Hi there! It's Asiya.
You know when Icame to study for my master's degree in the UK I quickly realized that I couldunderstand close to a hundred percent of my lectures at university.
There was noneed to worry about it.
But I definitely struggled to speak.
Every time I wantedto say something I felt like I need to pull each word out of my memory and eachword tried to hide.
That was especially true if I tried to speak infront of other students.
And it was so frustrating because I knew that eachword is somewhere there and I could easily recognize each word when someoneelse said them but I couldn't speak myself the same way.
Today I know why itwas so and what can be done about it if you are feeling the same way.
So let'sget started! imagine that this circle representsall the words you know in English whenever you hear them or you see themyou will understand everything this is your passive vocabulary all the wordsyou can recognize and this much smaller circle is your active vocabularythese are words we actively use when we write or when we speak these are wordswe can recall but I need this word and here it is so it's much smaller and thisis because of the way our brain operates our brain builds a path to each word weactively use and the more we use the word the stronger the path and thequicker we can recall the world but if we don't use a certain word for a whilethis path starts to disappear and then it takes time to like what is this wordit's on the tip of my tongue but I can't quite get it that's a feeling andactually it's exactly the same in the native language as well we have theactive vocabulary and we have a smaller passive vocabulary and I can feel it alot because in Russian I don't typically discuss like quite a lot of topics andif I suddenly start talking about something I struggle to find lots ofwords even though it's my mother tongue that simply because I haven't been usingthem for a while and of course in English and the problem is more acutebecause of the way within the language I personally mainly learn the language ina formal environment at school and then at university and we were taught as aclass of students so whenever we did a listening or a reading exercise or evena writing exercise everyone could do it at the same time but whenever we neededto speak only one student would speak and everyone else would listen oractually even listen and then like how much timewould you have to speak in a class like three minutes it's really not much thefunny thing is I even had some personal tuition for a few years and my teacherwas very good and I think she helped me to improve my English skills quiteconsiderably but we didn't speak much with her either and my guess is shewasn't fluent herself and she didn't want to show it that's why we did lotsof different things that not really speaking and of course I had problemswith it later but some people know the language were already living in anenglish-speaking country and quite often their listening skills would be reallygood they would understand everything and they would actually speak well theywould seem quite fluent even though in reality they may not know as many wordsas you do and they may struggle with reading or writing more than withspeaking because whatever we walk on or TOEIC practice gets better okay now weknow what the problem is what's the solution how can we start to activelyuse words we already know first of all choose a word you know but you don't useactually need a laptop i've chosen the word exhilarating and i know it verywell but I don't remember when I last used itmyself then read what exactly this word meansnot a word by word translation into your mother tongue but the full descriptionin English which gives a much better explanation so exhilarating is makingyou feel very excited and happy great now you need to learn how topronounce the word and in the Cambridge dictionary you can get the British andAmerican pronunciation so you just click here can increase the sound yeah exhilaratingso that's British I hope you can hear it and that's American exhilarating greatnow let's read examples an exhilarating walk in the mountainsokay any other examples so that's American Dictionary an exhilaratingsense of new beginnings swept through himthat's a beautiful sentence so we can say an exhilarating sense of somethingand now you need to make up your own sentences for example once I flew in ahelicopter and it was exhilarating all I could say flying in a helicopter was anexhilarating experience so the phrase I want to memorize is an exhilaratingexperience or an exhilarating sense of something an exhilarating sense ofadventure and next time when I would be talking about something very exciting mybrain will recognize the situation and it will give me this phrase anexhilarating experience or an exhilarating sense of adventure so whenyou link the world with your real memories it's much easier to memorize itor to make the words active in your brain that's how you learn it and sowhat you need is to see the word to see how it's spelled to hear the word tolearn how it's pronounced and then to say it yourself to use it in sentencesnow I want you to choose five words you know but don't use please post them incomments I'm gonna see what you choose then check each word in the OxfordDictionary the way I showed you and after that take an aisle topicand think of a story you could tell that would incorporate all five words in itand tell the story aloud probably you won't be too happy about the way youtold it so tell it again and again until the point when you will feel contentwith the way you just spoke the last time you tell the story will bedefinitely much better than the first time it will help you to memorize thosewords and next time you encounter this topic or a similar topic you will findit a little bit easier to talk about it and that matters these littleimprovements of their regular basis a much more effective than a lot of workin one go you need to speak regularly in order to improve your skills and youcan't rely on your school University for that you have to take it in your ownhands you can speak at home on your own you can organise speaking sessions witha friend who's also learning English as long as you won't switch into yourmother tongue and if you need a little bit more accountability you can booklessons on itoki and speak to a native speaker just tell them a topic for eachlesson and tell them that you want to speak as much as possible and they willhelp you do that you need to pay for each lesson but I think prices areactually very reasonable for having a lesson with someone who is from anEnglish language speaking country I'm gonna leave a link in the descriptionbox below if you decide to subscribe and if you use this link I will earn a smallcommission so thank you if you do and thank you for watching me today keep onspeaking and you will get better take care bye.
