#436 - How to Get Fluent in English WITHOUT Studying Grammar — What You Should Focus On Instead, Why Natives Don't Know Grammar, and How I Learned Verb Tenses in English
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So if you watch today's lesson until the end, you'll learn how to master grammar without having to sit down to study it. Because many people ask me, "Hey Izzy, why don't you teach more grammar?" You know, "Why don't you guys on this podcast teach more grammar?" And you know what? Let's talk about it today. There's a reason for that and you'll learn exactly how I did it. But you could be asking yourself, "But Izzy, how am I going to learn how the language works then?"

Well, to answer that, I want to divide this lesson in three parts. In the first part, I'll actually answer that question, you know, how to learn, how to master grammar without having to study it and why it works. In the second part, I'm going to demonstrate with real sentences how to do it in practice. And in the last part, I'm going to share with you guys why I didn't go to college, why I didn't go to university and how that was really good for me. And this is all related with learning grammar.

And we can also get into the question of, is it still necessary to go to college? Maybe. Maybe it depends. We'll talk about it. All right, so let's think about that question again. Izzy, how am I going to learn how the language works if I don't learn grammar? Well, the thing is, when I think about grammar,

I think about the terminology of different rules, right? You have verb tenses or jargon like preposition, noun, adjectives. It's nice to know these, you know, to know what these refer to. But even if you don't know, it doesn't make so much of a difference. If you go out there today, right now, and you ask somebody who you know about grammar in your own language, your native language, I bet that they won't know much. Even though they can speak fluently,

they won't know much grammar. There's even people who are illiterate. They don't know how to write or read, but they can speak fluently. Some people are actually great speakers. So if you go to the more advanced topics, such as like some verb tenses, like future, perfect, continuous,

What is that? It's even more rare that you find somebody who knows what that is, but people know how to use that verb tense, even though they don't know the jargon. So what you actually need is to learn patterns. This is how I learned. I focused on the patterns, the things that I'm seeing repeating themselves. So I can give you some examples here with prepositions like in, on, at, and some people confused like when should I use in, on, or at? So I have here

some sentences that I want to show you guys. And if you're not watching this, I'm going to read it out loud so you can hear it. But if you are on the real life app, you can actually see on screen the sentences. So here's the first sentence. I met Sarah the park yesterday. Is it I met Sarah in the park, on the park or at the park? What do you guys think? Well, the most common answer here would be at. I met Sarah at the park because at refers to the location.

Now, there is a rule that says that when you're referring to a location in general, you need to say at. You'll find this in textbooks. Like for the location to refer to the location, use at.

But I didn't learn it this way. I didn't learn by consulting a textbook or the official rule. I just learned a pattern. I realized by having enough input, by living my English sufficiently, I started to notice like, oh, okay. So when you're saying at the coffee shop, at the mall, it's like a general location that you'd find on Google Maps. But you could use in too, like maybe say there is in the park. But what's the difference there?

Well, I can think of two situations. So let's say, where is Sarah? Is she at work? Is she at school? Is she at home? No, she's at the park. But maybe the question could be, is she in the park or in the parking lot waiting for us? And then you could say, no, she's in the park. She's inside the park. Everything is part of the location there.

So you could say at, but it's not going to be specific enough. So we want to know whether or not she's in the boundaries of the park. You see, there's different applications, but this is just natural. If you just learn by having enough examples that you see in life, you just naturally learn this. No need to rush it, by the way.

Because if you try to just like learn so you don't make any mistakes, you're just going to be worried about something that no native speaker is worried about at all. And it's not going to harm the understanding of what you're saying in most cases, this kind of mistake, right? In an ad. So I would say, don't worry about it. But let me give you some more examples of sentences that you can see the rule in there, but it's just better to learn by learning the pattern.

