AE 1423 - Pete's 2c: Why You Know More English Than You Can Use

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever had that feeling where someone asks you an English question and you know you've learnt the answer before? You've studied it, you've done exercises on it, you've watched YouTube grammar videos about it, but in that moment, nothing comes out. Or worse, the wrong thing comes out and you feel embarrassed. If that's ever happened, then today's episode is for you. G'day you mob, welcome to this episode of Aussie English. Today is a Pete's Two Sense episode where I will just be having a chat with you, off the cuff, talking about grammar rules and automaticity. It's a nice fancy word in English. Automaticity. Automaticity. So I had a lesson earlier with a student who was working on articles, understanding articles. He's from Russia originally, and they don't have articles in Russian. And also understanding perfect tenses. I have been, I had been, I will have been, and how to use those. And again, they don't have those in Russian, obviously. So this was an issue that he had that he's like, I've learned English for a very long time. I still haven't mastered these things. What do I need to do? You know, why haven't I mastered them? Why do I find it difficult to use these naturally and spontaneously, automatically, like a native speaker? So we've been doing lessons for a few weeks now, and these same mistakes kept cropping up. You know, he would say, I went to shop, I live here since 2018, I bought car, and he's dropping articles and not using these perfect tenses. And again, this is such a normal thing, guys. So many, so many of you that get lessons with me have these same problems, which is why I wanted to make today's episode. So yeah, we were having this conversation, I was pointing these out. In fact, I think I said to him, you know, what are the biggest weaknesses you feel like we need to work on with your English? And he was like, You've seen them, you know them, you know, it's these articles and these blood, these bloody perfect tenses. And he was like, I know the rules. I understand the rules. I've read the rules, I've practiced the rules. If you explain the rules to me right now, they make sense. I understand what you're saying, I understand the examples, but when it comes time to talk, the structures don't spontaneously come out. I don't use the right tenses when I want to describe certain things. So why is there this mismatch? Why do I understand things when you tell me them, but why can't I use them? And really, it just comes down to automaticity. Knowledge, understanding, isn't the same as being able to retrieve and use grammar in a language spontaneously without having to think about it. So I thought we could have a discussion today about this sort of issue and what I would suggest you guys do to try and overcome it. And it doesn't have to be about articles specifically or about perfect tenses. It can be about, you know, effectively any grammar rule in English or any other language that you are studying. So many learners become collectors. We like collecting. Humans like collecting. It's part of our evolutionary origins. If you weren't good at collecting resources in the past, you were unlikely to pass on your genes to the next generation and have children. So human beings are very good at collecting. And we apply this when we're learning languages. You know, it feels good to watch loads of videos about different grammar rules or learning different vocabulary lists, or perhaps listening to loads of different podcast episodes about, you know, specific rules or cultural norms, all those sorts of things. You know, it feels good. It feels like you're learning, and you are, to some to some degree, you are, you know, you are learning these things. But there's a difference between getting that exposure and understanding it in the moment and being able then automatically use it when speaking. So these students, they learn something new every day, and it feels productive. It feels like you're making progress. But often you're not. Because they're increasing their knowledge, their awareness of these things, they understand these things, but they're not increasing their automaticity at the end of the day. They're not increasing their ability to retrieve these things from their memory and use them spontaneously and quickly and effortlessly when they're having a conversation. So why does it feel so good? It we have that evolutionary origin of being good at collecting, but deeper than that, it's about dopamine. It's about getting a dopamine hit. Every time you watch a YouTube video, I have this problem, right? So if I stop myself here, I like playing guitar. I like collecting guitars. I've got a whole bunch of guitars. I probably spend as much time playing the guitar as I do researching guitars, learning about guitars. You know, watching videos about them, listening to podcasts about them. I I spend way more time, or or way more time than I should, passively absorbing information about guitars than I do actively practicing the guitar. Because it feels good. You feel smart, it feels productive, you feel like you're improving. You you know, you watch videos about different techniques on guitar or different chords or different modes, and it feels like you're learning. But really, you're kind of getting this dopamine hit, you're feeling good, but you're avoiding discomfort. Because true skill building feels hard. You know, when you actually have to sit down at the end of the day and practice something, it's uncomfortable. It's difficult, and you probably don't get the same kind of dopamine hits from doing that thing, right? Watching a video, easy. Retelling a story, it's hard. Reading grammar explanations, easy. Speaking for five minutes using that grammar, hard. Learning fifty new words? Easy. Using those