Name: HOW I BECAME FLUENT IN ENGLISH + TOP 10 ENGLISH SPEAKING TIPS | Ysis Lorenna
Uploaded: 2016-11-10T03:30:50.000Z
Duration: 20 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Today I'm coming here to talk to you about how i became fluent in English.

It's a question I get asked a lot of times, and also to share some tips from

my personal experience on speaking a foreign language or second language,

on how to communicate well and be understood in a foreign language when

you're living abroad. If you don't know anything about me, and this is the first

I am originally from Brazil, I was born and raised there and I lived in Brazil

for 23 years. Then I moved to the UK and I've been living here for the last

Nowadays, I can say that I sometimes, well most of the time, I feel more confident

speaking in English than I do in Portuguese, and I think that's quite an

achievement for someone who wasn't brought up in an english-speaking

country and learned english as a second language. So I thought this video may be

interesting or useful to anyone out there who's learning English now and who

is struggling to become fluent or to know what to do to better their English.

My english is far from being perfect and I make mistakes all the time, but

I consider myself capable enough of holding a conversation, and I do all

my YouTube videos in English, which is good practice as well. So I'll just get

started with how I started to learn English. When you go to school in Brazil

English becomes part of the curriculum and it's one of the mandatory languages

to learn, and so I started learning in school. But the curriculum in school is

very limited and you really don't learn an awful amount of English in school.

So if you want to be able to speak English properly,

as a general rule, you have to enroll in a private English school. And that's what

most people do in Brazil and most of my friends did and when I was growing up.

I was about 13 when I started studying English, or 14. Around about that age, 13 to 14.

And I was going twice a week to a private English school.

It wasn't something that was forced by my parents. My mum always liked English.

She did do private English lessons when she was much younger, so it was something

that she was keen for us all to know and to learn from a young age.

And we were just generally interested in the English world,

in the English-speaking world and the culture. American culture, British culture,

which were the two biggest cultures that we were exposed to in Brazil, growing up.

We had lessons, and we started with Basic, Beginners and stuff, and carried on

progressing to Intermediate, then Advanced and then we got our degrees.

What happened to me was that, I very quickly realised I had a passion

for languages, and that I actually really enjoyed learning English. And so,

very quickly I progressed and developed my English because I was practicing so much

and enjoying it so much. I wasn't just learning in the English school,

I was going home, and I was watching things in English, and I was listening to music

in English and trying to understand the lyrics and translate it. And that kind of

helped a lot with my fluency and it helped just to solidify the concepts that

I'd learned from the books in my English school, and I'd come home

and it wasn't something that I was forced to do, it was something that I wanted to do.

So I would watch things in English and try to understand what they were saying.

I loved my dictionary, I walked around everywhere  with my Portuguese to English Dictionary

translating words that I'd come across and that I didn't know.

So, then when I was 14 to 15, my sister and I went abroad.

We went to Disneyland, and that was our first experience in an English-speaking country.

And I just thought it was amazing that I was able to understand certain things.

I just had a very basic knowledge  of English, but I just got so

intrigued and interested in all of it. A year later, I made my first trip to London.

I came to stay with a friend.  I was 15 at the time.

Yeah, I think so, 15 going on 16,  and I absolutely loved it.

I fell in love with the British culture then  and I just did not want to do

anything else,  I just wanted to learn English.

I was staying with a group of friends who only spoke English, which kind of

forced me to speak English as well and to kind of get out of my comfort zone,

So after I came back from abroad I did the placement test to see where my level

of English was after having spent that time abroad, because that does boost up

your English level quite a lot, and I had jumped quite a lot of levels.

So I went from being the start of Intermediate, to going straight to Advanced

and I skipped the whole of the Intermediate course because I had

already built up so much for vocabulary and learned so much just by being abroad.

I finished the Advanced level and I didn't stop there. I carried on studying because

I didn't want to lose my fluency and if any of you out there are learning

English abroad, you know how easy it is to quickly lose your fluency

if you've been abroad, if you studied abroad or did an interchange programme.

And then suddenly you're back home and no one speaks English on a daily basis.

It's really hard to keep up with the language if you're not constantly talking.

So I enrolled - my English school at the time offered what they called

a conversation course, which was basically, you finish the class, you finish the course.

There's no more grammar or anything to learn,  you've learned everything that we offer.

But now we offer you the chance  to keep coming back

twice a week with a group of people who are still interested in keeping that

English alive and we will just have conversations, basically. There will be

topics to be discussed every week, we'll have hand-outs and things,

and I'm sure you still be learning.  So I did that and that was brilliant.

I loved that and I recommend that anyone  who has finished their whole English course

Go and find a conversation course.  You might think that you're putting money

down the drain, but you're not, because you're keeping that whole investment

that you made  in your English course, alive.

You're basically saving your fluency in English,

because you're practicing twice a week at least  and you get to speak English that you wouldn't

get to speak otherwise.  And you also have  a teacher there to answer any questions.

It's not groundbreaking, I didn't do anything different to what anyone does

but I think I just already had a predisposition to languages, and the fact

that I went abroad really helped build up my confidence in speaking English.

So for starters I had a very very strong American accent because my teachers

in Brazil, they all had American accents and then when I came to the UK, I fell in love

with the British accent and somehow my brain was able to completely change

my accent from being American to British. And my husband being British,

at the time when we were going out,  we were still boyfriend and girlfriend.

He is Welsh, and my brain just sucked in  his Welsh accent, and now I have

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HOW I BECAME FLUENT IN ENGLISH + TOP 10 ENGLISH SPEAKING TIPS | Ysis Lorenna

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