English Challenge Final Month!

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.

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Go to that website. EffortlessEnglishClub.com We're starting the final month of our English Challenge. Remember, our Listening and Reading Challenge. Four months.

August, September, October, and November. So, let's all make a big push. In October, we kind of had a dip, I'd say, in October. Some of us, I know I did.

Where my time, my hours, my effort dropped in October a bit. I had a good, strong... August and September, and then in October, bit of a dip. Had some things happen in my life, and I think it's just normal.

These kind of things happen sometimes. Hard to sustain that level of intensity and discipline and everything consistently. And it's kind of normal in life to start strong and then finish strong. Sometimes in the middle is when we have these dips.

It's totally normal. It's nothing to get upset about, nothing to worry about. But that's why it's good to kind of have goals or challenges like this that are not too long. They're not too long because then we take advantage.

We take advantage of the powerful motivation that the greater discipline we usually have at the beginning when we start something like this, and the greater motivation we have at the end.

If it's too long, then the middle is really, really long, and it's easy to relax a little too much. Anyway, it's just a little psychological trick that three to four months is a nice...

kind of time period for doing something very intensely like this. Making a big extra effort. So we're going into our last month. So let's all make an extra effort now.

Whatever happened last month, whatever happened until now, doesn't matter. But we have one more month. Let's make a strong effort with our language learning. Our listening and or reading.

I'll be doing it, of course, with Japanese. Pushing hard with Japanese. and you all with English, of course. Now, connected to this, I have a couple things I want to discuss before we come back to the challenge, and we'll check in with the challenge.

First of all, I want to say thank you to Elena, because I received a book as a gift from Elena. And this is called The Heart of a Dog by Bulgakov Mikhail

Bulgakov. And I haven't started reading it yet, but Elena said that this kind of has similar themes to Brave New World 1984, that this is a book that kind of metaphorically, we'll say, describes what happened in the Soviet Union, the terrible things that happened.

And this looks like a very interesting book. It's a short book. So I'm looking forward to it. And she sent me a very nice letter too. So Elena, thank you very much.

I read your letter. Wonderful. Thank you. There's also a movie for this, a Russian movie with English subtitles. So please do send me the link to that on Gab, I guess.

Send me a link to that. I'd love to watch it. And we can share it, actually. If you like, I'll share it with everybody. This looks very interesting. So anyway, thank you.

Thank you very much. That's a very nice gift. So again, the book is called The Heart of a Dog by Bulgakov. Next, connected to reading, I want to alert you to something cool that I'm doing because some of you might be interested in this.

I'm going to buy something And it's called the Junior Classics Campaign. The website is voxday.blogspot.com Let's see. Let me put that on the screen really quickly so you can read it for those of you watching.

Just because you might be interested in this. Especially if any of you are doing homeschooling or I think actually it would be great for many of you for your English reading.

Because even though these are books designed for young people, Americans, but as I'll discuss in a minute, it's actually a fairly good level, and I think it would be great for all of you all.

So foxdayblogspot.com. All right, let's add it to the... All right, just stick it right there. Stick it up top. I'll put it in the middle. Okay, so this is something called the Junior Classics Campaign.

And what they're doing is they're doing a Kickstarter-type campaign, a fundraiser. So, Fox Day is a publisher. He's a writer and a publisher. And he has talked about how children's stories, children's books, children's literature, how it has gotten worse and worse and worse.

Over the years, you know, again, Brave New World 1984, where they're changing these classic stories and the changes have been very, very negative, very bad in two different ways.

Number one, just in terms of intelligence. So there were these books. It's a big series. So if you go to this box there, you'll see it says 1,000% and counting.

So they're raising money to create these books. So basically you can pre-buy. You pay for the books before they print them. And this helps them as a business because they're a small business.

So they raise the money first, then they know they have enough people buying, enough people are interested, and then they do the campaign and they create the books and they mail them to you.

And it's a whole, like, it's a big set. It's a whole big set of classic children's literature. So, literature meaning, like, really nice quality traditional stories. So, for example, in this book, they have many different stories from Aesop.

So, what they're doing, they're sampling kind of... The idea of these books is they're sampling some of the best literature... that's good for kids, that teaches morality, that teaches virtue, that is interesting to kids.

And they're kind of assembling it from all these things. So they have Aesop, they have like King Arthur, stories from King Arthur, the traditional stories from King Arthur. They have stories from like, it's American, so they have some of the like cowboys and Indians type stories.

They have some poetry. Now what's interesting is, and these books, they want to republish, republish. These books were originally created back like in 1912, I think it is, or 1918. So like 100 years old.

Okay? The original. But then, over the years, they changed them, they changed them, they changed them. And in general, children's books have changed over the years.

Changed, changed, changed. And as I was saying, the changes have been very bad. And it's two kinds of changes. Number one, dumbing us down. Remember that book?

The book club about John Taylor Gatto? When you look at the... These are stories that kids, children, elementary school children, were reading... back in 19, let's say 1912, 100 years ago.

But the level, the level of vocabulary, the level of intelligence, the quality of the stories is so, so, so, so much higher than what... children are, what children's books are now. Books for the children that same age, elementary school now, it's like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Captain Underpants. It's very babyish, right?

It's very childish. And it's okay. I recommend these books sometimes, like the Goosebumps stuff. I recommend these to you all to read because it's easier for you.