same fifty words naturally in a conversation, it's hard. And this is, I guess, what we could call the language learning illusion, right? So can you explain the perfect tense? Can you explain articles? Can you explain conditionals? You might be able to do that. But then can you use them automatically while discussing politics for 10 minutes? You know, that's a different question. That's a different skill. And that's probably the heart of today's episode. A lot of us are good at collecting these these different grammar points, understanding them, being able to explain them with enough time, but we don't practice, we don't do the repetition, we don't do the hard work of drilling them into automaticity, getting them to the point where you can automatically use these rules. So, what does research say about creating automaticity? Well, automaticity comes from retrieval and use. We've mentioned this a few times. So retrieving the thing, finding it in your brain, whether consciously or not, and being able to use it effectively instantly, instantaneously, spontaneously. You know, there's no delay. You're not trying to remember something that's really complicated and detailed and hard for you to kind of use. You're trying to retrieve it and use it instantaneously. So it's not about understanding, it's not about exposure alone, it's not about explanations. It's about finding this thing and using it in a conversation instantly. And the way to do this is noticing, retrieving, using, getting feedback, and then repeating again and again and again. And we'll go into that in a little bit. So let's go through a little example with articles, for instance. So students usually understand articles in English, right? The words a, an, and the. The brain understands. I use a or an when I'm talking about a noun that is not specific. You know, I walked outside and I saw a dog. I use the when I want to refer to a specific dog that I have already mentioned, or that the listener already knows that I'm talking about. I walked outside and the dog that I saw earlier was still there. So the brain understands. The speaking system though doesn't, quite often with these students. The solution wasn't another explanation. The solution was sitting down and spending time noticing where articles are being used, reading, retelling, correcting, and then repeating. So what would I do if I started again? If I if I were learning a language from scratch, and say it had these grammatical features in it, or well, any grammatical features, it doesn't matter which one specifically. But if I were learning a new language, you know, it's been six months, a year, two years, and I'm at like B1 to B2 level, what would I do? I would stop trying to learn five new grammar points all at once, you know, or every single week, sort of overloading myself, and instead I would choose one, maybe articles, maybe the present perfect tense, in the cases that we've sort of mentioned in today's episode. And I would spend a long period of time trying to master one of these grammatical points. So maybe two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, thirty days, a month, you know, a prolonged period of time. It's not gonna be a single afternoon. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna spend time with these five activities that we've already sort of covered multiple times, noticing when this grammatical feature is being used. So you could do this when you are watching a movie and the subtitles are on. Where do you see it come up? Right? Um, listening for it when you are speaking with people, listening to a podcast, when you hear English, in this case, being used, listening out for it and noticing it, you know, those two things together there. Reading it. So getting examples for yourself. You could ask ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever the AI is. You could find sentences online in resources, in books, you know, you could take notes from the different resources that you're using to learn English and write down sentences where this grammatical feature has been used. Using it, trying to read these sentences out loud. And I often suggest trying to come up with your own sentences. You can find one or two sentences online or in a book or in a movie or with ChatGPT, and then try and use that same structure to write your own sentences. So, for instance, if you found the sentence the dog was out on the lawn in the rain, perhaps you would take that structure and instead of saying out loud, the dog was out on the lawn in the rain, you might say the car was broken down on the highway. You know, so you take that same basic structure and you're practicing using the grammatical feature that you're having a problem with, in this case, say the, you know, articles. And then the most important part here is getting corrected, whether it's from a teacher like me, whether it's from AI, whether it is by then going into grammar books and looking for other example sentences to compare against your one to try and get feedback that way. I would probably suggest using a real person or AI. AI is probably the easiest and cheapest because you can literally just copy and paste your sentences into whatever AI you've got and just say, correct the grammar, you know, or check that I'm using articles correctly. And then master that thing before moving on. And obviously try and revisit it from time to time, you know, just double check. You could do this with, again, a teacher or AI, where every now and then you tell a story, you read something out, you have a conversation with it, you write something for it, and you double check that everything that you've said out loud is grammatically correct. Are you making the same mistake still? Or has it been resolved and you can now sort of move on to the next thing? And this is quite often this is the issue, right? A lot of my students