How about the book is the table? Is it at the table, in the table, or on the table? You guys know this is on, right? Because it's on a surface. So anything that's on a surface, like stuck or sitting there on that surface, it's just on. Not that hard to remember that. And if you hear it differently, say you are speaking with somebody who's another non-native, and they say the book is in the table, because you'll have heard enough, like on, on, if you consume enough media,

that'll just sound unnatural to you. So that's a natural way that all native learn their native language. All right, so I have three more examples here. And tell me if you know which one is right. Just use your intuition. Don't try to think so much about the rule for now. We're going to have a meeting in 2 p.m., at 2 p.m., or on 2 p.m. How about, I've never been in the United States, on the United States, or at the United States, but I'd love to visit. Which one?

And this final one, my birthday is in December 15th, on December 15th, or at December 15th. What do you guys think? So there's an actual answer to these questions that follow rules. We can think about, for example, time, 2 p.m., you should say at 2 p.m. Or a country like the United States, you should say in the United States. And for referring to a day, like a date, December 15th, you should say on December 15th.

But these are rules, right? And what I'm saying is learning the rules won't get you to fluency. It's nice to know the logic, but if you obsess over it as if you had to memorize it, it's not going to work. So I'm not the enemy of grammar. For all the teachers out there who love grammar, they study it, they teach it with a lot of passion.

That's okay for them. But I just feel that when I do that with my own students, which I've done in the past, I had to teach the grammar that I knew just so I could teach at this school. But it wasn't right because that's not how I learned. And that's not how I developed my fluency. So I was feeling that they were too concerned about grammar. They would come to me and ask, hey, Izzy, which one is right? And I was like,

Dude, like that doesn't matter so much. Like you already got the whole sentence right. You're just like, why are you fixating on that one? The terminology, the jargon that you want to employ there. So that's my point. I'm not the enemy of grammar. I just don't think it's the method that you should use for acquiring fluency. So in summary, that was my approach to developing fluency.

I definitely reason about what I'm seeing. There's reasoning involved. There is a rational thinking. I do make logical conclusions to understand the patterns. I just gave you some patterns using in, on, at, you know, referring to time, location, et cetera. So when I'm living my English, I am thinking, you know, it's like, ah, okay. Just like I learned vocabulary, you know, you associate a word with an image. You can associate some structure, like a grammatical structure with a situation and then, you

you just know that that's when you use that verb tense for example you know it's it's just logical if you want to refer to the future and you learn like i will and you see that over and over again you'll just internalize that just like you internalize vocabulary and finally let me just say that if you are concerned about making mistakes because if you like if you learn grammar that will prevent you from making mistakes because you know you are ashamed of of that

When you meet a foreigner, think about it. When you meet somebody from another country that they try and speak your language, you're not too concerned, you know, if they make some mistakes. Because what you're more interested there in is connection. You just want to connect with that person. You just want them to say meaningful stuff to you.

you hear and then you respond with more meaningful stuff back to them. This language was made for connection, is made for accomplishing things in life. It was not made for perfection. Like linguists care about refining and perfecting language to this extent. Or if you're a poet or if you're writing lyrics for a song, maybe that matters more. But when you're just speaking,

you know, when you're out there living our English, living our native language, it's not really the point, you know, and mistakes sometimes are just a part of informal,

usage of the language. So, in a lot of cases, there's not even such a thing as a mistake. Now let's move on to the second part of this lesson and I want to demonstrate to you how I learned exactly. There are some grammar topics here that I set aside for us to look into and I'll show to you that the way that textbooks teach grammar is just ineffective. So, here it is. I even used ChatGPT to simplify the language to make it as direct as possible

to explain some topics. And you'll see that if you just rely on explanations, on conceptual explanations of topics, it's just weird. It's not human language almost. So for example, I mentioned the future perfect continuous tense. It's a verb tense.

What is that? Right? Let me read to you guys a description of what that is. So the future perfect continuous tense describes in an ongoing action that will be happening up until a specific moment in the future with emphasis on the duration. It is formed using will have been plus the verb in the present participle, the ing form. Like what?

