Discussing Our EE Challenge and English Questions

Welcome to the Effortless English Show with the world's number one English teacher, A.J. Hogue, where A.J. 's more than 40 million students worldwide finally learn English once and for all without the boring textbooks, classrooms, and grammar drills. Here's A.J.

with a quick piece to help you learn to speak fluent English effortlessly. I'm A.J. Hogue, the author of Effortless English, Learn to Speak English Like a Native.

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Today we will be talking about our challenge. Time for another update about our Effortless English Challenge, which is a listening and reading challenge. A listening and reading challenge. So we'll talk about the challenge, the listening and reading.

And then today I'm going to just answer kind of some of the frequent questions about English learning. Now some questions I have answered probably a hundred times.

How do I improve my vocabulary? You know, that kind of stuff. I'll probably avoid those questions. Or maybe I'll answer some of them. But I'll be looking for newer questions, you know, different questions.

So if you have questions about English learning that are a little different, that would be nice instead of the exact same questions I get every single time.

Now, I know we have new people, and so that's why you ask the same questions, because people are new, and those are common questions. They're important questions, so no problem. But just watch my old videos.

You'll hear me answer those questions again and again and again and again. And those of you who are regular listeners, I know you probably get tired of listening to me discuss the same exact questions. So we'll try to get some different questions today, so think of some creative questions.

Think of some creative questions about learning English. Hello to everybody who is live. So it's going to be kind of a discussion today. And we can talk about language learning in general because I'll discuss my own efforts learning Japanese and Spanish right now.

But first, let's talk about our challenge. Let's just go straight to an update. I need to update my hours. For about two weeks, I have not entered my hours.

So my hours are actually lower than they should be. Okay, screen cut. Let's go. Sign in. All right. So I'm signing in to our challenge runner. It's A website here.

Let's look at the listening challenge first. Let's see how we're doing. Woohoo! Look at those numbers. Yikes. So, look at those numbers. Okay, we have four people with a thousand hours or more.

This is listening. I'm looking at the listening one right now. So we're still not done. This is three and a half months. Our challenge has been going for three and a half months with four people that have more than a thousand hours in that time.

Wow, that's very impressive. Very, very impressive. We have Sven who has 1,641 hours. We have Edward Anderson, who has 1,608. We have Julia LeMaine, who has 1,005 hours.

And we have Alamin Ali with 1,000 hours. That's just impressive. Three and a half weeks. So that's... I mean, three and a half months. Three and a half months.

Three and a half months. That is very, very, very impressive. Let's see. Then we have... I'm just going to tell you the top ten here. Because it's still impressive, all these numbers.

We've got... Shero has got 983. Alexander Beliakov has 945. Julia Taquita, 796, almost 800. Miss Yell has 731. Yeager Yabar, 726. And Roberto De Santos, 687.

And then, you know, we still, you know, that's the top 10. But then, you know, you got the top 20. We still have the top 20. Everybody's got more than 500.

You know, there's Lisa at 21, 544. I mean, it's just impressive, guys. Carol's got 538. I don't know where I am. But like I said, I'm way down at 41 now with 384 hours.

But actually, I haven't been entering my hours. So I need to. Let's see. I probably have about 30 more hours than that, so I'm over 400. I'm happy with that.

I'm very happy with that. Since I started learning Japanese, I started learning Japanese one month before that. So I started actually in July, one month before our challenge. So I should, by the end of our challenge, my total Japanese hours will be about 500.

Not all during the challenge, though. But I'm over 400 for the challenge with Japanese. I'm with listening. I'm very happy with that myself. So I'm super happy with 400 hours.

Seeing you guys with 500, 600, 800, 1,000, 1,600 hours is just quite incredible. So, you know, we say hats off to you. Hats off is kind of like congratulations and showing respect. We say hats off to you.

Hats off to you meaning respect to you all because you're all doing great. And, you know, that's the top 20. But, you know, there are lots of people who have got, you know, over 100, 200, 300 hours also, which is still very, very good. Very, very good.

Now let's look over to reading. Now that one's weak for me. I didn't do much for reading, but here we go. Okay, our reading challenge now. Sven again.

Sven is just cranking. Sven and Edward and Roberto are doing like the combining listening and reading, and they are getting a huge number of hours. So Sven's got 1,431 hours of reading. Edward Anderson has 1,286.

Roberto DeSantos, 667. He's number three. And there's Carol, 575 hours of reading. I guarantee they have all learned a lot of vocabulary with that amount of reading.

That's incredible. Jennifer Melo, 472. Peggy S., 403 hours of reading. Salvador Ramirez, 386. There's Lisa again, 361. Slavica, there's Slavica, 344 hours.

Interpol, 343 hours. That's the top ten. Very impressive. And then, you know, you go even the top 20. There's Zobaday down at number 20, 193. It's Rafikol 208.

