AJ and Steve- Confidence (C)

Oh, hey! Oh, hey! Hi, and welcome to Effortless English. In today's episode, I present a conversation with Steve Kaufman. Steve and I had a long 30-minute conversation about language learning, learning on the internet, self-study, a lot of different topics.

So I'm breaking this conversation into little pieces. Today's piece is about confidence. Steve and I talk about the vital importance of of having confidence when you learn a language.

You've got to be confident. You've got to believe you can do it. You've got to believe in yourself. If you don't have confidence, it's hard to make progress.

It's hard to keep going. It's hard to have motivation. Your motivation will start to decrease. So maintaining your confidence, feeding your confidence, growing your confidence is very, very important.

Okay, let's listen to the conversation. Now, how about confidence? Obviously, confidence is another factor that can help people. If they are confident that they can learn or that they can improve, then that tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many people at some level really don't think they can improve. How do you find your students? How many of them are confident, feel that they can actually make some significant progress? And how many of them basically don't think they can?

I teach an advanced class, so I'm teaching... I would say most of them are confident because they've already reached the advanced level in our school.

However, again, I would say the older ones are more confident. and age does play a difference. I'd say most of them are fairly confident, but the problem comes in that then when they raise their standards, so they're confident, let's say, at a basic conversational level, but then they want to go to a university or to graduate school or job interviews with American companies, and then the confidence varies quite a bit.

You know, my experience has been that, if I look at immigrants here in Canada, my experience has been that many of them say that they would like to improve their English.

But, because to really make a breakthrough in language requires quite a lot of commitment. quite a lot of commitment. I mean, you literally have to study every day for one or several hours. Right.

And you have to really throw yourself into it with a very positive attitude. And I find that very few people have that attitude. Like, I think that it's probably less than 5%. In any group, in any group, even if you take, you know, it doesn't matter which group you take.

Maybe I'm being overly negative there. What do you think? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. We're meeting three hours. It's a three-hour class once a week. And I said, if you really want to significantly improve your TOEFL exam or your general English, three hours one time a week definitely is not enough.

You've got to do it every day. You've got to have a plan, a system. And I'd say most of them didn't like hearing that. Oh, is that right? They wanted to hear that they were going to come to the TOEFL class once a week and, you know, four months later their TOEFL scores are going to jump up and they're going to be speaking English much better and not have to do anything else.

Okay, that's the end of this section of the conversation. As I said, this is not all of the conversation. I'll be posting more sections of this conversation throughout the next week, actually.

I will run over a few phrases from this conversation that you may or may not know. Near the beginning, Steve mentions a self-fulfilling prophecy. A prophecy is a prediction of the future, right? Someone with magical powers, they can predict, ah, I know what will happen in the future.

Self-fulfilling means that if you believe something will happen in the future, your belief, your idea, might make it actually happen. For example... If you believe you are going to fail a test and you tell yourself, I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail.

And by doing this, you destroy your confidence. You become more and more nervous. So finally, when you take the test, you actually do fail. Well, maybe your belief is the reason you failed, right?

Your prophecy, your prediction that you would fail is the reason you actually did fail. So when you have this, when you have a belief about the future, and that belief makes this event happen, we call that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Okay, Steve also talks about making a breakthrough. This is a common phrase. We use it in many situations. To make a breakthrough is to make a sudden improvement.

It means you overcome... a problem quickly, suddenly, or you get through a problem, or you overcome an obstacle, or you suddenly make a big, big jump in your English level, or it can be used in any situation, not only learning in English. So that's making a breakthrough. And that's what most of us want to do with our language study, right?

We'd like to make a big breakthrough. We want to make a big, sudden improvement as fast as possible. We also use the word commitment a lot in this conversation. And a commitment.

A commitment is a promise to yourself. It means you make a strong decision to do something. It's not a small decision. It's not easy to change. If you make a commitment to learn English, it means you are going to keep trying.

If there's a problem, you will not quit. You will not give up. You have a commitment. It's the same thing in a relationship. If you have a commitment to your girlfriend or your boyfriend, well, that means it's a serious relationship.

That means you are not going to break that relationship easily, right? You've made a strong decision, a strong promise to yourself to stay with that person. So that's commitment. And you need a commitment.

You have to make a strong commitment to learn English and to master English. We use the phrase, throw yourself into it. I believe Steve said that. Throw yourself into it.

You've got to throw yourself into learning English. You've got to throw yourself into improving. To throw yourself into something, it means you commit with all of your energy, with all of your passion, with all of your enthusiasm.

So throw yourself into something means you totally do something. You do it with all of your energy. You're not holding back. You're not doing it just a little bit.

You're really trying as hard as you can. All right, and finally, I talk about talking to my TOEFL class, making them read part of Steve's book, because I wanted to impress on them an idea.

To impress an idea on someone, it means to kind of push your idea. It means try to get your idea across, to get them to understand your idea. And it has the idea of persuading, right? If I impress my idea on them, it means I'm trying to persuade them, trying to persuade them that they need to listen and read and learn English away from class.

Class is not enough. And so that's my final vocabulary point, but my final point about English and learning English is the same point I made to my class.

Even if you're going to a school, even if you're going to a school three, four hours every day, it's not enough. It's simply not enough. Classes waste too much time. You have to develop, you have to have your own learning plan.

You have to be listening on your own, by yourself, independently. You have to be choosing material, content that you find interesting. Something interesting to you, not interesting to the teacher, not interesting to me, not interesting to other people, other students. Interesting to you, something you're crazy about.

You love it. If you love the Beatles, then listen to Beatles interviews and read books in English about the Beatles. If you love cars, get car magazines. Listen to radio shows about cars.

Find content in English about cars. That will make intensity easier. That will make your motivation better. That will make it much, much more pleasant, more pleasurable, more fun to actually be listening and reading and learning English.

So, find what you love, find what you're interested in, focus on that, and be an independent learner. Okay! That's the end of this episode. Once again, our website, Effortless English, it's coming along.

The simple test version is almost ready. It should be ready next week. I will be accepting a few students, just a few students, to test out the new system. If you would like to be one of the testers, one of the few beginning students, go to my blog,

effortlessacquisition.blogspot.com and enter your email address on the right side at the top right side there's a little space enter your email address and click the blue button if you'd like to subscribe to this podcast instead of just getting it click the big round button on the top of my blog you need itunes to subscribe to my website

Well, it's easiest if you have iTunes. And I also have a link there for getting iTunes if you don't have it. iTunes is free. It's great software. Really great for managing your music and podcasts and now even TV shows and movies.

And finally, one last thing. I ask you a favor. If you know somebody who's trying to learn English, if you know someone who is frustrated with their normal, traditional English learning English classes, please tell them about this podcast and ask them to check it out. Ask them to try it.

Okay, I will see you next time. Keep learning English. Keep your motivation. Keep your confidence. Keep your passion. See you next time.