Let The CHALLENGE Begin | Kickoff Time!

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.

And the father of the Effortless English system that trains you, that teaches you, you speak English fluently, you speak English effortlessly, confidently.

When you join my VIP program at EffortlessEnglishClub.com, EffortlessEnglishClub.com, go there, join my VIP program, EffortlessEnglishClub.com. Good news. The business English course is ready. We have our sales page is ready.

The course is ready. We're just going to test it very quickly. We'll do a few practice, pretend purchases, buys, just to make sure the system is working. But it's ready.

Ready to go. Great news. But you might see it on the website now. Don't buy it yet because discounts are coming, guys. Discounts for VIP members and discounts for you, Effortless English Show, watchers, listeners, members, fans.

So I'll announce that soon. But today we're talking about our challenge. The challenge begins. We're kicking off our challenge. To kick off something means to start it.

A kickoff is a start. It comes from sports. I know at least two sports that begin with a kickoff. American football begins with the team kicks the ball.

It's called the kickoff, and that is the beginning of the game. Soccer also, not kind of, right? Soccer kind of has a beginning. There's a first kick, and that also starts the game.

But in American English, that kickoff comes from American football. And it just means to kick off. If we use it as a verb, to kick off something means to begin it, to start it. We are kicking off our listening and reading challenge.

Starting, for me, it starts in about three and a half hours. So starting August 1st, right? So just after midnight, August 1st. begins. So I'll be doing Japanese.

Everybody else, you are all doing English, of course. I guess I could do English, but then I'd win because I speak English all day. So it's not fair. So I'll do Japanese.

But everybody else, all of you, are doing English. I'm just going to review very quickly. I'll get to the comments and questions in a minute. I just want to show you what the page will look like.

So if you're watching on video, I'll try to explain it for the audio listeners. But on video, you still can join. Still time. So what you first do is you go to Gab.

You go to my Gab. Oh, that's not my Gab. There we go. You go to Gab. There's Gab.com, at AJ Hogue. That's me. And this is my main Gab. But you go to my profile.

All right, so you see my little smiling face right there. Effortless English at the top. It's my profile. It says, official gab of A.J. Hogue and Effortless English.

At A.J. Hogue. All right, and then you'll see there are two posts at the top. They're always at the top. The first one says, join our Effortless English group.

And there's a link. I recommend that you do that. Start. by joining our group, because then you meet everybody else. You meet everybody else who is also doing the challenge, who are also doing the challenge.

And you get to just meet other Effortless English fans and members. It's really great. But then number two, the second post at the top of my profile, says join the Effortless English Listening and Reading Challenge. Join here free, and there's a link.

The challenge begins. Oh, the challenge is, since there are really two, a listening and a reading. The challenges begin on August 1st and end. I need to edit that.

It ends actually November 31st. Let's see. Delete and redraft. All right. I'll do it right now while we're watching. What happened? I don't know what happened.

Anyway, I'll do it later. I'll redo that after the show. Now, when you click that, when you click that, you'll see you'll go to this page. This is called Challenge Runner.

It's just the website I'm using to count our minutes. Now, unfortunately, we have to use minutes. I really prefer to use hours, like 1.5 hours or something, but this will be measured in minutes. So you'll go here to this Challenge Runner website.

And then you'll create an account. It's free, but you have to create an account. And then after you log in, this is what it will look like. Now, this is what it looks like tomorrow.

If you log in right now, it's still July, so you'll basically see nothing. There's nothing on there. But starting tomorrow, on August 1st, boom, you'll see this information.

And you'll see right here, it's very simple. It says EE Listening Challenge. and it says time in minutes, and then there's a little box, and you just enter the amount of time for today, right? So each day you'll do this.

Each day you'll enter how many minutes you did. So, you know, hours times 60, right? So enter the minutes. It's measured in minutes, which is going, I don't know.

I don't know why. I had trouble finding a good website that would be free, right? that many people could use and that would count everybody's time and show the leaders. So this is the one I found.

I don't know. It's kind of a so-so website. It's not great, but hopefully good enough. So anyway, time in minutes. There you go. And then down here, it says EE Reading Challenge and the same idea.

You enter your minutes every day and it will count. Every day, it'll count and add it up. So you'll get your total. If you want to see the leader, you click, see it says time in minutes.