I'm just kind of reading some people who are on our show a lot. That's incredible, guys. That's amazing. That's just really, really, really good for three and a half months because, I mean, this is the amount of vocab you're getting.

You might not realize it, but you're getting a huge amount of passive vocab, I guarantee, meaning you understand it. You see it and you understand it. And then you're also getting active vocab. That will become active.

All right, let me just do something very quickly. That's incredible, guys. That's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, there we go. All right. Then we go over here and there.

All right, guys, so that's it. Very, very impressive. Here's what we've got. We've got... Oh, I've got to ban somebody. I've got to ban somebody! Woo-hoo!

Let's do it. It's kind of fun banning people sometimes. I don't know why. Boop, boop, boop, doop, doop, doop, doop, doop, doop, doop. Ideas are on this channel.

It is done. Alright. So, let's discuss it. How is your challenge going? You know, how has it been? I'm guessing you've had some ups and downs. Now, those of you doing 1,000 hours, 900 hours, you know, I guess it hats off to you.

Fantastic. For me, you know, I'll just discuss my own. I'm a strong starter and a strong finisher. And I often, in the middle of things, will kind of dip.

Yeah. And that certainly happened to me again this time. So I had a very, very, very strong beginning with this challenge. I was putting in like seven hours a day of listening to Japanese.

Very strong for the first month and a half, I would say. And then, you know, life got busy with my babies and... Two of my babies went into the hospital and blah, blah, blah. Lots of excuses, but basically things got busy and my hours dropped down to about four hours a day.

And then I kind of had a bottom a couple weeks ago. And what happened there is I just started getting bored because I was just using the same content, the same mini stories and the same, just a few things I'm listening to in Japanese and And I started getting bored with them. I started just kind of like, ugh, I'm tired of this.

And so my hours dropped down to more like two hours a day for a while. And then two weeks ago, kind of picking up again. So I switched my... I adjusted my strategy.

I changed and started focusing more on anime and doing a bit more reading, reading the scripts of anime and watching anime a lot. And so now it's going back up again.

The other thing I did is that I... I started doing Spanish. So I started doing Spanish about... Not quite a month ago. A few weeks ago. I decided I'm going to do Spanish also.

And that has been less consistent. Some days I do zero Spanish. And some days I do more. Like today, so far, I have done one hour of Spanish. What's great is that I... Because my Spanish level is better, is higher, it's a lot easier for me to find interesting content.

I found some... kind of cool conversations and dialogues in Spanish from Ali Richard's site. So I bought those. I've found another site that has a lot of conversations.

And then there's an old magazine I used to use, Audio Magazine in Spanish. So I've got a huge amount of Spanish stuff to listen to now that's about my level, which is my level is about B1. So that's great. So I'm trying to increase my Spanish each day a little bit.

I'm still mostly focused on Japanese, but I'd like to do an hour of Spanish at least and try to be consistent with And then Japanese, I'm trying to keep it at four hours or more, four or more hours of Japanese.

And I'm still mostly focusing on listening, especially Japanese, just listening, not really focused too much on the reading at the moment. That's it. So how's it going with you? So it is normal.

You know, I think it's quite common that I think now, you know, I'm going to finish strong in the challenge. So I started quite strong in the middle, kind of started dropping, dropping, dropping, and now I'm finishing strong.

Some people are very consistent. You've just been strong the whole time. And as I said, congratulations to you. That's great. All right, let's go and let's hear from you.

How's it going with you? Okay, Vladislav says, it seems I'm very weak at the challenge. I'm listening about 120th position. I listen for 2.5 hours a day, I guess you're saying.

An hour on average, yeah, right. For reading, I spend even less, but my reading position's better. Yeah, because people are doing more listening. It's easier to do listening, right?

Because listening you can do while you do other things. You can do listening while you're walking, while you're exercising, washing dishes, whatever. It's easier to get big hours in listening. Reading, you have to focus.

Your eyes have to be focused on the page, so you can't really do anything else. So it's more challenging to get bigger hours. And if you're reading difficult things, more difficult things, that also can be a challenge because it requires a lot of concentration.

So don't worry. So that's normal. You can see in general that the number of hours... on the reading challenge, they're less. It's a smaller number of hours.

So I think it's normal. That's no problem. And finally, I would say, Vladislav, two and a half hours a day is still very good. Two and a half hours a day of listening, plus some reading, even just a little reading a day.

You know, you're getting two and a half to three hours a day. It's excellent. It's excellent. That's why I like this challenge, because it raises our standards, right?

It's showing us that, wow, we can do much more than we thought. Like before, maybe I thought, oh, two hours a day, that's good for Japanese. And then I started doing seven hours.

So now I have a new standard, right? Now if I'm doing less than six, if I'm doing less than five, I feel like it's not much. So the key is just measure against yourself.

Measure against yourself. Don't worry about everybody else. Okay, so Evgeny says, let's see. I have the following problem. I understand most of the videos I watch and most of the things I read.