But on the other hand, if you're actually interested in education, It's quite sad when you look at it, when you see that, well, a hundred years ago, these young children were reading quite intelligent, high-quality literature. They were reading Aesop's fables. They were reading the stories of King Arthur.

They were reading these... Stories that had a much higher level of vocabulary, that had much deeper messages and meaning, that talked about virtue and goodness and honor and truth. You know, like pretty, what we now, now we would say these are almost adult type topics.

And yet, 100 years ago, little children were reading these books with no problem. With no problem. So we can see how the school system, the modern school system, has made children more stupid and more babyish. More like little babies.

Because now they watch Spongebob on TV. And it's just stupid, like farting, you know, poopy jokes and very baby childish-like stuff. If you go to a bookstore now, you'll see if you read it and you compare it to this, the difference is incredibly big.

It's sad. Now, I mentioned there are two kinds, two changes that have happened, two terrible changes. So, change number one, the intelligence level of children's books has dropped a huge amount.

The other change is political. Now what you will see in children's books is so much garbage politics. Especially left-wing, communist, cultural Marxist crap. So they are pushing transgender garbage and perversion on little kids through children's books.

They're pushing... gay marriage and all this junk they're putting into these children's books why because they want to get to the little children when they're young when these these kids of course cannot understand any of that so it's not the purpose is not education because those are very very adult sexual type of topics so why are they putting all that junk and garbage and lies into children's books

because they want to brainwash them at a young age before they can think clearly. And again, what's great is that these old books don't have any of that. It's long before that garbage. Instead, it's these very old and traditional stories, such as Aesop's Fables, King Arthur, like I said, Mark Twain, the old Huckleberry Finn.

It's things like that that are... You know, timeless classics. So, I'd see two uses for this. I'm going to use these books for my children homeschooling as kind of our literature, our basic literature library for my kids as they get our elementary school age for reading.

You know, of course, I'll just encourage them to read these books. I will read these stories to them again. Before they can do it, I can read to them and explain things. Then I'll have them read them themselves for fun.

And occasionally we'll just, you know, maybe I'll actually make them read some of the stories and we'll discuss them. But in terms of, I don't, I'm not going to use any textbooks. This is perfect.

It's just a whole huge, because it's a huge number. Let me click over to the campaign where they're raising the money. And you can see now on the screen if you're watching. So here are the hardbound collection.

It's ten volumes. Ten volumes. And these are big books. These are fairly big books. Ten of them. All of these stories. And each volume has something different.

Like one says, animal and nature stories. Stories of today. Poems. They even have poetry. Poetry. What elementary school child today learns and reads poetry?

Poetry. Old-fashioned tales, stories that never grow old, heroes and heroines, tales from Greece and Rome, folk tales and myths, fairy and wonder tales. So this is just great stuff. It's historical.

It's classic literature. It's really great. This comes from 1918. So they're raising money. So if you donate, you can buy it. Basically, you can buy the books now.

And when they print them, I think they print them in March. And then you can, you'll get them. They'll deliver to you. Or you can wait till then if you want.

But then they have, you know, if you go to this page, you click over to where they're doing the campaign. They have lots of different versions. There's just digital.

There's the set of hardcover books. That's what I ordered for my children. I want a nice hardcover that will last a long time so I can use for their whole childhood. And maybe when they have children, they can use with their children too.

So this is really good. It's called the Junior Classics Campaign. The Junior Classics Campaign. Go over there, voxday.blogspot.com. Check it out. The second use is for you as an English learner.

This would be great for your reading. That's why I'm talking about it now, because of the reading challenge and the listening. If you're focusing on reading, this is just a huge amount of reading, and it's quality stuff. It's interesting stuff.

quality stuff in English is not baby stories. I think all of these stories would be very interesting for you as an adult. And the English might even be challenging. Like I said, 100 years ago, American kids were much more intelligent.

They were reading some good stuff, really good stuff, with a good level of vocabulary and intelligent stories, not just stupid stuff. So this, if you're interested in improving your reading and you want a collection of lots of different interesting stories, traditional stories, This would be great for you, too, as an English learner. And for just learning English, you might just get the digital because it would be the cheapest.

Or you can get the paper copies because if you want to use it with your own kids or whatever. So, really good stuff. Fantastic. Highly recommend it. And I'm buying it myself.

I've already done it. Looking forward to those. Okay, finally, I just want to show you, I'm not going to play it because YouTube and their copyright garbage, but there is a nice little video on YouTube I found. It's called, If You Can't Control Your Brain, It's Over.

And it's an interview with David Goggins. And he's that Navy SEAL guy who has some kind of superhuman motivation. This guy is a maniac. He's amazing. But I like just the title of it.

You can go watch the video yourself. But the idea is that this is the master skill, the ability to control your own brain. In other words, self-discipline.

Self-discipline. This is the master skill for success in anything in life. Self-discipline. The ability to make yourself, to motivate yourself, do what you know you should do.

Figuring out what to do is actually fairly easy. You know you should exercise every day. You know you should eat healthy every day. You know you should listen to English many hours every day.

You should pray. You should meditate. You know all of these things. I know them. You know them. What's the problem? We don't do it. Why not? Because we don't have that self-discipline.

We don't have the control over our own brain, meaning our highest consciousness, our willpower, our highest free will, does not have total control over our emotions and our thoughts.

