Have you ever had a week where you feel like your English is broken and bad?
Like you're not making any progress?
Maybe you walk into a meeting or you take a class in English and you hesitate, you pause and your English is not feeling natural or as good as usual.
And you might leave the conversation or the class or whatever English practice you were doing.
And you might think to yourself, why am I getting worse at English?
Why is my English not improving and getting better?
If you're feeling that way right now or you felt it in the past, then this episode is for you.
I'm your host Oliver and welcome back to the Easy English Podcast, the best place for learning English vocabulary, tips and tricks, and improving your overall English listening skills.
As always today, we are going to learn some key vocabulary for the episode, as well as practicing our listening with these interesting topics.
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Okay, before we look at our key vocabulary, I have a question for you.
Honestly, how do you feel about your English fluency today?
If you're listening on Spotify, I've created a poll so somewhere that you can vote and answer.
So if you scroll down on the episode, you'll see an option to vote or you can leave a comment to answer.
The three options I have on the vote are, I feel great, I'm making clear progress every week.
Option two, I feel stuck.
I'm not getting worse, but I'm not getting better.
And option three, I feel like I'm going backwards and making more mistakes than before.
So I want you to answer and I will have a look and see what people have voted.
And if you're on Spotify, you can see live who has voted for what option.
Okay, let's learn today's key vocabulary, which is going to be very important for understanding today's episode.
The first word I want you to listen for is a verb, and it is to hesitate.
To hesitate.
And to hesitate means to pause before doing or saying something, usually because you're nervous or unsure.
Our second word for the episode is defeated.
Defeated.
And when something is defeated, it means feeling like you have failed or lost your courage.
So you're completely discouraged.
You're the opposite of encouraged.
So for example, after a difficult conversation or some grammar mistakes, you might feel defeated.
Our third word today is awareness.
Awareness.
And awareness is knowledge or perception of a situation, fact or your own mistakes, for example.
Our fourth word today is an illusion.
Illusion and an illusion is something that looks or feels real or true but in reality it's false or misleading
So you might have an illusion that your english is getting worse when in reality it's not
And our final word today is another verb and it is to squeeze, to squeeze.
And to squeeze means to press tightly together.
Or to force into a small space or schedule.
So you might squeeze between two buildings that are very close together, for example.
Okay, that's today's key vocabulary.
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Okay, let's get to our content.
So we're going to look at the fluency illusion.
And to understand why you feel this way, so why you feel like your English is getting worse at times, we have to look at a simple concept.
And that is the gap, so the difference between your ears and your mouth.
When you were a beginner, so when you were starting out with English, your awareness was very low.
So you only knew 500 words maybe for example, so you used them quickly without thinking.
And you didn't even know when you made a mistake a lot of the time.
Your awareness of mistakes was low.
And sometimes that actually gives people a false confidence.
So they feel confident because they don't know about the mistakes they're making.
They don't understand the mistakes they're making.
But once you start to get into the intermediate level, so B1 to B2, and especially then into C1 level, your ears are becoming better and your brain at picking up and understanding the mistakes that you're making when you make them.
You can now hear some native expressions, you can hear accents a little bit, and you instantly know or you'll start to get that feeling when a sentence sounds wrong, when it doesn't sound right.
Because you've heard a lot of English, because you're getting more experience with English, you do start to get that sense when a sentence sounds a little bit not correct.
So even if you don't know why the sentence is wrong, you still get the feeling that it is.
And at this stage, I would say that your awareness is becoming massive.
It's becoming big.
But your tongue, your speech, your ability is still trying to catch up with this awareness.
And you're not making more mistakes.
You're simply hearing your mistakes for the first time.
And you're understanding more mistakes or picking up on them when in reality, before you simply weren't, or you at least weren't focused on them.
And it's a really common psychological illusion with language learning, especially once you reach that B1 to B2 level.
So the intermediate level of English learning.
So I want you to think of your brain like a small apartment.
When you only have two pieces of furniture, so for example, basic present tense and simple vocabulary, it's easy to move around in the apartment.
But now you're trying to buy new furniture.
You're trying to buy wardrobes and extra things like learning phrasal verbs,
Idioms and complex past tenses.
And your brain is working overtime trying to squeeze these heavy pieces of advanced furniture into your conversations and your English use.
With English and with all these parts that are in your head and that you're learning,
Your processing speed can also start to slow down.
So this processing can lead you to hesitate.
You're looking for some words and the hesitation doesn't mean that your English is dying or that you've forgotten them.
It simply means that your brain is starting to try to fit all of these more complex pieces together to make more advanced language.
And it takes time.
And you will feel like you're getting worse before you get better because you're over complicating the sentences, which is fine.
You're trying to make them better.
You're trying to use the more advanced stuff that you've learned.
And as a result, it's slowing down your English.
And that's why you sometimes can feel like you were better before.
It's almost like a curse or maybe a negative of getting better at English for a period of time.