So that's a good problem so far. Unfortunately, when it comes to speaking, I struggle. And then he's got a follow-up here. I have a personal teacher who I talk with for two hours every week.

Okay. I've been attending this course for a year. Of course, my speaking has improved significantly, but I'm still struggling. Okay, right. So basically, Evgeny, you are ready to speak.

It sounds like your listening ability is very good. It sounds like your reading ability is very good. You are ready to really jump in and focus a lot, a lot, a lot on speaking.

And we're going to do a speaking challenge in a couple months. We're going to start it in January sometime. But you don't have to wait. You can just start doing it now yourself.

I recommend start... Being much more active and doing a lot of shadowing where you are listening and speaking along with all the audios. Whenever you're listening, try to do shadowing, even if you're shadowing in your mind and kind of silently talking along with everything you listen to. Focus on your pronunciation.

Work on your pronunciation. You could get my pronunciation course. Or just do it yourself with lots of shadowing again. You also, if you maybe get on italki, increase your... You're doing two hours a week of talking, increase it.

Do more. Do more conversation if you can. If you can afford it or if you can find an exchange or some way where it's not too expensive, try to increase that to five hours a week, something like that, or more.

So that's what I recommend for you, Evgeny, is that you need to... Start doing a lot of shadowing where you're really speaking along with those audios. You're speaking, speaking, speaking, speaking, getting your mouth moving constantly in English, speaking, speaking, speaking all the time. And then also do a lot more conversations if you can.

Because you're ready. It sounds like your listening ability is very good and your reading ability is very good. So you've got plenty of vocabulary and you just got to activate it now.

AJ Power says, I listen to you daily. I have improved so much. Now I feel I'm at some level in English language. Actually, no one tells the secret for learning language like listening is very important.

I'm from India. Well, fantastic. I'm glad you have improved. That's great. And that's what all of us should also do is focus on the improvement you made in four months.

We're at three and a half months. We have two more weeks. So... Let's make a big push at the end, and then you can think back. What was I like four months ago, and have I improved?

Do I have more vocabulary? Is my listening better? You know, like I was at not quite zero with Japanese, but close, certainly low beginner, we'll say.

What is that called? A1 in the European system. And now I'm probably A2. That's nice. Four months. That's not bad. I'm happy with it. And I've started doing Spanish again, and I'm excited about that too.

So definitely improvement. That's all you need to do is just keep improving. Sarah says, I do my best during the challenge. I increase my time of listening and reading compared to the past.

Exactly. That's the key. Proud of myself. I improved a lot. Thank you, AJ. Good job. Yes. You're doing better than you did in the past. That's the key thing.

That's all you need to worry about. Bufendra says, so sad to hear my name isn't in the list. Well, I'm not in the top 20 either. Or the top 10. Only 10 people on each list.

There's lots and lots more people. Don't worry about it. Again, Bufendra, are you doing better than you did four months ago? That's all you need to worry about.

All you need to focus on, I should say. Cliffy says, I'm very addicted to English listening during the challenge. But when I want to diversify for reading, I find it hard. The important thing is I feel sick and pissed off without English.

See, this is a positive addiction. This is how I feel about exercise. If I don't exercise for a few days, I get, like you said... sick and pissed off, kind of pissed off, like I feel irritated, like I feel something's wrong.

I need to get outside. I need to move. I need to do some exercise. It starts bothering me. And so it's really good. It's a good sign if you feel that way, like if you miss English a couple days and then you're like, ah, I got to get English.

Right? It's kind of a positive addiction that you have created, a positive habit, we should say. And that's wonderful. Ah, here's a nice... What does it mean, a catch-22, plataforma?

A catch-22. It comes from a book. And a catch-22 is kind of an impossible situation. An impossible situation. It means that it's a situation that no matter what you do, it's a bad outcome.

You know, it's usually like, you know, often it is involved with... like a bureaucracy having rules so that, you know, the rules are contradict. The rules go against each other. You're supposed to do this, but then you're not supposed to do it.

And so you're kind of like, ah, I can't do it and I have to do it. I can't do it and I have to do it. It's kind of this impossible situation. Executive Protection Brazil, hello again.

I usually have informal conversations with people I have no problem to make mistakes. That way I believe I get more confidence when I need to have serious conversations. Well, yes, indeed.

The good news is in English, it's not a huge difference in what I would call normal, casual conversations. normal meaning, not a lot of slang and stuff, not talking like a teenager, but like a normal adult, an adult casual conversation, and then an adult polite conversation. Really, in English, it's not such a big difference. It's pretty close, especially for Americans, because Americans are quite casual in general, I would say.

Canadians, too. So that... Like, even in a business situation, it's not super formal, usually. We don't, you know, you can still talk fairly casually.

You know, you may be, you avoid slang, but, and you may be generally, you know, kind of polite. Please, thank you, that kind of thing. But you can talk, you know, it's not far, not such a difference.

