Hey there! This is TOP episode 147: Be Like A Child! Tips For Language Learners
My name’s Ola I teach English since 2012 and I believe you can eliminate your language blockade. The secret word here is consistency. There are other secret words too. That is why I record this podcast’s episodes, and each comes with a little worksheet, a one-pager to help you digest and test what you’ve practised here. You can speak English with more confidence, slay that fear and enjoy fluent communication.
Visit my website for full transcripts and worksheets to each episode. Visit my shop at teacherola.com and enjoy your journey to fluency! Happy learning!
Hello hello! Thank you for choosing this episode. It’s Children’s Day today and that inspired me to create this episode on what kids do right in learning a language and what we should borrow from them to achieve better results ourselves. There is an episode about kids and if you haven’t tuned in yet I do recommend doing so it’s 121 Do Kids Learn faster Thank Adults. Spoiler Alert: No, they don’t.
They don’t learn faster but they do it better. Today’s episode will list what you can change and improve to learn languages better.
Before we move on let me remind you that you can meet me live on Instagram every Thursday at 11 am I jump in live just for a quick chat, 20 minutes or so to discuss some language-related tips. You’ll find me as teacherola.podcast. So join me this Thursday at 11:00 live on Instagram!
Let me quickly remind you there’s a Worksheet dedicated to these sentences we’re gonna practice in a while so go grab it at teacherola.com/147 or find it in your inbox.
Secondly, visit my shop, buy a Worksheet set, and have them all in one place. They’re editable. Check out my e-book with episode transcripts.
If you’re interested in learning English with tv series check out the links below. I am working on my Speak English with Netflix course, a programme focused on one skill only, on speaking. To try on for a size grab a checklist, the link is in the description. Thank’s for your patience and let’s get back to the episode.
One. Listening
Be like a child. Be like a sponge. A child learning a language is flooded with content. When children learn their mother tongue they are surrounded and immersed in the target language and its culture. Do they feel overwhelmed? No. They listen. They listen to everything that surrounds them, they don’t start with a simple listening task in a coursebook. They are immediately faced with the reality of people speaking a given language fast. Incredibly fast. They cannot do it and honestly, they won’t be able to do it for many years. Still, they absorb the melody, the intonation, and the way the language sounds.
What’s the takeaway for us, adult language learners? Listen. Listen to English all the time. If you can focus on what you’re listening to on a given day, brilliant. But think about your subconscious brain. It can be fed English while you are not paying any attention to it. Listen to people talking and don’t worry about understanding the words. Just wrap your mind in a cosy language blanket. Let your brain be immersed in the language. Let it absorb subconsciously, like a sponge. The intonation, the collocations, the rhythm, the sound.
That’s not enough, that’s not a secret trick to learning a language effortlessly. There’s no such thing. You need to put in a lot of effort and energy. So do all kinds of listening. Active learning comes first but don’t forget that when your brain is focused on something else or tired, it still absorbs knowledge passively. Think about yourself when you were learning your mother tongue. Your parents didn’t silence the language surrounding you in order to feed you only simple words you could make out. You were thrown into this world of words without a life jacket. Right from the word go you could hear people talking. Everywhere! Create such an environment for yourself.
Two. Mirror
What do kids do with all that they hear from us, adults? They imitate us. They look at our faces, at our lips and tongue, at our mouths and they do their best to replicate what they see we’re doing. That’s how they learn. Practising. Trying. Doing. Experimenting. Coping parents. Coping teachers. Have you ever seen those videos with kids doing impressions of their parents? Or teachers? That’s what they do all the time.
How can we apply this action to our grown-up language learning? Imitating people who speak our target language fluently. And here I have to direct you to episode 25. Shadowing Technique To Boost Your Speaking Skills. Episode 25. Shadowing is copying, mirroring a speaker. Well, it’s not the only technique you want to implement yet it’s a proven formula and worth a shot. Tune in to episode 25 because I don’t want to repeat myself endlessly, so to learn more about how to do it right find that episode. And we can move on to number three.
Three. Mistakes
Do kids do things correctly when they copy adults? No. It’s obvious, right? He’ll learn. She’ll learn. He’s just learning, she’s just learning, we say. Well, look at us, we’re so understanding when it comes to kids. How come we forget so easily that we adults learn a language similarly. We need to try we need to open our mouths and see what happens. But we’re scared of mistakes. We stop ourselves from speaking. But what we’re really doing is preventing ourselves from progressing. That’s not learning. Waiting for the moment ‘I’m ready’ and ‘I’m sure’ and ‘I know the grammar and vast vocabulary’ is not learning.
Because learning my friend is absorbing a chunk of knowledge, preferably a small portion and testing it out in reality. Through making mistakes. If you are afraid of making mistakes I’ve got the six best tactics to overcome that fear and I talked about them in episode 17. Please give up that limiting belief that you need to stop being afraid. You don’t have to stop being afraid, all you need to do is act despite that fear. Episode 17. Fear Of Making Mistakes While Speaking English.
Four. Repetition
Kids love repetition. They listen to ‘Baby Shark’ thousands of times, right? That’s brutal for everybody around them but they love repetition. They want you to read that one bedtime story over and over again. They want to watch the same cartoon repeatedly because they love it. They love repetition and that’s why they’re good at learning.
I used to teach in a kindergarten. The same opening song, the same song for the end of the class, to mark the end. The same structure of the class. Why? Because such an environment, save environment and on top of it, a predictable environment provides great outcomes. Was it boring for me? For the teacher in the kindergarten?
Generally for the stuff? It was monotonous. For kids? Fun and I mean ‘let’s scream at the top of our lungs’ kind of fun. It’s just being grown up that repetition, and revision becomes mundane and we think in our logical brains that it’s worse. That we need new information each time we learn. Nope. We don’t. Stop favouring new information. Bias towards repetition.
What’s the lesson for you? Well, be patient with yourself and revise your knowledge in a regular, monitored way. Create a system for yourself. A system which incorporates planned revisions.
This is it! Here you have it. Four tips for you inspired by how children learn. Listening, Mirror, Mistakes and Repetition.
Now, let’s practice. Listen and repeat out loud:
A child learning a language is flooded with content.
Do they feel overwhelmed?
Create such an environment for yourself.
Have you ever seen those videos with kids doing impressions of their parents?
How can we apply this action to our grown-up language learning?
But what we’re really doing is preventing ourselves from progressing.
Please give up that limiting belief that you need to stop being afraid.
You don’t have to stop being afraid, all you need to do is act despite that fear.
A predictable environment provides great outcomes.
Bias towards repetition.
You killed it! Now, go to your inbox, get the worksheet and take your today’s learning to the next level. If you aren’t a member of TOPeople download the worksheet from teacherola.com/147.
If you find this episode useful, tell your friends about my podcast, and share it with one person. It’ll help me grow and spread the message.
Thank for tuning in and I’ll see you next Wednesday! It’s gonna be about the difference between ‘lend’ and ‘borrow’. ‘Happy learning. Take care! Stay fearless and say it out loud! Bye!