And so what happens is we know, well, I know I should exercise. I want to exercise. It will make me happier and healthier and feel better and more energetic.

But then, oh, but I feel tired today. I feel lazy today. I'm in a bad mood. And then you don't do it. You know it, but you don't do it. Why? Because you don't have the self-discipline, the self-control to do what you know is the best thing to do.

You know you should still do it, but you don't. Or you know you should eat healthy. You should not eat sugary stuff. You know it. I know it. You know it.

But what happens? We get stressed out. We get tired. And then we start wanting that sugary thing because it'll make us feel better for a short time. And so we eat it.

We know we shouldn't, but we do it. Why? Because we lack that self-control, that self-discipline. Tony Robbins calls it emotional mastery. Mastery over your emotions.

You are the master of the emotions, not the other way. And in the modern world, we often get these messages in the modern world, especially from media, that, you know, like, feelings, man! Feelings are so important! Follow your feelings!

Well, that's bullshit. If... You don't want to follow your feelings. You want to listen to them. You want to listen to them because they do have a message for you.

There's a useful message in your feelings, but you don't want to follow them. Right? You want to control them. You want to hear them, learn from them, and then use your higher brain and self-discipline to do what you should do.

It's just like fear we talked about. Okay, you feel afraid. Yeah, okay, you should... You should for sure listen to that. There's a message there. Maybe there's some risk.

Maybe your confidence is low. Maybe there's some doubt. Maybe you need to learn something. Maybe you need to practice more. Whatever it is. Okay, fine.

So you don't ignore it, right? It's there and you learn from it. You don't let it control you. You don't follow your feelings. You don't follow your fear.

You don't let fear be the leader. Because then you'll never do anything. Then you won't do anything. And you'll fail and fail and fail. And you'll feel worse.

And you'll feel unhappy and miserable. So you want to do the opposite. You want your higher brain to say, no, no. Okay, I'm afraid and now I see. I know why I'm afraid.

Now I'm going to do what I must do. I'm going to start my business anyway. I'm going to go to that job interview. I'm going to give my speech. Whatever it is you need to do, you're going to do it anyway.

You're going to overcome the emotion. So this is really the number one big skill is self-mastery, self-discipline, self-control. We're always worried about everybody else. We tend to look, oh, I need to control everybody else.

I need to persuade everybody else. I need to have greater leadership skills. But the ability to control yourself will make you super, super powerful. Check out that guy, David Goggins, because he has this...

This is like his superpower, this ability to control himself, to overcome his own fear, his own weakness, his own doubts. He... He's got incredible stories.

Most of them involve physical training. This guy's a very physical guy. He was a military guy. So most of it involves torturing his body, basically. But there's a lesson there.

There's a lesson that you can use for anything in life. And so anytime you've got a problem in life, rather than looking at the outside and blaming the outside, you've got to blame yourself.

Because it's probably the root of the problem, the root of your failure, is almost certainly your own lack of self-discipline, your own lack of self-control.

And I'm speaking for myself and for all of us, because it's the same for me. Whenever I see where I'm not doing what I know I should do, where I'm not getting the results I want, all of these things, it always comes down to I'm not.

I'm not using enough self-discipline or self-control. So let's see November, with our challenge, as a way to develop this. So even though we're maybe focused on listening to English, reading English, language learning, but it's a skill, this self-control, this self-discipline, this is a skill that's useful for all parts of life.

Developing our ability to overcome our own laziness, our own emotions, and do what we know we should do. All right, let's get into questions and comments now.

Yeah, like Bufendra says, emotional mastery will make you strong. That's right. This is true strength. We're talking about mental strength. That's what it is.

Okay. Yeah, like Abba Damani says, The purpose of school is to blind our eyes and shut down our brains so we become like a bunch of robots. They want us to be wimpy and very childish for the rest of our lives.

100% yes. Exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah, now Paulica says, I love Goosebumps. They're fairly advanced, but not too difficult. I still learn great vocab from them.

Exactly. And for that purpose, they're totally fine. So that was, you know, I'm not criticizing that at all. I recommend Goosebumps for reading. And because they are easier, they're a good step to read a lot of those.

But my point, though, is that now, that 100 years ago, American kids were reading books of the same age, American kids of the same age, were reading things that were so much more advanced in terms of vocab and in terms of the thought, the messages, all of this.

Right. And so now for English learning, read Goosebumps because it's great because it is easier. Right. And these kind of even Diary of a Wimpy Kid and all these kind of little stories and things, they are easier, which means it's good for you as an English learner when you're maybe in a kind of intermediate level.

But then after that, of course, you don't want to forever stay at that level. So eventually, you want to move up to things that are more difficult, and I think these Junior Classics would be a great next step. So you're doing things like Goosebumps, Hardy Boys is a good level, where it's easier also, and kind of any modern stuff for kids.

And then when all of that becomes quite easy, you're ready for something more difficult, but not really difficult, then this Junior Classics is kind of a nice next level.

I would say. Like I said, those were books that elementary school kids used to read in America, but of course, the level of intelligence was so much higher because most people were still homeschooled at that time.

Are you familiar with the history of Poland, the decades of the 80s and 90s? I mean, I know the big obvious stuff. All the communist stuff, the propaganda. They would tell us what to read, what to watch on TV.