Some languages, it's very different. Like Japanese, it's a very big difference. The verbs change and everything, so it's very confusing. Well, I won't say confusing, it's challenging.

Lisa says, During the challenge, I was just starting to enjoy reading, watching movies in the original language. However, the most valuable thing was to meet some very good people who inspire and help each other. Indeed, good point.

Because a big part of our challenge was, you know, over in our group in Gab, everybody sharing their content, what they're listening to, what they're reading, you know, and commenting with each other and encouraging each other. It was really cool because I think we kind of created a nice group online here where we're really supporting each other. And that's also been great. I agree.

I've enjoyed that also. yeah palika says i wish our challenge to continue well what we're going to do is uh we'll just take a little break one month really maybe maybe six weeks six weeks because we'll have a holiday around new year so maybe middle of january somewhere around there we'll start again and we'll do the speaking challenge and it'll be shadowing and conversations it'll also have two parts

I might do that in Spanish. Hmm. I don't know. I'll think about it. The law says, I don't need to count my listening because in every hour of the day I'm listening.

Oh, that's good. But reading, I'm not doing good. I'll try to read in my free time. And that's okay. It's fine to focus on one for a while, you know. You can change.

This is a great thing about being an independent learner, where you are the boss, is you can change any time. You know, like I did. You find that you're doing something, it's working, everything's going well, and then something changes, whatever, for whatever reason. Something in your life changes.

You're just getting bored, doing the same thing. So you can just change it. You can change it around a little bit. You do listening, listening, listening, a huge amount of listening.

Suddenly you're like, oh, I'm tired of listening. And you can just decide, ah, now I'm going to focus on reading. Maybe next year you'll decide you want to do more reading.

Or not. It's up to you. This is what's great. Nobody's telling you what to do. You decide. Ken N.T. says, My routine is speaking, answering VIP lessons.

Good. Listening to VIP. Watching Ellen TV shows. So watching talk shows. That's good. Reading books that you introduced and watching AJ's live show every day.

Perfect. See, it's great. It's a nice mix of things. It's very nice. It's a good mix. Mai says, my friends always ask, how can you remain during this period, all this period, to improve your English without frustration?

Always I'm answering because I'm following a very powerful coach every day. Thank you, AJ. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. And, you know, in general, the answer to this, again, this is why independent learning is important.

Because if someone was forcing you to do this, then... It would be very hard to keep going after a while. But the nice thing, like with the Japanese, again, my own Japanese listening.

You can make changes very quickly. Or Spanish, same thing that's happening in Spanish for me. What happens is I'll get something new that's kind of a good level for me. And I'll listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen like crazy.

Tons of repetition, lots of repetition. And then eventually, finally, my brain's like, enough, enough, enough. And I get really bored with it. But that's after 40 or 50 times listening, repeating.

That's a lot of repetition I do. But eventually, I'm kind of, oh. And then I have to search and try to find something else, something else, something new that's at a good level. And sometimes that's difficult, because a lot of times what I'm looking for, everything's too difficult.

So it takes time, but then I'll finally find something that's good. And then again, I repeat again. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Right? And it's kind of this up and down, up and down. And in Spanish, it's the same thing. And with Spanish, because I can read Spanish easily, I can just change between those two.

I just do day to day. It just depends on my mood. Some days I don't want to listen. I just want to read. So I'll just read a little while in Spanish. And other days I'm like, I don't feel like reading.

And I'll just listen. And then, like I said, just recently I found a lot of new stuff in Spanish that's at a good level. It's conversations, which is what I'm wanting now, like real conversations.

But anyway, you can see, like, you know, you have that power because you're an independent learner. Like Ken was giving that, he has that variety. He's got the VIP lessons, lots of repetition, deep learning, and then he also has a variety where he's listening to talk shows and he's listening to my podcast.

That's a good combination. I like that. Ronjan, what level have you crossed in Japanese speaking fluency? I don't know. I don't do tests and stuff, but I probably started at the A1, low zero, almost zero, four months ago, and now I'm probably A2.

I'm just using that European system, which means basically I was super low beginner, now maybe I'm a little bit closer to high beginner. Not bad for four months.

I'm still not speaking now, just listening. I mean, I'll speak a little, a few phrases, because I'm in Japan, so I do, I try, but it's not easy. Takes time, takes time.

Adil says, I've been a student at an American English school. I reached the advanced two level. Should I improve my level myself or go back to school?

Well, if you want my opinion, I would say do it yourself. You don't need school. You don't need school anymore. Read a lot of books. Listen to lots of audios.

Enjoy. Talk to people. Hey, Jake, could you please explain the expression something happened big league. President Trump often uses it. Big league. I don't know what the phrase is exactly.

I mean, generally it means like in a big way or in a very high level. That's kind of the general idea. If I could see a full phrase, if you can give me a little longer phrase, I could...

