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For Practice
Exercise: Take a grammar holiday. For the next six months, just decide you are not
going to study grammar. In fact, do your best to completely forget about grammar
rules. Unlearn this information by avoiding grammar books. Whenever you catch
yourself thinking about grammar, immediately change your focus. During this time,
instead of worrying about mistakes, accept them. Accept that mistakes are normal
and necessary.
Focus on communicating. The truth is that native speakers will still understand
you even if you make grammar mistakes. While schools hate mistakes, normal
people really don’t care. They simply want to hear your ideas, your feelings, your
thoughts. In fact, native speakers make grammar mistakes, too, and they don’t get
upset about them.
CHAPTER 11
The Third Rule: Learn With Your Ears,
Not With Your Eyes
My third rule for learning to speak English is simple, yet powerful. In fact, I
usually say this is the most important rule because this is how we all learn language
as children. It’s such an easy thing to do that you have to wonder why most English
classes don’t emphasize it more.
Here it is:
Learn with your ears, not with your eyes.
That’s right. If you want to
speak excellent English, you have to listen. Listening, listening and more listening is
the key to speaking excellent English. If you listen a lot, you are going to learn
vocabulary. You will learn grammar. You will get faster at speaking and you will
understand what people are saying to you. You will do all of this in a more natural
and enjoyable manner. You will imitate the process that babies and small children
use to learn a language.
Academic research on language learning has consistently found listening to be
the biggest factor in overall language ability – particularly in the early stages. In
fact, this is true even if you don’t understand most of what you’re hearing. That’s
because our ability to learn new words is directly related to how often we have
heard combinations of the sounds that make up those words, says Dr. Paul
Sulzberger, a researcher at Victoria University in New Zealand who conducted a
2009 study on the subject. “‘Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new
language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language,” Dr.
Sulzberger said. “This is how babies learn their first language.”
Remember the process used by babies and children? Babies learn through
listening. They don’t study grammar rules. They don’t use textbooks. They don’t
take tests. Yet small children master spoken English, including grammar. In fact,
experts say, 80 percent of your time studying English should be spent listening, even
after you’re no longer a beginner. Unfortunately, most traditional language classes
don’t emphasize listening. So if you studied English in school, you probably
learned mostly with your eyes. I have observed many English classes in many
different countries, and they’re all the same. Most English teachers – whether in
middle school, high school, university or private school – focus on textbooks in the
classroom. There may be short “communication exercises,” but the entire class is
defined and driven by a textbook.
Now, if your goal is to get a degree in English from a university, this is a great
way to study. But if you want to speak real English, these kinds of traditional
methods won’t get you there. Why? Because even if you study for many years,
you’ve basically learned English analytically. You learned to think about English,
talk about English and translate English. You also may know a lot about grammar
rules. In fact, you know more about grammar rules than most Americans, most
Canadians, most British people because native speakers don’t study that stuff very
much.
English conversation is different.
Native speakers learned to speak English with their ears by listening, listening,
listening, and that’s what you must do if you want to speak English quickly,
automatically and naturally just like a native speaker.
The most important factor for learning English is what Dr. Stephen Krashen calls
“comprehensible input.” In other words, understandable input. Input refers to what is
coming into your brain. You get English input in two ways: through listening and
through reading. Certain kinds of reading are very useful and beneficial. However,
the most powerful kind of input for learning to speak is listening.
Comprehensible (understandable) input methods have been shown to be more
effective than traditional methods (grammar study, drills, exercises, speaking
practice). The research shows that speech happens as a result of listening.
Think of babies and children again. Listening is always the first step. No child
starts talking before they understand through listening. They always listen for a long
time, until they understand a lot of the language. Then, and only then, do they begin
to speak. This listening “silent period” is vitally important to the process of natural
language learning.
Another property of natural language learning is that speech emerges naturally
from listening. Speech is not a skill that is consciously practiced or taught. Rather,
after enough understandable listening, a child will just suddenly begin to speak. Its
seems to happen by magic. The speaking ability grows out of the listening ability.
Researcher James Crawford has found that speaking English is the result of
listening and that English fluency frequently occurs from listening alone. He states
that English learning is an unconscious process, and while it’s happening we are
often not aware that it is happening.
You can think of this like a seed in the ground. The seed, the potential for
speaking, is always there. However, the seed needs water in order to grow and
emerge from the ground. Likewise, our brains need a lot of understandable listening
for effortless speech to emerge.
As you might imagine, because children spend so much time listening before they
speak, their listening ability is always higher than their speaking ability. In other
words, children always understand more English than they can actually use in
speech. As you use the Effortless English™ system you will experience the same
thing. Your listening ability will naturally grow faster than your speaking ability.
Some learners worry about this but it is the natural and correct process.
Another way to think of this is that listening leads speaking and pulls it along.
Listening is like a balloon with a string tied to speaking. As the listening level rises,
it pulls the speaking ability up with it. They go up together, but the listening ability
will always be higher.
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