478. Level up your English with these advanced techniques

If you are an advanced learner and you feel stuck in English, this episode is for you. Because today I'm going to teach you some of my top strategies for advanced learners or English learners or English speakers who have a lot of experience using and learning English, but they still feel like they want to make their English shine, this is going to help you.

Hey, you're listening to the Influency podcast. I'm Hadar, your host, a pronunciation expert, fluency coach and a proud non native speaker with over 16 years of experience teaching. I am here to share with you all my secrets on how to show up in English clearly with confidence and freedom. On this podcast, I'll provide step by step strategies, lessons, stories and practical tips to keep you inspired and motivated on your English journey.

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Let's do it.

These are strategies that I've been using with my most advanced students and I've given it to my coaches to use with their advanced students. So now I wanted to share that with you so you can shake up your English routine, you your English practice and start feeling small breakthroughs in your confidence and your fluency. But before we start, hi, my name is Hadar. I'm a non native speaker of English and I'm here to help you speak English with clarity, with confidence and with freedom. You can check out my website@hadar shemesh.com for a ton of free resources or follow me on my social media accounts for daily lessons. So the first strategy that I'm going to teach you is to set clear and high level goals. So advanced learners, they don't need to just know more words or to improve their pronunciation necessarily. They need performance goals. They need goals that if you know that you've achieved them, you know that you've made progress, you know that you've reached the next level. So you can set goals such as deliver a 10 minute keynote speech in front of a group or without getting stuck or being able to debate controversial issues with clarity and and while being very concise and to the point, right? This is a very clear performance based goal or to sound natural without getting stuck in a small talk. Very specific goal. The benefits are clear, right? And it's easy to measure it. Also frame goals around specific contexts like around your career or around your social life or around your creative life or maybe around your business. So it's not about English, it's about achieving something in English that is not about English. But your abilities in English are required, your competency is needed. So for you to achieve those goals, you need to improve your English. And when you focus on the goals, it makes it about the goal and about more than just English. But also you know exactly what you need to do to get there. So for example, if you need to deliver a 10 minute keynote speech, obviously you'll need to create a plan. You'll need to practice effectively, you'll need to try it out in front of other people, you'll need to contact people to be able to have that talk in front of others. Right? So there's a lot that goes into achieving that one goal that you need English for. The next strategy is to use the fluency wheel. The Fluency wheel is a tool that I developed to help my students understand what to focus on. The idea is that there are six areas of fluency that you need to be equally strong in. And if you're weak in one of those areas, you need to strengthen that area more than the others. The tendency of people is to usually gravitate to practicing the areas that they're already strong in. And the fluency wheel helps reflect the things that they actually need to focus on. The fluency wheel has six Pronunciation, grammar and syntax, Listening comprehension, Speaking time, which means the amount of time you actually use to speak English. Active vocabulary, the amount of words you know and use immediately. Confidence and mindset. That is the last pillar. So if you have a 10 in grammar, but two in confidence and mindset, you are not going to feel and experience fluency. Okay, so that means that when you use the fluency wheel and I'm going to share with you resources in the description, you will be able to know what to focus on and not just keep on practicing the same thing over and over again. The next thing is to build a daily plan. This is something that I use when I learn Spanish and this is all about quality over quantity. Because you don't need to just practice hours and hours every day, you need to practice a certain amount of time. But that time needs to be qualitative, of high quality. So the idea is to create a laser focused routine for yourself, 20, 30 minutes a day where you know exactly what you will be doing. So for example, five minute drills of tongue twisters. Then you're going to learn a specific topic or grammar subject that is still vague in your brain. Then maybe you can prepare a short persuasive speech. Okay, so you do that exercise and you incorporate all the things that you need to improve, simulate a professional conversation or high stake conversation. And you can use ChatGPT for that. I have a lot of Videos and trainings on how to use CHAT GPT to level up your English practice. If you don't use ChatGPT, use ChatGPT to infuse. Use your practice with more resources and more creativity and really easy to generate drills and exercises because I think drilling sounds and sentences in grammatical structures are really important. Record and analyze yourself, Repeat and refine the things that you are practicing and recording. Do shadowing exercises. So all of these things, and again, I'm going to add more resources for what to do are things that can be helpful. But the idea, the main idea is to know exactly what you'll be doing every single day. What I do in Spanish is that I set a specific goal. Okay, in three months I want to be able to use, I don't know, reflexive verbs spontaneously without thinking about it. And then I would kind of like reverse engineer it and say, okay, if this is where I want to be in three months, like what needs to happen every day for five minutes out of my 30 minute practice so that by the end of the 30, 60 or 90 days I will be able to reach that goal of using that tense or that grammatical structure effortlessly. Right? And I can do it with drills that I create for myself and I can do it with all the other things that I shared with you, like recording, simulating conversations, shadowing, so on and so forth. The next one is to start focusing on other elements of speech. What does that mean? When people speak in English, then they focus a lot on the technical things of the language, like the grammar and pronunciation and sentence structure. Vocabulary and all of that is really, really great. And of course, ideally practice, but sometimes they might still feel like they're not authentic or they don't feel like themselves or they don't feel comfortable with the voice. So this is where I would encourage my advanced students to start to explore exploring more things about the voice and about their speech, rather than focusing on the theory or the technical things of English. So for example, one thing that can completely change how you feel in English is your voice quality and placement. Maybe you change your voice a little bit when you speak in English. Maybe your voice is a little too high or a little too low and it's different than how you sound in your first language. Maybe you speak too, too fast or too slow in English. So this is something that you can start focusing on. And don't just assume that it's just going to improve in the future or it's going to change when your English improves. No, sometimes we need to put a spotlight on specific elements of speech and improve them so that we can feel the difference in how we speak. You can focus on connected speech. You can focus on your pitch range. Maybe your pitch is a little too monotone and you can play around with your pitch and sound more persuasive. Again, I have more resources for you, and I'm going to share them in the comments if you're interested in doing exactly that. A lot of these things are not considered as English practice, but for advanced learners who've already done work in English, these are the things that connect all the dots together. These are the things that make you feel more safe and more authentic in English. And usually we don't think about those things. We don't think about them in our first language as well. I personally learned these things in my acting studies, and I think that everyone should know these things and everyone should study these things because these are tools that help you sound like yourself, but also help you express your voice in a way that people want to listen. So I wouldn't underestimate the importance of speaking speech work and voice work. This is why in my programs I always incorporate speech work and voice work, even though it's not necessarily English, but it helps speakers, especially advanced speakers, feel more at home in English, which is what we want. Okay, I hope this was helpful. I have one last strategy for you, and that is if you want a little bit more coaching and support and more strategies to improve your English as an advanced student, I invite you to join either New Sound my Pronunciation coaching program that we open twice a year, or you can also join beyond my English practice community, where you have a ton of resources and opportunities to practice with me, with my coaches, and with the rest of our community. And you have really unique and innovative strategies for improving your English. So as an advanced learner, you can can absolutely find exactly what you're looking for there. It's not just for advanced learners, but there's a lot there for people who have a lot of experience using English. All right, my friends, that is it. If you have any questions or other suggestions or ideas on how to improve your English as an advanced learner, you can write them in the comments below. In the meantime, have a beautiful, beautiful rest of the day and I will see you next week in the next video. Bye.