Explain it better. Yeah, so Asukar says, what about one hour of comprehensible input, understandable input, like videos, explaining words and their meanings, all of that, and lots of mini-stories. Sounds good.

Very good. Okay, Antonio de Lima. with a question we all face. Right now I'm in a plateau in my English learning. I don't know how to get rid of it. It seems to me I'm not improving anymore.

Yep. Well, you know, this just happens again and again. This happened to me, like I said, a few weeks ago in Japanese. I just felt stuck. Like, okay, I'm repeating the same stuff.

I'm not really getting any more learning from it. And I'm getting bored. So what I decided to do and what worked for me was just stop worrying about improving.

You know, I just want to find some new things that I enjoy. So I just switched over and I started reading anime, manga, and watching anime. Is that, I don't know, am I improving a lot? It's very difficult.

I don't know, but I like it. It's Japanese. So... I'm not going to worry about it too much. I think we focus too much on this idea of level, level, level.

It's something that children do not do, right? Children don't do that. They just read and listen and talk and enjoy the language, and they get better eventually, and they don't worry every day about their level.

How much did they improve? So, Antonio, I would say just keep reading books in English and listening to things you like in English, and don't worry about it.

You will improve. It's going to happen. Just don't worry about the plateau. Just enjoy. Focus more on enjoying and less on level. That's interesting. Priscilla says, sometimes I can't find a word in my language...

To translate a new word I learned in English. But I understand the context. It's a little weird. That's a good sign. I mean, it means you're just understanding the English from the situation.

And you don't even need a translation in your head. That's kind of cool. Lucas Zambon says, Greetings from Italy. I love your channel. I'm studying Italian.

Nice. Using English as my helping language. Ah, great. It's been interesting so far. Excellent. I want to learn Italian eventually. Italian is a beautiful language.

Coach Dowd says, in my community, it's quite hard to totally talk 100% in English. The culture is towards English, Manglish. Manglish. Would that be Malay?

Malay. In English? How do I overcome that and educate them? You probably need to find more native speakers to talk to, you know, online. Or maybe, you know, I don't know where you live.

I'm guessing Malaysia. If you live in KL, you probably can find native speakers of English. You know, even some of the Indians. You know, people who are Indian background.

Indian... ethnicity grew up learning English and speaking English in their home, but also, you know, lots of local foreigners, or just get online and, like, try to find people online and talk to them, because it's hard to make other people change what they want to do, especially if they're not native speakers. ... ... ...

Yeah, like Ahmad Salim says, hurrying improvement always leads to getting bored easily. Enjoy as much as you can. Yes, we all do it. I do it too. But the more we just relax and enjoy, then we just keep going, keep going, and not worry about it.

Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter what your level is. As long as you're enjoying it, you're going to improve. As you just do more time, more reading, more listening, more chatting with people, you will get better.

You don't have to measure it every time. Emotion. People are curious about Japanese. Can you communicate with people in Japan and doing things like shopping?

I can shop. Travel. Yes, I can do buses and trains and restaurants. You know, it's kind of that travel level. But I can't do conversations. That's where I am now.

Are you trying to speak Japanese or English? It depends. Mostly I'm just at home because I have two new babies. I'm not out talking with people. I don't have a social life at the moment.

So it's mostly I'm just at home listening. What's the general English level of Japanese people? That's hard to say because there are a lot of... Sometimes it's hard to know because they're quite shy about it, even if they know English.

I'd say in the cities it's okay, so-so, and outside the cities it's not so good. Tata says, I'm excited about the speaking challenge. I'll be happy to help people with their English speaking practice. We can create a page on Gab specifically for sharing our voice messages.

Not a bad idea. I like it. Yeah, we can talk to each other when we do the challenge too. That's another thing. You don't have to just do native speakers.

You can chat with each other too in English. It's still good practice. You're still communicating. Basil says, I speak English recently, very casually, not like before when I used to be nervous.

That's great. Sometimes when I'm angry, I make a lot of mistakes. Why? It's just the emotion. The emotion turns your brain off a little bit. Strong emotions, positive or negative, really, can make it harder to think clearly, right?

That's why job interviews are difficult. That's why public speaking is difficult. Because of the emotion. So if you're really angry and you're really upset, you kind of... Or if you're tired.

I was joking yesterday, only half joking, half serious, that many times when I do some of my interviews for the show, it's really late or early for me. Basically, I'm tired, I'm sleepy.

When I'm doing them. And my brain's not quite working well. Because I'm just tired. I've been awake all night. And so I kind of. Like I find it difficult.

To talk sometimes during the interviews. It's interesting. And that's my own language. So it's normal. Nothing to worry about. Hardik. says, I'm improving my English gradually because of you.

You have given me a lot of confidence to speak fluent English. You're really marvelous. Think on this earth, man on this earth. I listen to your videos to develop.

