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Welcome to the A to Z English podcast.
My name is Jack, and I'm here with my co-host,
Sochil, and today we are doing a topic talk episode.
And, Sochil, the topic for today is,
I pulled up three strategies for overcoming a plateau in language learning.
And a plateau just means that you reached a certain level,
and then you're not improving anymore.
You're kind of flat-lined.
And, yeah, so I'll tell you the strategies,
and then you just tell me what you think about them,
and share your view on these.
The first one is,
diversify your learning methods,
which means changing the way you engage with the language
can re-energize your learning process.
So incorporate different activities that target various skills,
such as reading, listening, writing, and speaking.
You can, for reading, you can choose a variety of materials,
such as books, articles, and blogs,
to expand your vocabulary.
You can listen to podcasts.
You can follow YouTube channels.
Again, that's right in our, that's what we're doing here.
To listen to different accents and slang,
and we do a lot of slang episodes,
so the A to Z English podcast is really a great way to improve your listening.
By writing journaling, writing essays, or replying on online forums,
and by joining language exchange programs,
finding a conversation partner, or participating in speaking clubs,
or you could even join the World English Google Meets class,
which is something that I started with another teacher here in Korea.
And students can, for $10 a month,
they can join and just have a one hour conversation.
Actually, if you become a VIP,
it sometimes students will talk for two or three hours a night, every night, every day.
Yeah.
And then there are multiple classes,
and we have multiple teachers teaching different lessons as well.
There's a lot of things you can do.
What do you feel about this, like diversifying learning methods?
I think it's really good.
I actually was one of the first things I would have suggested right off the bat,
especially with reading.
It's really great to read varied content,
like you can try reading old English literature,
and you can try reading science articles,
and you can try reading horoscope in a magazine,
or a celebrity news thing,
and you can try reading a fashion article,
just because you're going to acquire a lot more different
diverse vocabulary that you don't see in every day.
That really helps me able to get you from just a proficient level,
to really a distinguished native speaker level.
I'm going to throw a plug for something I'm not related to it at all.
I have no connection to it.
Brilliant.
It's called breaking news English.
What they do is they take an article,
and they scale it down so that it's more understandable for second language learners.
They put a new article up every single day.
You can read the article and answer some comprehension questions,
some true false questions, vocabulary matching.
They've got lots of little exercises there.
I think that's just such a great website.
I've used it many times for my classes,
and I love breaking news English.
If you're looking for something to read,
and the articles are all different,
it's a science article, it's a sports article,
it's a news article,
it's all just a bunch of different things.
Like you said, if you read a variety of material,
you're going to pick up a variety of vocabulary.
If you stay in one specific area,
like sports only, you're going to get a lot of sports lingo,
but you may not get exposed.
It's lacking in science or social studies,
sociology, history.
Exactly.
Number two, the second one is set specific achievable goals.
Breaking down your learning into smaller,
manageable goals can help you stay motivated and measure progress.
How do you feel about that one?
I think that one's good.
I mean, for example, you could say your goal is to improve your pronunciation,
but that's extremely vague.
But for example, let's say that you struggle with pronouncing the R,
or L sound, L and R.
L sounds, R sounds, which is really common.
Then you could practice a few words that are L and R heavier
that alternate between L and R within the same word,
and record yourself every day.
And you'll see your progress from the beginning of the month to the end of the month.
And that will really inspire you to keep going and keep practicing and improving.
That's right. That's right.
I think students tend to try to bite off more than they can chew.
Yeah.
You know, you...
At Parker, our purpose is simple.
We want to make the world a better place by working more efficiently,
by using more sustainable practices.
By developing better technologies, we keep moving forward.
With each new idea, innovation, and partnership,
we're one step closer to fulfilling our purpose every single day.
To find out more, visit parker.com slash purpose.
Parker, engineering your success.
You set your goals.
It's like, I want to sound like a native speaker.
What does that mean exactly?
You want to sound like a native speaker?
