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Welcome to the A to Z English podcast.
My name is Jack and today I have a solo episode and today I'm doing a topic talk episode and the topic is what to do when you are stuck.
Okay so what to do when you are stuck and what I mean by that is whenever you try to learn something new, like if you're trying to learn the guitar, or if you're trying to learn a new language, like learning English, there's going to be times where you get stuck, okay?
We call this a plateau.
And a plateau is like a flat surface, right?
You go up, up, up, and then you hit a kind of ceiling, and then you hit a plateau and you don't improve for a while.
You get stuck, okay?
And I've got three strategies that you can employ when this happens to you during your English language journey.
And the first one is the first strategy that I would use if I were you and you're studying English, you're learning English and then you just feel like you're stuck, you're not getting better.
Walk away, take a break, okay?
Just take a vacation because sometimes your brain is overstimulated, right?
You've just been studying, studying, and going to online classes and everything has just been, your whole world is just English English, English, and you're so focused on it that you're overwhelmed.
You're overwhelmed and overstimulated.
And that's actually not necessarily a good state to be in if you want to improve in something.
When you want to improve in something, you want to be in a flow state, A flow state is where you're having fun, it's challenging, but it's not too easy and not too difficult.
And when you're just overloaded with too many things and you're putting too much focus and too much pressure on yourself, then you're actually not in a flow state.
You're not in a good place to improve.
So what I would do in that situation is just take a break, maybe two days, maybe three days, maybe a week and just walk away from the whole thing and just be like, I'm done.
Okay. I used to be an athlete when I was in high school and college, I was a basketball player.
And the funny thing is we would practice every day, but during the vacation, the Christmas vacation, we would have about five or seven days off, which is, that's a long vacation for in the middle of a season, right?
If you're supposed to be playing every weekend, you don't usually take five days off in a row.
But the funny thing is, what I noticed is that after five days of not playing basketball, when I came back, I was able to jump much higher than I was before because my legs were not tired anymore.
My legs had basically rested and they got stronger or at least they were more rested.
So when I came back, I actually found that when I was jumping, I was able to dunk the basketball much easier than I was when I was playing every day.
And so, that's kind of an interesting thing is that sometimes when you walk away, you get a little bit stronger because you start resting, your brain is resting, your mind is resting.
And then when you come back, you're much sharper.
So, your English might actually be better.
So, sometimes taking a break and just walking away from something is not a bad thing.
That can be a good thing.
Number two, change up your strategies.
So, if you're focusing a lot on conversation, go to listening.
Okay? Just stop doing conversation and do something else.
Do something completely different.
I also play the guitar as a hobby.
and my friend told me the strategy he said sometimes when you're and in the guitar people get stuck all the time you know you get you get to a certain point a skill level and then you just can't seem to break through to the next level my friend recommended to me he said sometimes when i get stuck what i'll
do is i will put my guitar in a different tuning so what that means changing the strings the sounds of the strings into like a different tuning and just play you know using a different tuning it's like a whole other um basically like a whole different vocabulary of of uh of of guitar music and um and he
says by do by by playing in a different tuning by tuning my guitar differently i can just i don't have to worry about chords and things like that because I can just tune it into like an open cord.
So where you just drum the guitar and it sounds good.
And then you can just play around with different, you know, picking styles and things like that.
And so basically he just, he'll change the whole.
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The whole situation, the whole, you know, the whole, basically, structure of the standard guitar playing to something different and then play around there for like a week and then come back to the standard tuning.
And then he'll find that he's able to kind of improve a little bit because he had that break and now he comes back with a fresh mind, fresh eyes, and a different set of skills.
So if you're focusing on speaking and you feel like, oh, I'm just, my speaking's not getting any better, don't do more speaking.
Do something different.
Go work on, you know, pronunciation practice or go listen to some podcasts and improve your vocabulary.
Read something. Do something different than speaking.
Okay. And or do something different than listening.
You're like, oh, my listening is not very good.
Okay. Well, then why don't you go and focus on something else like reading or writing.
So, change it up. Whenever you get stuck, make a change.
And the last piece of advice that I have is sometimes when you get stuck, it's because either the material that you're studying is too difficult or it's too easy.
okay and so sometimes we have to be careful about what we're you know like what we're what we're using to to learn english right um if if what you're doing is the same thing every day um you're just doing like you know for example if you were to learn english and every day you just practiced abcs you
know a b c d e f g h a j k i'm gonna be if you just do that every day Of course, your English is never going to get any better because learning the alphabet, it's too easy.
You're not challenging yourself, okay?
But if you go and watch a YouTube TED Talk about, I don't know, physics or something like that, that's going to be way too hard.
The vocabulary in there is going to be incomprehensible to you.
and so you're not going to get any you're not going to gain anything from watching that very difficult TED talk and you're not going to gain anything from practicing the ABCs either okay so as I mentioned earlier what you want to do is put yourself in a flow state where you're giving yourself material
that is just slightly challenging okay a little bit beyond your level not too challenging, just so that it's fun and challenging and not too easy.
And it should also be enjoyable.
And if you're having a good time, you're not bored, you're being challenged, not too hard, but not too little, not too much, not too little, just the right Goldilocks, we call it the Goldilocks space, the perfect amount of difficulty.
then in that case, you're going to show improvement.
Okay. So it's, it's about getting into a flow state.
Okay. So number one, you can walk away from the whole thing.
Just take a vacation.
Okay. Five days I'm done.
I don't want to even look at English for five days.
And that's totally acceptable.
Number two, change up your strategy.
Just work on something else.
just a different one of the different skills.
If you're doing a lot of reading, do listening.
If you're doing listening, do speaking.
If you're doing speaking, do writing, okay?
Just switch it up. And if that doesn't help, number three, make sure that you're in a flow state, okay?
You're being challenged by material that you think is interesting and fun.
It's not too challenging and it's not too easy.
And so you can run those three tests And, you know, or you could try all three strategies and see which one works best for you.
But there you go. Those are my advice.
When you get stuck on your English journey and you're not improving and you're not moving up, you can try one of those three things and see if that helps.
And let me know. Give me some feedback about this.
This is did my advice actually help you send me an email at C English podcast dot com.
leave a comment on our website a to z english podcast .com sorry our email is a to z english podcast at gmail .com um our website is a to z english podcast .com you can also uh join our whatsapp group or wechat group and you can leave a comment in there and i will get back to you and with that said i will see
you next time thanks everybody bye Bye -bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now boarding Group A.
Please have your boarding passes ready to scan.
If your phone is cracked, old, or was chewed up by your Chihuahua travel companion, please refrain from holding up the line.
Instead, go to Verizon and trade in any phone in any condition from one of their top brands for the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus with Galaxy AI.
And a watch and tab on any plan, only on Verizon.
With new line on MyPlan, service plan required for watch and tab.
Additional terms apply.
See Verizon .com for details.
Owning a boat comes with a number of perks, like being able to say, ahoy, or land ho, and not feel weird about it.
So here's another perk.
GEICO's Boat Insurance offers access to the largest towing fleet on the water.
And with specialist support from agents that are as passionate about boating as you are, there's so much value that you'll want to say, shiver me timbers and not feel weird about that either.
Get more with GEICO.