Thank you very much. And I'm happy to do that. Congratulations. Keep going. Just keep going. Yeah, I could do this too. Alexi's saying, what do you think about the kind of movie club where you can observe Trump's speech?

We get used to English and getting aware of the situation in the USA. Yeah, that could be interesting. Especially the elections coming up, so there'll be a lot of speeches.

We could do that. He's a good speaker. He's good. N says, I started the pronunciation course in August. Now I'm in unit 11. I feel like I should come back to unit 1.

Do you think I should continue to the end? Better to come back to unit 1. Either it doesn't matter. This is why, you know, it's great to be independent.

You decide. What do you want to do? If you said you feel like you should go back to number one, then go back to one. It's okay. Just go back to one and you don't have to do all of them.

You can go back to one and just review everything quickly and then keep going ahead again or it's up to you. You know, whatever you want to do. Yeah, so this is a common problem. I have the same problem.

Ranjan says, I have a lot of vocab, but during speaking, I'm not able to express myself impressively as much as I want. I can't recall the exact strong word in the exact moment. Yeah, well, it's all normal because, again, it's that thing of passive and active vocab. Passive means if you hear it in a situation, you know what it means, right?

A word. But active means when you are speaking, it will pop into your head when you need it. And it's very different. You usually will have a lot more, you will know a lot more words passively.

If you hear them, you understand. But the number of words you can actually use quickly, effortlessly, is usually much smaller. And that's just normal. So again, it's really nothing to worry about.

Just continue reading, continue listening, and continue chatting. And it will improve. I mean, it's exactly the same in Spanish. Like in Spanish, especially my reading, because I can go slowly, I can read quite a lot of Spanish, actually.

My reading level is pretty decent. My listening is so-so. The main problem is speed. A lot of Spanish speakers, they can speak very fast and they kind of, they cut the words.

And I still find that very difficult to catch. If someone speaks slowly, it's not so bad. But if when they're just speaking really fast, like normal speed, it's very hard for me. And then actually speaking right now, because it's been four years, especially not much.

My active vocabulary is very small right now. And so, again, so it's totally normal. And then my Japanese active vocab is tiny because I'm just starting.

So it's going to be normal. But it's normal even in my English vocab, right? I know a lot more words passively. like reading in English. You know, I've got a very good vocabulary in English.

I read a lot. So I recognize a lot of words, but I don't use them all when I speak, right? And if I want to use, let's say, some very nice word that's not common in English, I might know it. If I hear it, I know it.

If I see it, I know it. But when I'm speaking, I'm like, ah, ah, ah, you know, I'm like, what's that word? What's that word? You know, I'm trying to remember it, and I can't get it when I need it.

So even in English, it happens to me. So it's totally normal. It's nothing to worry about. Just, you know, what you do is, in that situation, what do you do?

You just use a simple word. Maybe it's not the perfect word, but you use a word that's close enough, that's good enough. Like if I'm trying to say, let's say, okay, let's say I want to use the word infuriated. I was infuriated.

What does that mean? It means like super angry, super, super angry. I was infuriated. And I know this word passively very well, right? If I read it, I know it.

If I hear it, I know it. And so I'm talking to somebody, having a conversation, and I say, and I'm telling them a story, and I was very, very angry in the story. And I say, I was so... And I'm like, ah, what's that word? Right?

I want to use this word, infuriated. It's kind of there. It's... It's passive mostly. It's there. And I'm like, what's that word? What's the word? And I can't remember it.

In this moment, I can't remember it. So what do I do? I just say angry. I just say, I was angry. I was very angry, right? I'll just use two super common words, very and angry.

It still gives the same meaning, right? 90% of the same meaning by just using the common, common words. It's not as, you know, what, artistic or something.

But it doesn't matter, right? So that's what you do. Don't get stressed about it. Instead of getting stressed, just relax and use simple common words.

And you still can communicate the basic idea. Cleefy, about learning two languages, is it better to schedule your hours or just relax and let it happen with your desire? By the way, I have another interview coming next Friday. This is Japan time.

I'm interviewing Steve Kaufman again. Like a real interview. Last time we just chatted in the hotel for a few minutes. But this will be a real, like an hour or something, a long interview.

Steve Kaufman from LingQ. That's Friday the 22nd, November 22nd. It's 11 a.m., 11 a.m. Japan time. And he's, you know, some of you know, he's learning three languages right now.

So we'll ask him about this question. My approach, I think there's, again, there's no rules. There are no rules because this is, again, you're an independent learner. You're the boss.

So you decide what you want. Like, it depends on your situation. It depends on what you want. Right now, I'm living in Japan now. And I'm just starting Japanese.

And Japanese is much more difficult than Spanish. So I have decided that like 80% of my effort and time, maybe 90%, must be Japanese. I have to focus on Japanese. Spanish is just like a little bit.

Just a little bit. When I have a little extra time. For me, what I do is I use Spanish as a break. I'll do Japanese, Japanese, Japanese. And then when I'm getting kind of... My mind is getting...