So I want you to take a little break now and answer in the comments if you haven't already, you know, do you feel like your English is improving or not?
And tell me why.
What are you experiencing?
What do you feel with your English?
I would love to read your answers and reply.
So how can you get past this intermediate trap, this intermediate difficulty?
Well, when you feel defeated, when you feel that feeling like your English is getting worse, that it's all bad, your natural instinct is let's study harder.
Let's memorize more advanced vocabulary, more grammar, more accents, more stress and intonation.
Stop.
Don't try to do that.
Here's what you should do instead to make your English a little bit less stressy so you can relax and start to improve naturally to feel more natural with the language as you learn.
And the first piece of advice that I can give you, and this is personal advice of mine, and I try to use it with my own language learning, and that is lower your expectations on bad days.
You need to realize that language learning is not a straight line upwards.
It's more like a wave.
You're going to have days where you feel like your English is great, like you're making some improvement, and you're going to have other days where you feel like it's terrible.
Like you're hesitating, like your English is useless, like it's bad, like it's getting worse.
And you need to just stop being so hard on yourself when you have those days.
It's normal.
When you're learning, you're not going to be perfect every day.
You're learning.
You're a student in a way.
And on those days where you're struggling, slow it down.
Make things simpler.
Make simpler sentences and take the stress off of yourself.
Protect your own confidence and give your brain a rest.
That this is the main number one advice that I could give you is just relax and don't be hard on yourself.
The next piece of advice that I can give you, which I feel is important.
It's something I've never done with language learning.
I should have done it so much more.
And that is record your progress.
So when we're learning, particularly at intermediate level, it can feel like we're not making progress.
So you should, in my opinion, record yourself speaking from time to time, maybe every couple of months,
Maybe a video or an audio recording.
And a year later, go back and listen to it over time.
You can see the improvement.
You can see how your speech has gotten better.
And it's almost like, you know, getting past that trick that your brain has that you haven't made any progress or improvement.
The final piece of advice that I can give you today is when you hesitate, so when you're pausing and you feel like you can't find the word, you can do two things here.
The first is you can smile to yourself and think, oh, I'm trying to find a good word for this, or I'm trying to find the best word for this.
And don't stress, take the time and even recognize that you can't find the word.
And you can say to the other person, oh, I'm trying to find the word.
My second piece of advice there in relation to those pauses and the hesitations is you can either one,
Pick a simple word to go in that place.
Or two, ask the other person for some help.
And trust me, if it's a native speaker or even an English learner, people do not care.
They would love to give and help you find the correct word.
And who knows, you might even learn a new word from this and it takes the pressure off of you and it makes it a shared moment in the conversation.
I've lost count of how many times I've had those moments with English learners and students.
And I think they're so natural.
They're so nice and totally normal.
And in fact, very, very useful for both the student and sometimes the teacher or the conversation partner as well.
So really to conclude, before we look at our comprehension or our understanding questions, the feeling of getting worse is a normal feeling at intermediate level.
And it's something that every single language learner goes through.
That alongside the feeling that you're not getting better or improving.
It's not always a feeling that you're getting worse.
Sometimes it's a feeling that you're just staying the same.
But you cannot improve.
You cannot improve.
Get past that stage without going through this difficult period.
You're not going to get to a very advanced level without going through some struggle, some feeling of lack of improvement or getting worse.
So the next time that you leave a conversation or some English practice and you feel a bit defeated,
Take a deep breath, pause, recognize the progress that you've already made, smile, and continue.
Don't put pressure on yourself, don't stress, and don't be too hard on yourself.
Progress will continue and you will get better.
Trust the process, be consistent and keep on learning.
That's my advice for you today.
Okay, let's have a look at some comprehension questions and see how well you understood today's topic.
So the first question I want to ask you is why do beginners feel more confident sometimes than advanced or intermediate learners?
And that's because their awareness is low.
So they don't know enough grammar to notice when they're making mistakes or maybe enough words or enough understanding of their own English.
Question two, what is the reason why you start to hesitate at the B1 to B2 level?
The main reason is because your brain is actively trying to squeeze
New complex vocabulary, grammar structures, and all that more advanced and intermediate English into your sentences and your English speech.
Question three.
What is my number one advice to get past this stage?
You're right.
My number one advice is don't be so hard on yourself.
Lower your expectations on those bad days.
And don't be hard on yourself.
Don't stress.
So that's all for today's English therapy session, I guess.
It's just a topic that has been on my mind that I wanted to share with you because I know it's a very difficult time or a difficult period for many English learners when they reach this stage of their language learning journey.
So I hope this has given you some motivation.
I hope it's helped inspire you to keep learning.
And I would love to hear your experiences in the comments.
Remember, if you want to support this show, if you want to support me, you can click the link in the description below and you can become an Easy English Patreon member.
Thank you very much for watching and I will see you in next week's episode on Monday of the Easy English Podcast.
Have a lovely rest of your week and I will chat to you very soon.
Goodbye.