that I have, they are B1, B2, C1. They're very good, they're fluent, they can speak in English, they've they've got jobs in English, families, lives, they live in Australia, you know, they're doing, they're functioning well in English. But often there's these small little things that they can still clean up if they want to be perfect, you know, if they want to improve, if they want to sound more professional or feel more confident. There's often these little mistakes that still happen on a regular basis that don't necessarily prevent people from understanding the basic idea of what they're saying when they're communicating, but that they wish to master. Okay? So one of the biggest takeaways from today is that learning loop. Trying to notice something, understanding it, retrieving it, producing it, receiving feedback, and then repeating that same that same structure. Again, making it fit in with you. This is where fluency comes from. Right? It's having that awareness of your your issues, spending time trying to notice when and how they're being used, trying to understand them, then practicing retrieving them from your working memory, trying to produce them, use them spontaneously, whether writing or speaking, you know, that's it's that. It's that retrieval and production there that is super important. And then getting that feedback. Did I do it correctly? Where can I improve? What things did I do wrong? Did I do right? Getting that feedback is crucial as well. So if you work on this, these sorts of ideas, then your fluency will increase and eventually you will overcome these problems. You will overcome these small errors, you'll correct them, you'll fix them for good. The problem is that many of my students have spoken English for a long time, they've been learning it since they were kids, or they've been learning it for a decade, you know. The point is they've been learning it for a long time, and these mistakes have kind of fossilized, they've become common errors they're making. And they think, I understand the rules when I read them, but I still keep making these mistakes. Why am I doing this? So coming back to the start of this episode, it's not about knowledge. You'll know all these rules. You'll you'll understand them when you read them, right? You'll consciously, when you look at it, when you read it, when you hear it, you're sort of like, I get it. But there's a gap between that and automaticity, being able to use it automatically. And the only way that you can achieve automaticity is by practicing again and again and again. Noticing it, understanding it, retrieving it, producing it, and getting feedback. Repeating that process again and again and again. And I think a lot of my students that do give up or fail or don't improve, at least quickly, or you know, sometimes they they quit when they're just like, you know what? The level I'm at is good enough and I don't care. And that's another thing. You've got to decide how much you're worried about your English. Are you happy with where it's at? Do you want it to be better? And how much effort are you willing to invest in order to get it to where you would like it to be? But the biggest issue, the biggest reason I think these students fail, it's not because they're dumb, it's not because English is hard, it's not because they can't do it. Usually it's about time and energy. Do they have the spare time to be practicing this on a regular basis? And do they have the energy, the motivation to really do it? Is there is there a drive there? Are they really kind of like, you know, I really want this job, I really want this relationship with someone. You know, there's a there's a big why standing above them that they can look at and see as a motivating factor for working hard. The students that often fail are the ones that are just like, I don't really care. You know, like it's not it's not gonna change my life significantly, it's not that important to me. I would like it, you know, and that's that's my case. You know, I say this, I'm not criticizing these people, these students. It's like that with me and guitar. I would like to be so much better at guitar. I would like to be the world's best guitar player. You know, ideally in my mind, if someone could click their fingers and all of a sudden I was the best guitarist the world had ever seen, sure, you know, I would like that. Am I willing to put in the time and energy and effort into becoming a, you know, the world's best guitarist? Assuming it was possible, assuming I still had time, if I spent all of my waking hours on this this thing, the the real point is can I be bothered? Do I have the am I motivated? Do I have the energy? Do I have the time? And when I really think about it, no. When it comes down to it, no. I don't have the time or energy, and I have to just sort of be happy with where I'm at. So I don't know. I know I'm rambling. There's a lot to think about in this episode, but the main takeaway from today is most learners don't have a knowledge problem. They have an automaticity problem. The gap between knowing and doing. And every time you choose another explanation instead of another repetition, you know, watching that video instead of practicing using the information that you are trying to master, that gap is widening. So maybe the next level of your English isn't hiding in another grammar book or watching another grammar video on YouTube, maybe even listening to another podcast like this. Maybe it's hidden in finally mastering what you already know. Okay? So with that, I'm gonna include a downloadable PDF with some information in it today to try and help you with some exercises to take things from knowledge to automaticity. So download that for free, it'll be for free. You'll be able to find it in the description or on the website. I'm Pete. I hope you have an amazing week, and I'll see you next time.