It's just confusing, right? Because you're trying to conceptualize something that should be more simple. Let me give you some example sentences and you can see what this verb tense future perfect continuous refers to. So by next month, I will have been working here for five years. What logic that reveals to like, what can you understand from that is that by next month? So we're right now we are in April. So we're

in May, some point in May, there will be a point when this person or I myself, I will reach five years of working here. So what that means by next month, I will have been working here for five years. Let me give you another example. In 2025, they will have been traveling for three years. So this year,

These people will reach a total of three years that they have been traveling. So it's continuously happening, right? The name of the verb tense is future perfect continuous. My point is that most textbooks, they try to teach the concept. Textbooks and teachers. So they give you all this explanation about the concept of the topic.

And it's just better to get the examples, skip to the examples. And you don't even necessarily have to learn the terminology that represents that verb tense. That doesn't help you learn the verb tense. What helps you learn the verb tense is just getting enough exposure and trying to use it yourself. You know, get exposed to the verb tenses and then you can pause if you're watching a movie, for example, and you're like, okay, let me try and say something.

similar to that, using that verb tense. You may make a mistake, that's okay. Let me give you another example here. By the time you arrive at lunchtime, I will have been waiting for you for two hours. So what does that mean? It means that maybe somebody called you, you know, you're waiting for that person and somebody calls you saying, "Hey, I'll be late, I'll arrive there at lunchtime." But you got there at 10, 10:00 AM so that you can answer, you know, by the time you arrive here at lunchtime, I will have been waiting here for two hours. So we're just expressing that at that point in the future,

That's what will have happened. It's as simple as that. The more you see it, the less you have to conceptualize it because it just makes sense. Let me give you another example here. So subjunctive mood. What is that? It's just like another, it sounds very advanced, like subjunctive mood. Let me read the description here as a textbook would explain it.

The subjunctive mood is a verb form used to express hypothetical, non-real or wished for situations, desires, recommendations or conditions contrary to fact. It is often used in dependent clauses following expressions such as wish, if or as if. In English, the subjunctive often appears in the base form of the verb regardless of the subject. This is very long. It's boring. Maybe you want to leave right now and stop listening because it's so boring, right? Like,

That's why I don't believe that this really works. Now, if you hear a sentence, it starts to make sense and you're like, okay, give me another sentence. All right, another sentence. And then you start to realize, all right, there's a pattern here. I'm seeing the pattern repeat and I'm starting to extract meaning from it. Let me give you some examples of the subjunctive mood. I wish she were here to help us with the project. Does anything here catch your attention? I wish she were here to help us with the project.

She were? That doesn't sound very natural. Like she were? But isn't she was the correct form of the verb to be to use there? But in the case of the subjunctive mood, it's she were. Let me give you another one. I wish I were a doctor.

Not I wish I was a doctor, even though informally you could even say that. But correctly, the correct grammar would be I wish I were a doctor. You start to see a pattern that is just saying wish I were, wish he were, wish she were, wish it were. Just always using were there.

This is one very good example of something that I learned without having just no idea about the actual terminology, subjunctive mood. And there's even stuff in pop culture that helps you fixate in your memory all these patterns because it's going to be more emotional to you. So there's the song Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. And if you guys know, it starts like a so, so you think you can tell.

heaven from hell right and in the chorus uh it's like how i wish how i wish you were here and because of that song i always remember it so if you live here english enough it's going to be much easier to learn grammar yeah so when you're referring to something hypothetical you know that's not true but that you wish you were true

then like this is always the information. Wish I were, wish he were, wish we were. And it's as simple as that. Informally, you could say was, that's not going to make so much of a difference. But I'm talking about the official pattern that you'll find in textbooks, that there's this huge explanation to this. And there's also jargon. There's a

for this topic, which is subjunctive mood. People try to learn. And my point is that people try to learn all of this by attaching all of this to the expression subjunctive mood and also attaching the whole explanation, trying to memorize it, to go to school. And there is this curriculum, this list of things that they will see over the next four years of studying English. And then, um,

They're like, okay, once I'm done learning all of these, checking all these boxes, I'll be totally fluent. Wrong. It's possible some people obsess over grammar because they love it, they're passionate about it, and they become fluent. But that's just the minority of the masses. It's very likely that you are not one of these people, you listening, watching us right now. So that's what my point is.