I'm getting really tired. I'm kind of... I can't do any more Japanese. I need a break. Then I'll do a little Spanish for a while. And then I'll go back to Japanese again.

Japanese, Japanese, Japanese. So it's like, you know... It's a big difference. Lots of Japanese and a tiny amount of Spanish. I think Steve... He's doing Turkish, Persian, and Arabic.

I think he's doing them about the same amount of time. Like, you know, 33%, 33%, 33%. You know, one-third, one-third, one-third. I think he's doing it more close to even.

So I don't think there's a, there's not a rule. I think you just decide what you want to do. Okay, Emmanuel asking... Do we need to understand every word when reading a book?

No. My friend always gets riled when dealing with fuzzy stuff. He doesn't understand. Yeah, well, you know, if you understand every word well, then you're not going to learn any new words.

Obviously, right? Because you already know them all. So you probably want some new words when you're reading. That's the great benefit of reading. But then the question is how many new words?

Like what percent? If it's too many, then like your friend, it becomes stressful. It becomes just, ah, it's so slow. It's hard to understand the general idea because so many words are new.

This is my situation with the anime scripts. Really, it's too difficult for me, because probably I only understand 5% of the words, because 95% are new.

Like, I'm clicking every word, checking it, right? So I can only do that about 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, I'm like, ugh, I'm finished, enough. And I just stop, and I do something else.

Okay. On the other hand, you can, you know, maybe, I don't know, 5% new words might be a nice number, something like that, where you understand 95%. And the other 5% are easy to guess because you understand almost everything. You understand the situation easily.

It's easier to guess. So, I don't know, 5% to 10% might be a nice number of new words that you don't know. Frazant says, do native people, native speakers, make grammatical mistakes as well? Of course, all the time.

They make mistakes and sometimes it's not even a mistake. I mean, there are many common phrases, especially when we're talking about casual speaking and idioms and slang. Many are not, you know, grammatically correct, quote, meaning, you know, if the textbook would say it's wrong, but, and yet, They're common and accepted phrases that everybody uses.

Long time no see. I think we had that one recently. Long time no see. That's not technically good English. It's been a long time since I've seen you. Would probably be the nice full sentence grammatical way to say it.

It has been a long time since I have seen you. And then we shorten it to long time, no see. Right? Which is not really grammatically good, correct. But it doesn't matter.

Because that's what we say. Well, Emmanuel is saying now, like, do you recommend learning three languages simultaneously? Because I have to keep my French simmering on the back burner. Focus on one language.

Any tips? Is it stressful? I don't know. Two for me is plenty. Steve is doing three. He seems to be enjoying it. So again, there are no rules, really.

It's up to you. Try it. If you want to, you could try it. And then if it's too much, just drop one for a while. If two is too much, drop it and just focus on one.

And also you can change. There's no rules again. There are no rules about this. So you can just focus on one, like English. And then for a while you can say, I'm going to add French.

I'm going to do some French. And you're doing French along with English. And then you get a bit more busy. You get tired. And then you can just stop doing the French for a while and just do English again.

And then do the French. You can do that. Anything you want. No rules about this. Oh, Yosef's talking about typing. This is not a bad idea. As a programmer, I use English for everything.

for learning new courses, writing code. And I use some text in rapid typing software to improve my typing speed. It's worth doing, actually. When I was in high school, I took a typing class.

I learned to type. I'm not super fast, but I can type faster. Some people just use two fingers, which is super slow. It's good to learn how to do it without looking.

It does help. From sunshine to excellence. Nice profile name. Is there a difference between learning and different ages? 40 versus 20. Young versus old.

40 versus 20? No, I don't think so. If we're talking about very young, like 10, 12, and younger, then there's a difference. There is sort of a, I don't know, nobody knows why.

There's different theories about it. Is it just psychological and emotional? Is it certain things in the brain? Whatever. But children do seem to have some advantages.

But once you're an adult, let's say 15 and older, then I don't think there is much difference. As long as you have a healthy brain... As long as you keep your brain active and strong, then I don't think it doesn't matter if you're 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70. I don't think it matters.

Or 20. Now, if you are 70 and you have not been learning, you've been lazy with your brain and your body, you're for 30 years, then your memory might be much worse and there might be problems. But that's just the same with your body.

If you just lay around and do nothing after a while, you will have problems. Yeah, Abraham Ali kind of says, checking new words constantly kills the enjoyment and love of reading for me. Yeah, me too.

I like to learn new words by seeing them in different contexts. That's the best way to do it. And that's what I do in English, of course, in my own language.

I never use a dictionary when I read English. And Slavica is sort of agreeing. Flavica says, I rarely search for unknown words in the dictionary. I somehow manage to guess meanings based on a sentence or topics.

And again, if the number of new words is small, smaller, like 10% or less, then it's easy to guess. If it's too much, then you can't guess. It's too hard.

