want.
If you're doing like, let's say, okay, I'm going to do 30 minutes of English right now.
Set your timer to 30 minutes, go, and then and you keep going until that timer beeps.
And when it beeps, take a break.
If 30 minutes is too long, at one time you start getting too tired.
Then you could do 15 minutes each time.
Just get two hours total every day.
It doesn't matter how much you break it up.
You know, some people like short little chunks like that.
And some people, they get into it, they kind of get focused and they want to do longer.
Like, that's me usually with a lot of things is I don't want to be interrupted after 30 minutes.
I find I'm in the zone, you know, I'm in the flow.
I'm focused.
I'm energized.
I want to keep going.
Another Brazilian, John Porter from Brazil here.
You helped me a lot improving my English in the past years.
I probably listened to your podcast.
I have listened to your podcast for eight years or close, but it's my first time seeing you live.
Wow, all these new live watchers who've been listening to me for years.
Alright, I'll do a couple more.
It's about time to go.
Alright, I'm just scanning for like one more.
I'm at one hour.
I'm trying to limit to one hour.
So then I can keep doing this more.
What's your opinion?
AV6R says, your opinion about the book Cambridge English for Engineering.
I think I have that book.
I do.
Cambridge Book for Engineering.
I've been reviewing it.
It's a test prep book, you know.
So, you know, I'm sure it has, the vocabulary is fine, right?
I mean, all these books, like so, you know, textbooks for engineering, medical, business.
The vocabulary in the books is fine.
They're just pulling it out of, you know, technical articles or talking to engineers or whatever, but it's the teaching method that's terrible.
This is boring as hell.
It's just.
Let's see if you can see it on the screen.
Yeah, you know, it's just the typical textbook.
You know.
It gives you a question and then you have to answer, Or it says in pairs
This is another textbook thing.
In pairs, discuss.
Roland, a mechanical and electrical services engineer, is talking to Saskia, an architect, about the design of a new building.
Listen to the conversation and answer the following questions.
What's the key characteristic of the client company?
How will this characteristic affect the building?
This is terrible.
So terrible, boring as hell, incredibly unnatural.
I mean like, who does tell me the key characteristic from this podcast you're watching now with me?
Like uh, who talks like that?
Who does that?
It's not, it's not, it's no.
I would like to do an english for engineering course, but not like that.
I'd want to use the same methods Many stories, point of view audio, articles where you would get the useful vocab that you need, but in an article or in content that's real and interesting and useful to you, not this kind of like super fake, incredibly boring, very artificial structure.
So you know, if you want to use it for a vocab maybe, but boring and i, i just yeah, i don't think you're gonna learn from it very quickly.
You're gonna forget most of it, okay.
Finally, ibrahim's i'll get.
Ibrahim should get the last comment he says.
I noticed you opened the comment section in the last few videos on youtube.
I'm surprised.
Yes, I'm opening my comments back up because I like interacting with you and I like connecting with listeners.
The reason I closed them before is just so much spam.
There's so many spam bots, you know, buy crypto, that kind of stuff.
And it was just filling up all the comments and I got tired of having to go in there and try to filter them out.
And but now uh, i'm testing again, from what i've seen, the you know youtube uh system.
You can change the settings, which i did to try to filter out that stuff and block more spam.
It seems like it's doing a pretty good job now blocking spam.
So uh yeah, i'd like to have the comments on, if i can, so i'll keep the comments on.
It seems like the the spam filters are much improved, which is great.
All right, then.
I think we're uh, i think we're done.
So go back and watch the recording of this, take notes, if you need to, to follow this 90 day plan.
A lot of people get stuck in that intermediate level right, you know, getting up to intermediate level uh, at least a low intermediate level a lot of people manage to do that, even with fairly bad methods, but then they get stuck stuck, stuck and they keep trying to do the same thing and they're not going higher anymore.
So consider all the things I said in this video, of course the importance of that fuel, that energy, that peak state, that morning ritual, the importance of two hours every single day, the importance of Committing to 90 days, no breaks, 90 days straight, two hours a day, right.
Using only these natural methods.
I definitely think for jumping to advanced, that movie technique is really good.
And the final thing consider that focal skills approach because there's a lot of research that supports that that it's actually if you did the focal skills in one year.
Compare that to someone else who tries to do that balanced approach doing reading listening, speaking and writing all at the same time every day the focal skills people after a year improve a lot more.
They improve more in listening, more in speaking, more in reading and more in writing.
So it actually is better to focus in on one skill at a time than trying to do them all all the time.
All right, in the description below you will see links to everything I just mentioned.
Like, subscribe, all that stuff.
Share.
Lots of love to you.
I will see you next time.
Bye for now.
