Learn English Faster: Why Listening Beats Grammar Study | Rule 1/7
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Adept English Rule 1. Hi there, I'm Hilary and welcome to our free course, The 7 Rules of Adept English. Now you've signed up for this course, every day for 7 days you'll receive an email from Adept English with links to the next video, an MP3 file and a

PDF. The MP3 file is there in case you prefer to just listen. And in the PDF, you'll find the transcript, the written words of what I'm saying. Maybe watch the video first of all, and then you can download the MP3 to your phone so that you can listen again. Only use the written words if you really need to, or if you want to look up the spelling of a word. That'll be in the PDF file.

That means also you can look up in the dictionary any words that you don't understand or look them up online. But try to focus on listening during this seven rules course. And once you've worked hard and understood all the words, it's a good idea to listen again. Give yourself the experience of understanding everything I'm saying in one of these videos, just as though you were a native English speaker.

So, you're at the beginning of our 7 Rules course. Here, I can give you a guarantee. If you follow the advice of the 7 Rules of Adept English, your English will definitely get better. It will improve. It'll take time. It's not magic.

And you can't learn a language in a very short time, no matter what anyone says. But these seven rules contain the secrets of language learning, the very best method of learning a language. We show you how to do it, whether that language is English or any other. We're going to be talking about how you do your language learning.

the method you use, and hopefully will influence you to change your method of learning to our Listen and Learn method, which helps you learn more quickly.

More adeptly, we like to say it, adept English and a method which actually moves you towards speaking fluently. Also important, this course is not intended for beginners. You need to have a basic understanding of English, some basic grammar and vocabulary knowledge.

If you can understand most of what I'm saying in this video right now, you're ready to learn using the Adept English method. Our method will take you towards fluency. But if this video is too difficult to understand at the moment, you're better to go and do a beginner's course and come back to us later.

Come back to Adept English when you know more basic English. You'll get the most from it then. So what is the seven rules about? Well, once you have some basic grammar and vocabulary, my advice is don't continue learning in the traditional way. Lots of people take courses to learn a language. The problem? Well, usually language courses, just like the lessons we had in school, don't focus on the right skills.

The focus of most language lessons is on written words, reading and writing the language, learning grammar, vocabulary, verbs. Language courses in schools and colleges do certain things really well. They're great at preparing you to pass exams, usually written exams. So if that's what you want to get good at,

that's fine. But actually, most people learning a language want to be able to understand other people and to be able to speak fluently. For this, you need a lot of focus on listening and understanding, which is exactly what traditional language teaching doesn't do. It gets ignored.

forgotten about. What does happen though? When you've finished learning to read and write the language, they try to move you straight onto speaking. And wow, how uncomfortable, how unsure, how uncertain this feels to most people. There's an expression in English, flying by the seat of your pants. And it means trying to do something when you haven't learned the skills, when you haven't practiced,

flying by the seat of your pants is really uncomfortable. If you have to think really hard to make up the sentences in your head before you start to speak, that's not fluency. And in fact, that's really hard to do. And even if you manage to make yourself understood, you probably won't understand the native speaker's reply. In English, the person responding to you is likely to speak quickly and

and there's no telling what words they might use. The words may not be on your vocabulary list. Conversations are very short and very uncomfortable, even embarrassing. Most of us really hate speaking a foreign language if it feels like this. The only conversations we're able to have are those which run along predictable lines.

That's P-R-E-D-I-C-T-A-B-L-E. And predictable means you know exactly what's going to happen in that conversation. Like when you're at the coffee shop or in the bakery. Most of us may be able to do those type of conversations in our foreign language, but we get stuck at that level. In contrast...

True fluency, that's F-L-U-E-N-C-Y, means that you can understand and speak a language automatically without thinking about it too much. And fluency is almost impossible to arrive at using traditional teaching and learning methods. But if you follow the seven rules of Adept English, anyone who is able to speak their first language

can learn a new language. You just need the right tools and techniques. And I do mean anyone. If you can speak your own language, your brain, that's B-R-A-I-N, the machine here inside your head, it's already learned one language. I imagine you're fluent in your own language, aren't you? So if you can learn one language, you can learn another.