Right. I mean, I'm familiar with how the Soviet Union worked. It's communism everywhere. It's not just the Soviet Union. Mao did the same thing. It's the same everywhere.

And it's depressing. Okay, so Elena says, do you think I could homeschool my kids, my children in English if I'm not a native? I ask because I live in Ireland and here homeschooling is legal. Yeah, you could.

Absolutely, you certainly could. I think you would have no problem doing that. You could homeschool them. Or, you know, split it. Do some in your language and some in English.

Pardon? 50-50 or something. And you can have them, if you're concerned about their accents or things, get audiobooks for them. Try to find things, whatever you're having them read.

Read to them first, and then you could get some audiobooks that have native speakers, so they'd be listening to native speakers. They could watch some other things too. But you certainly could do that, yes. But don't neglect, you know, I recommend teach them your native language too.

Lisa says, the challenge helped me to take a leap with my English, also to develop the habit of spending time with English regularly. Thank you, AJ. You're welcome. It helped me, too, with discipline in Japanese and building that habit, like you said, because now, you know, even on a bad day, then I'm still doing, you know, at least an hour or two.

That's on a low day. What's your opinion about dictionaries? If I don't understand some vocabulary when I read books, what dictionary is better? English to English or translation?

Translation. I answer this question a lot, but yes, translation. Yeah, this is a nice way to say it. Sabriya Ali says, fear is the mind killer. We have to get rid of our internal fear, reprogram our brains.

Thanks. Yes, now, of course, this actually brings up a very deep philosophical idea, religious idea, we could even say. Because it's an interesting statement to say that, if you think about it.

We have to reprogram our brains. So then you have to ask the question, well, who is programming what? I have to reprogram myself. How is that possible?

It automatically gives, we have this intuition that there's some part of us that is, in Sanatana Dharma they call it the Atman, the soul or the spirit, that is at the very highest, that we are not actually our thoughts, we're not our emotions.

Maybe we possess, those are kind of a part of us, like we have a body. We use this in English. We say, I have a body, not I am a body. I have a body. I have a brain.

I have feelings. So this idea is I have, I possess. So what's the I? The I then, we don't usually talk about it or think about it, but really what it's implying, what it's communicating is the I is something else that's much higher than your mind, higher than your brain, higher than your emotions, higher than

the thoughts that come and go in and out. And that I is your soul, your spirit, your Atman. So when we say, I need to reprogram my brain, we're saying that I, my highest self, my soul, basically, my highest consciousness, is the master, the true self.

our true self. And then that, and then the brain, when we're saying this, we're saying, well, the brain then is like a kind of software, hardware, right? It's something that's kind of part of us. We have it, we use it, but ultimately we should be in control of it.

And so that's what we mean when we say, don't be controlled by your feelings because you are not your feelings. You are not your thoughts. You're something much higher.

And so we want that highest self to be the master. not these lower things. You don't want your body to be the master. You don't want your emotions to be the master.

You don't even want your thoughts to be the master. Bidola says, I have so many fears like losing my job, stress about money. What should I do? You should listen to our book club and follow the advice in our book club.

This book, Your Money or Your Life. Because it seems like your stress is related to jobs and money. Those are the two things you mentioned. So what you do is, if you don't need much, we'll just make it extreme.

If you don't need anything, then you have no fear. If you don't need money... then you'll have no fear at all about money. You'll have no fear about losing your job.

Right? So that's the extreme. But the less you need, the less you fear, the less you'll stress. If you only spend $100 a month to live, then you can probably relax about money quite a lot.

And if you have a job that pays a lot more than that, well, then you'll probably be totally relaxed about money. And then you say, well, I don't care if I lose my job. So what?

The other way, you know, you do it is you learn how to do be really good at job searching, really good at job searching, really good at job interviews so that you always feel very confident that, you know, I can get another job anytime. No problem. It's easy. Send out some.

You'll have a system for resumes and cover letters and identifying companies and a system for interviewing. And it's so good, you know, if I lose my job, I'll have another one very soon.

No big deal. And that's what my Business English Conversations course is. It really teaches you a whole system. Exactly that. And it did. It's a system that I learned and used myself when I had jobs in the past, and it did.

It reduced my stress about working a lot. But the main thing is the less you need materials, the less money you need, not want or have, but the less you need, the less stress you'll have.

Watch the movie Fight Club. It's about that. It's about that idea, too. Paul Lucas says, I'm not so happy our challenge comes to an end. I find so much motivation.

We're going to do another one. We're just going to take a break. I feel that when you do these things, you just take a little break, probably a couple months, kind of just normal, whatever, and then we'll start up a new one with something a little different. Maybe shadowing.

I think shadowing is what we're going to do. Julia says, challenge gives new power. Our challenge made another part of my life better. I stopped eating sugar two months ago, started running, and now I run five kilometers a day.

Hey, that's right. That's fantastic. All these efforts make me happy. See, it's like what I was saying, right? That the self-discipline is useful in all areas of your life.

Like for me, it started with fasting, actually. I started doing all the fasting, right? You can watch some of those shows where I was in that gave me such self-discipline, then I use that same self-discipline with Japanese and other things.

Helena says, my daughter's three years old. Everyone asks me why she's not going to kindergarten. At three years old, they're already pushing that garbage. Jeez.

Nobody understands about homeschooling, thinks I'm crazy, to stay home with my own child. Isn't that sad? Isn't that sad? Good for you, Elena. Good for you.