Well, I mean, it's kind of like a child saying,
I want to be Michael Jordan.
There's a lot of steps that you have to take to get to that highest level of basketball
or whatever sport you might be playing.
You have to...
You can accent.
You small goals.
Yeah.
Well, right.
You can accent for one.
A neutral English.
Or some kind...
The easiest one that are the one that you like or the one that you resonate the most with.
And there's just so many small goals from there. Just start with short words or
the ones that you have a little bit of a hard time pronouncing and then build up from there
and gain your confidence.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And number three is,
immerse yourself in language.
And immersion is one of the most effective ways to push through a plateau.
And what does immersion mean?
Immersion means when you are fully surrounded by a language in a lot of aspects.
So when I was living in Korea, I was immersed in Korean because it's the only foreign teacher.
So all day, every day, all that I would hear were people speaking Korean around me.
And I would say this is...
This and patients were the biggest keys to my breakthrough when speaking Korean.
Because first when I got there and I would hear a word and I...
I wouldn't know where a word began in another one.
Yes. That's a hard thing to create.
Yeah.
I was like, what's going on?
Because words are so many.
It might be a sentence with only two or two words or three words or even one word,
but it has many syllables.
So I was very confused.
I was very confused.
And then with page...
I said, I said, I'll never learn Korean.
I've gone crazy on...
I don't know what I'm doing here.
With patients within a couple of weeks,
I could begin to distinguish where words ended and began.
And every month, it just got better and better.
And then I would feel like I hit a plateau of understanding
or sometimes I would even regress a little bit.
And then I would improve.
And so it's another thing is that learning of any type and especially language learning,
it's not necessarily a linear improvement.
It's not going to be linear.
You might do really well for a while.
You might regress after a little bit and come back down.
But overall, the trend is going to be that you're improving.
So you just have to have faith.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
It's a long process and it's very detailed and or tedious.
We say detailed and it takes a long time to grow your language skills.
And yeah, I mean, like so what social did, what I did,
travel if possible.
So that's one of the ways you can do it.
Just throw yourself right into the fire.
You know, so that you have to use the target language.
You have to use English to survive.
You know, survival English, you know.
Right.
But that's expensive and that's not available to everybody.
That's not available.
But you can do a version of that online.
Like that Google meets class that I was talking about.
Is kind of a version of that where we have a no native language rule.
You have to speak English.
And so no matter what your skill level is,
you've got to find a way to communicate some ideas.
And you just have to figure it out.
And there's no guide or anything necessarily.
You can ask questions.
People will help you.
But it's a great way to grow because it's a stress.
It's putting stress on you and forcing you to perform.
And in a real world environment that you don't only,
you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
It's really like, okay, this is crunch time kind of behavior,
which I think really helps.
And yeah, I would say that's a great way, Jack.
Sorry, did I cut you off?
Go ahead.
No, no, that's it.
I'm good.
I was going to say that's a really good one.
Another way I know a lot of people learn
another language is through playing video games
with people that speak that language as native speakers.
You'll pick up things that they're saying.
And you'll begin to understand things through that context.
Another way to immerse yourself is by joining like a Facebook group
for that, for a hobby that you like in English
or watching a YouTube channel in English
or listening to our podcast.
For watching Netflix or English movies,
I have a friend who moves from Brazil to the US.
When he was around seven.
And he said the biggest way he learned English was through movies.
And I think that that was a really big help
when I was trying to learn Korean is just a lot of listening practice.
And sometimes I would watch something with subtitles
and I would rewatch it without the subtitles.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the incremental element to it.
Right?
Start with the easiest and then move a little bit more challenging,
a little bit more challenging.
That's the way you grow.
So yeah, right on.
All right, listeners, if you like these tips
or if you're curious or have any English learning language tips
of your own to overcome a plateau,
make sure to leave a comment down below at eduz English Podcast dot com.
Shoot us an email at eduz English podcast at gmail dot com
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And we really, really appreciate all the support so far.
Thank you again and we'll see you guys next time.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
