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What is the quickest and most efficient strategy to speak English for non-native English speakers?

August 20, 2021 , by Dr Julian Northbrook

I’m going to say something controversial: there isn’t actually a “quick” way to learn English.

There are English-learning methods you can use to learn English efficiently… but it’s certainly not quick.

Because the quick way is actually the slow, consistent way.

But for most people, the main thing you will want to do is change the way you learn and speak English. Non-native English speakers have learned English as a system of grammar rules and individual words. So, if this is how you learned English, you’ll end up speaking using these rules. And instead of sounding natural, your English becomes quite robotic.

If you’ve learned that way in school, what you need to do (first and foremost) is to unlearn it. Rather than focusing on grammar rules… focus on “chunks” (a sequence of words that are stored in a native speaker’s brain (you can learn more about “chunks” in this video.)




And, we have all of these chunks of English encoded in our long-term memory. So whenever we speak, we just pull all of those chunks out of our memory and use them. And these could be short or long… and that’s why we speak very fluently and efficiently. We don’t actually need any of these “rules” to be able to speak native-like.

So, again, if you want to speak English quickly and efficiently, don’t focus on words. Use chunks and speak confidently. But if you really want to sound like a native English speaker, I have a free guide here you can use to start speaking like a native English speaker.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook

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