Good. So you're a child. They don't care about your child. They're strangers. They don't care about your child. They don't love your child. You do. Okay, Clippy says he's kind of tired now.

He's like, after three months, I feel improved and exhausted. How to reset my willpower. We've got to just overcome it. It's like a big push. It's like the end of a marathon.

They always say the end of a marathon. It's the last six miles. It's the hardest. And it's kind of true because that's when you're tired. So this is actually why it's actually a very good thing.

You're tired. So this is the time when you will increase your self-discipline, increase your self-control. It's when it's tough. When it's easy, at the beginning, you're not really improving.

But now, when it's hard and you've got to keep fighting and keep fighting, you just do your best, this is when you will really make some improvements in your self-discipline.

So just do your best and keep pushing. Okay, a couple more and then time to go. Yeah, good. So, Liz has got another follow-up. In the first three months, I discovered the pleasure of reading English.

Focused on reading easy stories and books for fun. Now I'm back to deep learning to repeating power English lessons. Great. That's exactly. You just, you just, you know, change things if you need to.

That's another thing you can do, Khalifi, is change what you're doing. Just do different activities. Antonio says, I have some fear in Brazil. The main reason is communism in Brazil is like a shadow.

We have been fighting against it, but sometimes it seems impossible to defeat it. Well, in America, we have exactly the same problem, Antonio. And you have to learn to enjoy the fight. You have to fight them, fight them, and fight them again.

These guys win because people stop fighting them. We let them fight. Get away with things. We let them try to use our kindness against us. And when you have to stop doing that, you have to understand they are the enemy.

A terrible, evil enemy. And you just fight them and show no mercy. And learn to enjoy fighting. You know, like martial artists enjoy fighting. Boxers enjoy fighting.

You've got to learn to enjoy the fight and it never ends. And enjoy smashing them. I, you know, it wasn't natural for me either, but now I enjoy it. I enjoy it.

They're pure evil and they must be crushed. So just do it. Okay. Fight them and fight them and fight them. See, a lot of you are saying that the challenge helped you improve your self-discipline.

Paulica is saying, I really improved my self-discipline during our challenge. Now I cannot imagine a day without English. I wish you all this feeling. Right, exactly.

And that's why we did it. And I feel the same about Japanese now. And I hope you're feeling the same with English, all of you. And, you know, of course, when the challenge ends, we don't stop.

We try to keep that momentum going, keep doing what we're doing. And maybe we drop down a little bit or maybe we increase more. Who knows? But we'll have a couple months where we'll just kind of be normal, whatever that is for you.

And then we'll start up a new challenge and we'll make another push. Maybe the next push, like I said, might involve shadowing and talking. Abra says, I noticed when I quit thinking, if my English improves and I only listen to it, enjoy it, I learn several times faster. This is a great statement.

I have noticed exactly the same thing, Abra. Because when you're constantly thinking and worrying, am I getting better? Am I improving? Am I getting better?

Am I improving? I'm not improving fast enough. When will I be better? It creates all that stress, like that formula again we talked about. from that Hungarian woman.

And I found exactly the same thing was happening to me in Japanese, even though I know, again, right, I know it's not good to do that, but I was doing it.

And I noticed that immediately my enjoyment dropped and also my improvement. And exactly what Abra said, I just decided, okay, forget it. Just let go. Okay, don't worry.

You don't need to worry every week if you're improving, okay? You'll improve. Okay. Just focus on enjoying listening or enjoying reading and relax, and that's it.

And that's what I started to do. So I stopped worrying about it. I stopped worrying, like, am I studying vocabulary enough? Am I learning enough new words every week or every day?

Am I doing enough reading? Am I doing enough focus? And now every day, my goal is just do some Japanese. That's it. That's all. And I don't worry about it.

I don't force myself. So... Like I said, if I'm very motivated, I might read and do something fairly difficult. But many days I'm not, so I just watch anime.

Or I listen to the mini-stories. And I've got some other audio. Sometimes I just listen to some other audios that are fairly easy. And I just do it day by day.

I don't worry if I'm getting better each day, really. My focus is just on do at least a couple hours every day of something. It doesn't matter what it is, really. That's kind of my approach also.

Focus more on just enjoying it, and it will happen. It's a slow process, so just enjoy it. Where can you buy my book? Amazon.com. Kobo.com. This is great.

Priscilla says, I'm improving in three months in our challenge. What I didn't improve in three years studying English by traditional methods. Thank you so much, AJ. Isn't that a great statement?

More improvement in three months compared to three years of the traditional. That's great. That's fantastic. Really great. And that's when you really get happy when you notice it.

That's really cool. And that's what I want, you know, at the end, at the end of November, what we'll do is then we're going to think back to the beginning, right? Think back to the beginning of, what was it, August.

And think about, you know, what you were doing then. How did you feel then? How many hours a day then? What was your English ability then, reading or listening?

And then how, you know, how did you improve in four months? I know my Japanese certainly has improved a lot when I really think about it. And that's why...

I just say, don't worry about it every week, okay? Compared to three months ago, it's definitely much better. Yeah, so this is a tough question about school. What should I do with my college system?

This is... I have more than four hours sitting in a chair in a class. It's boring. Kills my passion for learning English. I cannot listen to your lessons.