The machinery is already in here. All you need to do is the same activity that helped you learn your own language, listening. I'll come back to that. So given our listen and learn method of teaching English, what

rule number one. Rule one of the seven rules of Adept English says that listening is the most important task of learning. When you learned your first language as a baby, you heard the language being spoken all around you all the time. Your brain grew and developed.

It's very clever and it's designed to learn language naturally. So your brain adapted to understand what the adults around you were saying. You began to understand your own language automatically. Was there a need for a language course? When you were a baby, did you do grammar lessons or learn vocabulary lists? Of course you didn't.

You learned your language naturally by hearing it and understanding it. Gradually, you learned by context.

That's C-O-N-T-E-X-T. And by repetition. Context means the situation around you. If you're at the railway station, you hear words to do with timetables, the station and trains. If you're eating a meal, you hear words to do with food. That's context. Context is essential when we're learning a language so that your brain can make the necessary links and associations.

And as a child, you heard the same words repeated over and over again. Repetition means you do it lots of times. And repetition is what helps us to remember words and grammar, actually. As adults, our brains are waiting to learn language in exactly the way that we learned it as babies and small children. We learn language naturally if we listen to it

and we understand it. This is the natural way to learn a language and trying to force your brain to do it another way, it doesn't feel right and it doesn't really work. Not enough to take you to fluency anyway. This explains why people who live in the country where the language they're trying to learn is spoken, why they do so much better at language learning. They're hearing the language spoken all around them all the time.

on repeat. So, rule one of Adept English says that listening and understanding is the most important task of learning, but it takes time to develop your listening skills and your understanding. In other words, you have to listen to lots of

English for your brain to do its good work. And it's the job of Adept English to help you with that task. We help you to do lots of English listening without being in an English speaking country. And you may notice also the understanding happens.

way before the speaking. Young children can always understand much, much more than they can say. And if you're learning the language the natural way, this will be true for you too. And that's okay. You need to do a lot of listening to develop your understanding first and only then are you ready to start speaking. Once you've listened enough, speaking will start to follow on

naturally. Your mouth will start to want to say the words that you have begun to know so well. If you listen to 30 minutes of spoken English every day, your brain will automatically make the links and the associations.

What listening does is allow you to hear words lots and lots of times. As long as you're understanding most of the words, most of the meaning, your English will be improving. Like you, I struggled with language learning at school. When I was learning French, hardly any of the time in the classroom was spent listening. We focused on reading French, writing French,

and a little bit of speaking, but hardly any listening to French at all. So when we went to France, we soon found that we couldn't really understand French very well, and even less speak it. I got good grades in my French exams at school.

But that meant very little when I visited France and tried to have a conversation. It's only since I've discovered this listen and learn method of learning a language that my French has improved. And the advice in the seven rules is to help you focus on improving your English through listening, making it all much more automatic like it is with your own language.

Adept English is a stage in your language learning. As a guide, you need to be able to understand 70 to 80 percent of what I'm saying in this video. If you can do that, you're ready for Adept English and your main job is to become good at English language listening and understanding. That's what will take you forward. 70 to 80 percent

That means 20 to 30% of this you may not understand. That's why we include the PDF, but also there are captions on the screen to help you. So to recap, don't take a typical English language course

Unless you're right at the start, at the beginner level, typically courses focus on reading and writing and a little bit on speaking. They don't usually develop your understanding by listening. If you want to be fluent,

You need something different. And this is what we provide at Adept English. We recommend you listen to 30 minutes a day of spoken English at a level you can understand. So rule one of the seven rules says, again, listening and understanding what you hear is the most important task of language learning. It's the activity that you need to spend most of your time on. Remember, this is only rule one.

There are another six rules to help you move towards fluent English. See you tomorrow for rule two.