Don't obsess over the names, the terms, the jargon, the definitions. Just obsess over examples, which is, in other words, real life English. You want to learn a verb tense? Okay, let's say the one we went through today. Future perfect continuous. Obsess over examples. Go through many sentences. You can even use ChatchPT for that. You can widely listen to English sentences.

a podcast movie series you just pay attention and you're going to eventually see that and use it practice write it speak it speaking is better my opinion because you also start to master the sound usually there's connected speech in a lot of these word chunks and a lot of these formations so if that's what you focus on

you're going to be remembering all of this a lot more, which is ultimately what you want, right? Speaking fluently, speaking naturally as if you were your native language requires you to use the same method that you use for learning your native language. We know grammar of our native languages, us non-natives, because we went to school, right? It was something that we studied because we had to study it, but ultimately we don't think about it, right? And as I pointed out earlier in this lesson, if you go out there and speak with any person on the street,

Very unlikely that they will know what some advanced terms like I used today here. Subjective mood. There's even other ones that I listed here, but we're not going to go through them because, again, it can be really boring. Right. Again, if you are into it, if you're a linguist, that's OK. But, you know, just stop obsessing over it and start obsessing over language.

Real life English. And by that, I don't mean us real life English necessarily. But what I mean is real things that you live your life through that. You know, it could be books. It could be whatever you want it to be. Instead of doing that in your own language, just try doing that in English. And as I also pointed out, use your English or as we say in our own method, activate your English. So live it.

and activate it. And all this grammar, all of these structures will start to make sense to you. And some people could argue, that's just going to take more time. You know, if I go directly to the grammar topics, I won't need to wait until all of these examples come up in the movie series, et cetera. And while that is true,

But grammar is everywhere. Like everything you read, there's formation in there. You know, there was a sort of structure. So in a way, it doesn't really have to take so much time. It just means that you need to start paying attention to what you're seeing so you can analyze it, have that curiosity for what you are reading, consuming. That's a very important part of activating your English. You want to activate that sense of curiosity, right? And then you start to see patterns everywhere.

We talk a lot about patterns in vocabulary, patterns in pronunciation, connected speech, right? But there's pattern in grammar too, obviously. Actually, grammar is all patterns, right? If you think about the word rule, a rule is trying to teach you something that you need to repeat over and over again because that's the rule. It's the same thing. That's what a pattern is. I didn't define the word pattern, but that's what it means, right? Something that, for example, you have a...

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12. We see that the pattern there is even numbers, right? Or like 1, 5, 10, 15, 20. The pattern there is adding 5, 5, 5, 5. So those are numerical patterns. And we can see patterns in language too. All right, guys. Now, related to all of this, I wanted to share with you why I decided not to go to college, to university.

And what I did instead that I felt was just a lot better for me and seeing the results today in my life, like everything that I've been able to accomplish, I just feel happy, you know, that I didn't go. And I don't want to say, you know, I don't want to tell you not to go if you're considering, if you're young and thinking about that, or if you're thinking about going to college again, if you're older. But let's think about the benefit of going.

what I call like real life learning, real life doing. So when I was 18, I took the test, the exam to see if I could enter college, university in Brazil, and I passed. So I could actually study music

you know, music theory at this very prestigious university, public university in Brazil. And I decided not to because what I actually wanted to do was move from my state to Sao Paulo, which is very far and start a band with a friend who I was in contact with. I had been in contact for, I don't know, years at that point. And I wanted to start a rock band with him and do real music. I know that was not the most

All right, guys. Now, if you're interested in watching or listening to today's full episode, including this next part, all about my decision of not going to university and what I did instead, then you want to head over to the real life app right now. We're going to leave a link in the description below so you can click on that and it'll take you straight to the lesson on the app.

And on there, you also get to practice the advanced words they learned today. And we give you interactive transcript that you can just tap on the words. It really is the best way they can learn with these lessons and become more confident and natural when you speak English. So join us and we'll see you over there.