Well, I can't tell you what to do, but you have to think, do you need it? Do you need college? And that is a purely economic question. You certainly don't need it for learning, as you see.

You're not going to learn much in college. So it's just a question of, The cost of college, the cost in money, the cost in time. Is it worth it? Is it a good investment?

Will the college degree help you make a lot more money so that the time and money is worth it? Or not? Many times, no. Many times the answer is no. It's not worth it, so just quit.

Do something else. Sometimes the answer is yes, so you should continue and just do your best and fight through it. So I would say you just got to answer that question for yourself.

Do you need it? Okay, Mindo says, many people say it's good to read books on professional content like science and art. How can I improve my reading skill? Some specialty books are quite difficult.

Yeah, no, no, don't do that. Free voluntary reading. It means read what you're interested in. Read what you like. That's it. That's all. Period. You don't have to read science.

You certainly don't have to read... I don't read art books. I'm not interested in it. So I'm not going to read it if I'm not interested. So no. It's don't force yourself to read stuff that you don't want to read.

Read anything that you're interested in. Okay, if you like comic books, read comic books in English. You know, if you like... the children's stuff, Hardy Boys, mysteries, read mysteries.

If you like non-fiction, like business books, think books about money, read that. You just read what you like and read a lot. That's it. Don't force yourself to read that stuff you don't care about.

No, there's no forcing yourself, I should read philosophy because people say it. You don't have to. You don't have to. Abra, send me a link. for this teacher you're recommending that I interview, and I'll try to contact him.

Yeah, so see, this is kind of showing again this, we were kind of talking about, Oscar and I were talking about this yesterday, when you kind of get, you have a break from something, some material, some lesson, something, and then you come back to it and suddenly it feels much, much easier. It's kind of, it's interesting. It's like your brain learns while you're taking the break.

So Lisa says, Power English lessons are much easier for me than at first. I enjoy it much more so that I can now easily apply the shadowing technique. This way I'm trying to raise my speaking now. Right.

See, this is how you do that deep learning where you're using the same audio and you're just having a different focus or a different purpose. So in the beginning, you're just trying to understand.

For me in Japanese, I'm just trying to really just understand it. But then later you can try to answer the questions with the mini story. And then after that, when it becomes even easier, you can try shadowing, which is what Lisa is now doing, which is where you're working on your speaking too.

Deepak, this is terrible and good at the same time. Deepak says, Effortless English taught me to speak fluent English. I got a job as an English teacher.

But the problem is, now I have to study the crap grammatical terms to teach students which are not useful for them. Isn't that crazy? So, Deepak became fluent in English using Appertless English.

Good enough to become an English teacher. But now, the school is forcing him to use methods that don't work. Insane. Well, Deepak, I don't know what to tell you.

I would say that... Okay, there are a few things you can try in this situation. You can try to talk to your boss and say, I don't want to do this stuff.

Let me use the storytelling method and these other methods. They're much more powerful. Let me try it. Let me show you. I'll show you that this is much better.

Good luck. If you have a really great boss, maybe. Otherwise, mostly they'll say no. Number two, try to change jobs. Go to a different school, like a school that's more creative, where you have more freedom, where you can teach how you want to.

I did that a few times in my career. And then choice number three is you start your own school or just teach privately in your home or coffee shops or whatever. other people's homes, whatever, where you have total freedom and you're an entrepreneur or a freelancer. And then you can do what you want.

But then, of course, you have the pressure, the business pressure of getting students and charging money and all of that. But those are kind of your three choices in this kind of situation if you want to teach using different methods. That's the key thing.

Or just suffer. Suffer for a while. Okay, let's see. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so Brazil, the situation's bad. And it's not only Brazil. To learn English in Brazil, you have to stay in school five or six years and cannot be trusted to speak naturally.

It's horrible. That's from Jackson. Yeah, Jackson, well, that situation is quite common around the world. It's even common in the United States, by the way.

Steve Kaufman and I talked about this. In North America, Canada's the same problem. They have, you know, there are a lot of immigrants, right? And they have these programs for them, paid for by the government often.

And they're terrible. These poor people do not learn English. And they did all these research studies that showed that actually taking the classes was harmful.

Their English got worse. Terrible. Nice. Priscilla says, in my challenge, I'm also applying the four Fs you suggested. Faith, family, finance, and fitness.

So strong to my self-discipline. Yes, indeed. Helps me too. It's easy to remember and every day or whenever I feel like I'm not, you know, something's a little off in my life, I'll focus on those four areas.

All right. Let's see. Same in Poland. Publica says, same in Poland. Several years of English in school worth nothing at all. Same. I mean, really, I think it's the same everywhere.

See, now here's cool. Here's guys using these methods. A teacher who's doing it Doing a great job. Abhishek says, I'm an English teacher myself. I've been using your methods to teach my students.

They love it. They have a big smile every time. Yeah, there are people doing it. What, a couple days ago, Ruben Freitas in Brazil, he said hello in the comments.

He's doing it in Brazil. So there are a few, but it's hard to find. There's some teachers like this that you get around the world in different places. It's just hard to find them.

You know, Paso is doing it in Vietnam. There are a few places, but it's just a little bit difficult. Los Machakos, thank you very much for the super chat, by the way.

People have noticed this. A few people have noticed I do this. LongQ says, I realize you're correcting people's grammar without telling them. That's right, I am.