It's a link. Click that, and a little pop-up will come up. Right now, there's nothing in it, but in the future, you'll see everybody. You'll see all the names, starting with the person that has the most minutes, and then going down to the bottom.

And you can do the same with reading. So that's how it works. We'll see tomorrow how it's working. Hopefully, it's working okay. I don't know. I've never used this website before, but...

We'll see. I hope it works. If it doesn't work, we'll just change. We'll find another website and we'll quickly change over to a different one in a couple days.

It'll be fine. So don't worry. We'll try this one first. Hopefully it works. And if not, we'll figure it out. So that's it. Now I had a couple questions.

I've had a few questions on Gab about how to count things. So just a quick, just to make things clear. Number one, someone asked, audiobooks. If I listen to an audiobook, do I count that?

Is that listening or is that reading? It's listening. It's listening because you are listening. You're using your ears. You're not using your eyes. You're using your ears.

So it's still listening just because it's a book. It's still listening because you're listening to it, right? It's an audiobook. It's only listening. So that counts as listening time.

Let's see, another question someone asked about flashcards. Like some of you like to use Anki or these like review flashcard systems. Count those as reading because mostly that's reading, right? The card shows you a word or a phrase and you have to remember what it means.

So, that's you're using your eyes, reading. I mean, this is the basic idea, the simple idea. If you're using your eyes, right? If you're using your eyes for English, count it as reading.

If you're using your ears, count that as listening. A few things you can count as both, like double. So, for example, if you listen to an audio book, and at the same time you're reading it with your eyes, the same chapter, the same sentences, reading the book with your eyes and listening with your ears, you can count that for both.

That time you can count as listening and reading, because indeed you are listening and reading both at the same time. Another example would be if you're watching a movie or TV show,

And you have the English subtitles, so you're listening to it in English, and you're reading the English subtitles. That would count as listening and reading both for that time. But only English subtitles. If you have your own language subtitles, nope, doesn't count.

Doesn't count. Everything has to be in English. And I said, you know, To be fair, I'm doing everything Japanese, so same idea, right? If I watch a video in Japanese, but it's English subtitles, that's not reading for me, right?

So I think that's it. Now we can go to live if you want. And if you have more questions specifically about how to count things or what we're doing or, you know, remember this is all for fun. The idea of this is to get to build intensity, intensity, intensity means doing a lot in a short time, right?

It means doing a lot in a short time. Our short time is four months. which is not super short, right? I think four months is a nice long time. It's kind of like a semester in school, right?

Like a traditional semester. So it's a nice amount of time, you know, longer than four months, might start to feel very long. Shorter, I think there's less benefit.

So, I really think four months is a nice amount of time because I think we all can make some big improvements, you know, by making a strong extra effort for four months, we can really make big improvements with English, with language.

So I think this is a good amount of time. I kind of think of it like, you know, physical training. In four months, I could train for a marathon. Four to six months depends on your fitness level, but I could do it in about four months.

And because I already am, you know, walk and... have at least decent shape. And all of you are listening to English. You have a decent amount of English already.

So I think four months is a really good time period for making a jump, like a jump up in your English ability in that four-month time. Make an extra effort.

Okay, so let's get to questions and comments now and see if you all have any questions or comments about this. I'm just going to... Just hi to everybody. I'm just going to skip kind of the hellos so we can get right in.

Kickoff also means to start a quarrel. That might be British. I don't think it's American. That's Surya. Kickoff means to start a fight. In American English, it just means to begin anything.

It's not specific to fighting at all. I don't know about British... Because British have some different idioms and some different slang than Americans do. But in American English, to kick off just means to begin.

Tuan, you might have to register again on the site. Just give it a try. All right, I'm going to jump to the bottom and kind of go backwards here. Let's see.

Yeah, I will go with listening, Nassar says. So, Nassar's going to focus on listening, and I want it to be good quality. Nassar, I'm the exact same with my Japanese. I am doing a little reading, so I will do some.

Some of my time will be reading because I need to learn to read Japanese for sure. It's helpful. Today, actually, I did probably the most reading that I've done in a long, maybe ever in Japanese at

which is still only maybe an hour. Maybe today I'll do an hour and a half of reading, something like that. But most of my time will be focused on listening.

