Hi this is AJ and welcome back for secret number three, now the last secret the last rule was maybe your favorite, right? No more Grammar rules, good news for you, but this one is probably the most important rule, this is really the Central Key, it's the main one and this rule or this secret is this: learn with your ears not with your eyes, again learn with your ears not with your eyes, now of course we're teaching you how to speak excellent English, speak, and to speak well you have to have excellent listening, see speech comes from listening, here's the problem. In school you mostly learned with your eyes, what did you do? You read a lot of textbooks, you watched the teachers write a lot of stuff on the board, maybe you listening to the teacher explain English in your language, so you’re less you’re hearing your language not English in your classroom, but in general what happened is you’re learning, learning, learning, with your eyes that's what happening, and maybe still happening now, I don't know, hopefully not.
Not after today, so there's a big problem with this, see when you’re when you’re just reading and try to learn grammar rules, for example by reading grammar books and you trying to learn vocabulary by reading vocabulary list, and you’re trying to read English dialogues and then you written tests, and then you’re doing all this writtens activities, and writing drills, none of that is helping you with your speaking, and that's why you probably read English much better than you speak it or understand it, it's a common problem, it's because in school you learned with your eyes all the time or most of the time and you did very little learning with your ears, listening, listening, listening is secret number three and it's probably the most important one, you gotta listen a lot, you’ve gotta listen to a lot, a lot, a lot of English, that's the key to great speaking, there's a lot of research about this, a lot of academic research, excellent research that shows that listening is the way you improve your speaking, not reading, not practicing speaking in a mirror or something, no it's lots and lots and lots of listening, lots of it, now this is so obvious, but let's think imagine a baby, a little baby, little American baby will say, this little American baby of course needs to learn English, so how will we teach this American baby to learn English, will we buy grammar books and try to make the baby study grammar?
No we won’t, we could try, but it won't work, would we try to force the baby to read immediately? of course not, so how does this little baby learn English? one way and one way only, Listening for 6 to 12 month that baby just sit there and listens, listens listens listens listens, listens to the parents mostly and maybe brothers and sisters and maybe others people in the family, speaking English constantly and of course when parents speak to a baby they don't speak difficult English, they speak very simple easy English, and eventually the baby starts to learn a few words like Mommy, Daddy, maybe food, really simple stuff, but they start to learn a little bit and that’s the beginning and then they start learning, you know, group of words, two words, three words together, all of this is happening through listening and for a while the baby can understand a lot, this small child can actually understand a lot of English, but cannot speak very much this is natural and normal that the listening level is higher than speaking level, and then eventually of course the baby will start to speak one words and two words in the beginning, and then phrase, bigger set phrases and then sentences and it just keep going, and that baby learns to speak excellent English through listening, by learning with the baby’s ears, and that's what you have to do, you have to go back and start learning English, now change the way you learning it, and instead learn it like a baby,
learn with your ears lots and lots of listening, now like a baby you should not focus on difficult listening, this is another problem that schools have and a lot of students have, maybe they do practice some listening, but when they do it’s so difficult like they’re listening to sample TOEFL tests and things like that extremely difficult, vocabulary very academic and formal not really natural normal English for normal situation, and it's so difficult that you cannot really understand it easily and automatically, if you do that if you listen to English that too difficult your learning will be very very very slow, you want the opposite like baby, you want to listen to lots of easy English, easy listening is the key, easy listening will give you great speaking, that's what all the research shows is very powerful, so you probably need to be listening to things that are much easier than you think, here's my basic rule for listening, you should listening to something that you can understand 95% of it without a dictionary, 95% that means you don't need a dictionary at all because the other 5% you can easily guess,