Listen carefully to how I say things. So thank you again, Los Machacos. What does that mean? Machacos. I have to look that up. Okay, we're going to do the speaking.

Some of you are asking about speaking. So our challenge right now is input focus because that's the big thing. We talked about this with Oscar yesterday.

I will talk to Steve Kaufman about this. Input, input, input is the big one. The listening and reading is the foundation. But of course, eventually, you're ready.

And that's just your choice when you're ready. But eventually you feel ready. I want to start talking more. I want to start talking. I want to improve my speaking.

And then you have to start speaking. So that's going to be our next challenge. And I think we'll do it maybe January, end of January. We'll have the new year.

Everybody has a vacation at new year. So kind of just after that, middle to end of January or maybe beginning of February, something like that. And we'll focus this time on speaking.

And we'll probably do two again. One will be shadowing. So a shadowing challenge. Again, just counting hours, how many hours a day or how many hours in total do you do shadowing.

Shadowing is when you're listening and speaking at the same time to an audio. I'll explain it later when we do it. And then the second challenge will be conversations, chatting, talking with other people live in English.

It doesn't matter, native speakers or other English learners. It doesn't matter as long as you're speaking in English. So you could do italki. You could do Skype groups with other effortless English members, anything you want.

You could talk to people in your local town if you can find people to talk to. really up to you so that will count those two and again i like the two because it depends on your level and what you want to do like i'm not ready to do conversations in japanese yet i don't by february i i doubt it but i will probably be ready to do some shadowing by then with some easier stuff the good thing about shadowing you can do it at any level

So for shadowing, you can choose audios that are very slow and easy. That's the best thing to do when you're lower level. That's what I'll do. Or you can choose things that are faster.

And then, of course, finally, you could choose something very fast and full-on native, something long and fast and difficult if you're more advanced. So it's up to you. You can shadow movies. You can shadow podcasts.

You can shadow anything, really, any native speakers. So it's very flexible. I like that about it. Beginners can do it with things that are very, very slow and easy, and super advanced can do it too.

So shadowing will be one. I'll focus on that. But also, I know some of you really want to jump in and talk to people, and you want to count that and do that a lot. So we'll have that also available.

I'll probably do that a little bit myself in Japanese. Just start doing it. But only maybe an hour or a week for me. But the shadowing, I'll try to hit hard also.

So we'll do that all in the winter. Pallica says, when can we do writing? Maybe writing can be our next, we can do a writing challenge in the spring. I have to think about it.

But why not? We could do that. That would be an easy one. You could just count the words that you write. If you use software, you can just do an automatic word count.

And we could just count the number of words that we're writing every day. Oh, when can we get the movie club matrix lessons? They're being added. They're working on it now.

I'm just waiting for them. I don't know. Probably a few more weeks. Sorry about that. All right, a couple more. What kind of novel is useful to increase vocab?

Any, any. Actually, I love short stories. Do you think that's useful? Yes. Depends on what you are interested in. Exactly. That's it. Do you like it? Do you like it?

Comic books are also fine. Comic books, graphic novels, which are just long comic books, right? Or if they're Japanese style, they're called manga. But they have manga in English, right?

There's manga that's been translated. It was originally Japanese, and they make English versions. But then they also just have people who are native speakers who do manga, the kind of Japanese style of comic book, but it's English.

So all of that is also good. So just really, it's read anything you like, that you enjoy, that feels like it's a good level for you. It can be kid stuff. It can be anything.

Captain Underpants is fine if you like it. Goosebumps is fine. Hardy Boys is fine. Tom Clancy is fine. Danielle Steele, which is romance, is fine. Any level, anything.

Short stories are fine. Aesop's fables are fine. And we will start doing those again next week. I promise. So it's really up to you. Those classics. Junior classics, I mentioned, would be fantastic.

So really, this is what's key. You've just got to enjoy it. You're just reading for enjoyment. You have to change your mindset. Forget the school mindset that you're, I am reading so that I will learn vocabulary and become good at English that I am studying.

Do not think of reading as studying. You're not reading to study. You're reading for enjoyment in English. That's the only thing. It's just you're doing it in English.

That's all. So it's you read things that are interesting to you. That's the only rule, really. It's in English. It's interesting to you. That's it. You can jump around.

You don't even have to finish. You can try to start something, read it a little bit, and then say, ah, I'm getting tired, it's too difficult, and then jump to something easier. I did that in Spanish. I have two things I'm trying to read in Spanish.

One is easy. It's a graded reader. It's a little mystery story. It's easy. So I'm reading that. I'm almost done. And then I jumped over. I started reading Cervantes, Don Quixote.

It's difficult. It's difficult. So I only read the first chapter, not even the whole chapter, and then I got tired, and I just stopped, and then I'm jumping back to the graded reader again. So it doesn't matter.

It's totally up to you. Just enjoy it and read a lot. That's all you have to do. It's simple. Don't even worry. Don't worry, am I learning vocab? Don't get stressed about it.

Don't even think about it. Just focus on the story, focus on the information, focus on enjoying it, and let the learning happen automatically. Yeah, like Sophia is a teacher in Korean. I'm a teacher at a middle school in Korea.

We still teach English with grammar translation method as I learned 20 years ago. I know. Korea is the same. Japan is the same. America is the same. How do they teach Spanish and French and German in America?