So that can be a problem. Okay, Vendela describing some common problems. During conversations, I translate my thoughts. I begin to think about rules of grammar.

I even begin to forget what I'm saying. I'm afraid that I will say something wrong. So this all sounds like this created by schools, right? This is the problem.

So what you need to do, Vendela, is relax. Spend, let's say, six months focusing on doing a huge amount of listening and some reading, too. And don't worry about your speaking for a while.

Just get a lot of English into you, into your brain. You know, understandable listening, understandable reading, especially the listening. And then come back to it. And when you speak, make mistakes.

Don't worry about it. Osman says, Hi, AJ. You're really the best. We teach English. I need your help to improve my English. I feel very much better and understand your lessons.

Before, I was frustrated and depressed. Well, congratulations. Keep going. Keep going. There's a vocab question. Tiet says, What's the difference between neighborhood and neighbor?

Neighborhood is the area. The buildings. The street. Neighbor is a person. A human being. A human who lives next to you or near you. Aaron says, can we use the methods you talk about for other languages as well or just English?

Any language. Any language you can use. Same ideas. Baran Gul says, which do you suggest, IELTS or TOEFL? Neither. If you can avoid it, don't take either one.

I know sometimes you have to do it. You have to go for a class or a job or something, but If you don't need the tests, then don't take them. There's no point.

Just add stress. They don't do anything for you. There's no really benefit, really. It just makes you stressed out. And Vladislav's agreeing with me. Look at that.

He answered the question. Neither of them is better. Great minds think alike, Vladislav. Those tests won't help you to improve your English. They'll hurt you.

Just listen and read what you like in English. So, he already answered it. Yes, what Vladislav said. Dalima says, I noticed there are a lot of French expressions in American English more than British.

Could you please tell us why? Well, I don't know why. I didn't even know. I don't know. I didn't know that. For example, give us some examples because I don't know French expressions.

So I just know that I'm sure I'm using them, but I don't know. Okay, two more and then I'm going to go... Take care of some babies. Cool. So here's someone who just did it all themselves.

I read that book. I started practicing seven rules of English speaking 11 years ago. Wow. Wow. I found your videos online. I didn't have the budget to join the course.

I focused mainly on listening to lots of MP3s. It worked. Thank you AJ. Great job. Good for you. Congratulations. Okay, final question, Aaron again. One of my teachers claims that native speakers don't even use complicated grammar rules when speaking.

Right, well, they don't think about rules. They may or may not use complicated grammar, depends on if it's needed, but we don't really think about the rules when we're speaking, of course.

He also says they don't even use perfect tenses. Is that correct? That's not correct. Perfect tenses are like, I have been, I have gone. Those are super common.

He had gone. I'm not sure why your teacher said that. Those are super common. They're used all the time. So I'm not sure about that one. But... But overall, I mean, I don't know what is a complicated grammar rule.

What would complicated grammar be? Like maybe like a future perfect, he will have gone to the store. But it's just, you know, it is a little complicated, but it's not common also. It's just not a common thing we talk about.

It's kind of a very specific situation when you use that. And I almost never use that because I just don't need it. Because it's not common, a lot of people don't use it, so you don't hear it very much, so it's hard to learn it.

But you can find other ways. You can use a plain future. You can use grammar that's not exactly correct, but you can still communicate the idea you're trying to communicate.

So if you don't know the perfect grammar... By 7 o'clock, he will have been at the airport for three hours. That's complicated. That is a bit complicated.

So you can just say, at 7, he is there three hours. It's not good grammar, but I think most people would understand what you're saying. And it's much easier to say. So just do that.

Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Okay, that's all, guys. Tomorrow, tomorrow, no show tomorrow, because my mom is visiting Japan. My mom is coming to Japan.

My sister came a few weeks ago, my sister and my niece, and now my mom's coming to visit, so fantastic. I'll be going to the airport tomorrow and picking up my mom, and so no show tomorrow, but I'll be back

on... What is that? Tomorrow's Wednesday in Japan. So Thursday, Japan time. I'll be back again with another show. So just final thoughts. We've got...

It's the 12th. We've got roughly... We've got about two weeks. A little more than two weeks. Two more weeks for our challenge. Listening and reading. So let's finish strong.

Right? Let's finish strong. Do your best for these last two weeks... Do as much listening and or reading in English as you can. And don't worry about level.

Don't worry. Are you improving? Just enjoy it. Try to find things you enjoy listening to. Try to find things you enjoy reading. And just focus on the hours.

Don't worry about level. Just hours. Get more hours. More time. More time with English. More time with English. More time with English. Let the improvement.

It will happen automatically. with time. So just focus on the time. Okay? And as always, join and commit to my VIP program at EffortlessEnglishClub.com.

Commit, don't quit, at EffortlessEnglishClub.com. Lots of love to you. Bye for now.