Grammar translation. It's exactly the same. Which is why Americans can't speak any languages. Okay, a couple more, then I'm going to go. Take care of babies.

Take care of baby chans. Baby chans. Baby chans. Drew, that's a nice comment from me too. I don't care about mistakes. That's nonsense because you said you often make mistakes.

Every native speaker makes mistakes eventually. Then who am I? Especially as speaking. And second, it's because I'm not trying to speak. I'm only thinking.

Yeah, don't worry about it. Mistakes are no big deal, especially in speech. Nobody cares. I guess I shouldn't say nobody, but almost nobody cares. And there are many native speakers, many, who have horrible spoken grammar.

But people understand them. They are totally fluent. And it's not a big deal. It doesn't really cause a lot of problems for them. You know, try to speak well, but don't get stressed about it.

All right, Cleefy, we're going to hold you to this. Cleefy says, the interview with Oscar was interesting. It's so interesting. It pushed me one day to do effortless Arabic.

Why not? Cool. You should tell Steve Kaufman because he's learning Arabic now. I think he would love you if you made a lot more mini stories and things in Arabic.

He'd be very happy. Baby Shark is a nice song. Baby Shark. Yes, I knew it. I knew it. Good luck, Mito. Thank you. It was a nice comment. Raju says, I have been listening to you for 13 months.

However, no fluency. Help. What should I do? Okay, Raju, I need more information. Listening to me. Are you listening to lessons and mini stories? Are you just listening to the podcast?

How many hours a day are you listening? So without knowing that, I can only give you a very big general answer. So I would say number one, focus on listening to mini stories, let's say at least two hours a day, more if you can. Okay, so focus.

It's good you're listening, but you probably need a lot more listening with a lot more time with mini stories, specifically mini stories. Because that's where you get that huge repetition of the most common English that will help your fluency.

That's number one. Do that for a few months. Then, next, number two, when you're really getting that deep learning, number two, start doing some shadowing, doing the shadowing technique with those same mini stories.

Now you're practicing speaking. You're getting those, practicing just moving your mouth, getting the words out. And then finally, number three, do the challenge. You know, this will be good timing for you.

So when we hit, you know, in the wintertime, North American winter, when the winter comes, then we do the challenge where you try to do a lot of hours of shadowing and you also try to find people online to talk to. So you start getting that speaking practice.

I think if you do all of that, you'll notice maybe six months from now, you'll be doing much, much better. Yeah, like, Cool. Mr. Killer, interesting name, says, I'm learning English by talking to myself all the time.

That's because I have no one to talk to. I can see improvement after all. Greetings from Poland. This is what Oscar talked about yesterday. Remember, Oscar said he did that same thing with English.

When he was learning English, he would just talk to himself, like talk about his day and just talk about his life to himself when he was at home. In English, just practice talking about everything. And it helped him a lot. So that's a good idea.

I do the same when I'm practicing for public speaking. I just kind of... I won't practice the topic as a speech. I'll just talk about the topic to myself during the day.

Sometimes in my mind quietly and sometimes out loud. Just getting used to talking about the topic a lot. And that is a good way to start preparing for a speech.

Okay. Two more. This is just a suggestion, so I'll take this one. Forrest Gump as a movie. The only problem with Forrest Gump for movie technique is that Tom Hanks has a weird accent.

He's trying to do a southern accent and he fails. So, you know, for the movie, it's fine. It's funny. It's interesting. But the way he talks... It's not a real southern accent.

It doesn't sound right. So I really don't want you all to learn. It's fine to learn a southern accent, but I'd rather you not learn a bad one. So this is the problem in terms of English.

It's a nice story, but in terms of English, Forrest Gump has a few problems, mainly because Tom Hanks' English in that story, the accent is quite strange. It's not a natural accent.

So, oh well. Okay, we'll end with this. Going to end again. Looking ahead. From Mick says, what about collecting members from all over the world to enjoy talking in English every day?

Yes, I think we'll do something like this. So again, this month, it's listening and reading, listening and reading, listening and reading. Focus, focus, focus. We're going to make a big push, you and I, okay?

Let's make a big effort this last month of November. Maximum reading, maximum listening every day. Then, when we do our challenge, our next challenge in the wintertime, northern hemisphere, I should say, winter, So let's just say around February, maybe end of January.

Then we can try to do something. We can try to organize something like this where you all can connect with each other so you can easily find other people to chat with on Skype, for example, or whatever you use, whatever app you use. It doesn't matter. So we can do probably our Gab group.

probably our Gab group will be a good place to say, hey, I want to talk, and then just try to connect with people, share your Skype IDs, whatever. You can create groups where we can get as much speaking conversation practice as possible.

We'll figure out these details. I'm sure you all have some good suggestions, and we'll explore these ideas after we finish this challenge. But for this challenge...

reading and listening, one more month. I'm going to do it. That's exactly what I'm going to go do right now. After I finish this podcast, I'm going to check my babies, and then I'm going to watch anime, listen to anime in Japanese.

And I encourage you, you can listen to this podcast again, listen to... If you have one of my courses or you're a VIP member, listen to those. Listen to anything or read in English. Let's get these hours up.

All right. And I'll add my hours again. I haven't been adding my hours on the site, so I will. Okay, then. Lots of love to you. As always, join my VIP program at EffortlessEnglishClub.com.

EffortlessEnglishClub.com. Book club tomorrow.