And for a few reasons, I think, number one, at the beginning level, where I am, I think listening is more helpful for me as I'm just trying to get, you know, kind of getting familiar with Japanese language.

And the second reason is because of my babies that I'm very, very busy. I can listen while I'm taking care of them, but I can't really do much to read. I need some quiet time to focus, and I don't have a lot of that right now. And so those of you who are busy, who are really busy, then maybe listening is a more convenient one to focus on.

But you can do both. You can still do both. And I agree with Nasser that I also will only count, you know, high quality hours. Not necessarily like totally 100% focused, you know, like, but if I'm just really distracted, if I'm really not paying attention at all, I'm not really understanding or noticing the meaning, I'm thinking about something else, I'm not going to count that time.

Jackie says, are your babies calm today? Much better today. Yesterday, ooh, yesterday was hard. That's why no show yesterday. I was too tired. How about if you practice Japanese with your wife?

How do you count that? I don't really do that much because her English is fluent and my Japanese is almost nothing. So we just speak English. Now for you all, if you're speaking, well, it doesn't really count for this challenge.

It's still good to do, but we're not focusing on speaking during this challenge. Maybe the next challenge we'll focus on, maybe we'll do speaking and listening next time.

But this time we're just doing reading and listening. But go ahead and talk as much as you want. You know, when you're talking, if you're spending a lot of time listening during the conversation, you could maybe count half the time as listening. That would be fair.

Okay, so Vladislav says, Cool, my dad decided to join the challenge. His English level is close to zero. Which fairy tales or kid podcasts can you recommend for him? Which of them will you teach your children?

Okay, let's see. Very low level, zero level. He might try Flow English. That's pretty low. Flowenglish.com. That's Chris Moses, and some of those are mine also.

He could try, let's see, very easy children's books. He might have to go slowly. I'm trying to think of something really easy. Easy, easy, easy fairy tales.

I was going to say Dr. Seuss, but Dr. Seuss are kind of weird. We do use Dr. Seuss a lot for our kids, but they're very strange little stories. I would go with basic fairy tales, like the Grimm Brothers fairy tales, but you have to find young, young children's views. I think...

He's going to have to use a dictionary and go slowly, but things like goose bumps are pretty good. Hardy Boys are pretty good. Now, that's above zero level, so he probably has to repeat many, many times.

But see, I'm going to have to do that with Japanese, too. When I first start a story, the first time, I understand nothing. And then I have to read it and try to figure out the words. Sometimes I can't figure out all of them, but I'll figure out enough where I get the idea, the basic idea, and then I'll have to listen to it many, many times.

And so that's what I would suggest with your dad, doing a lot of repetition of short things. But especially like my mini stories would be good for that.

Yeah, Alexei's got a point. The real result we get when we're completely concentrated on one thing, in my case at least, if you're listening and reading simultaneously, one of the things will suffer. I generally also like to do one or the other because I find each one has different benefits. See, the benefit of reading is that you can do it slowly, right?

You can do it slowly. You can find the meaning of words. The reading for me is a good way to figure out The vocabulary. That's really the point for reading, for me, for learning Japanese.

And then the point of listening, of course, is very different. It's more about your brain. Okay, with the reading, you kind of learn the words, but the problem is...

The listening is fast. So you kind of know it when you see it and you can take notes and you can look at a dictionary. But really understanding it fast during audio is a very different thing.

Much more difficult. And that also gives you the pronunciation. It gives you the intuitive natural learning. So... I agree. When I listen, I like to just listen mostly.

I don't really listen and try to read along at the same time. I do one or the other. But some people like to do it. So I'm not saying it's not wrong. It's just I kind of agree with you.

Namaz has an interesting idea. While reading, let's record our voice pronunciation tomorrow once. Record yourself once. Then, 31st of November, do it again and compare.

I'm sure we'll see a huge improvement. That's not a bad idea. If you want to measure, get an idea of how this challenge helps your speaking, you could do that. You could talk for about two minutes in English.

You could either read something like this if you're more focused on pronunciation, or you could just talk freely about anything. And then do it again four months later and see if you notice the difference. Compare the two.

Not a bad idea. Zohair says, how can I read books more quickly with full comprehension? I would say don't worry about reading speed. I just don't think that's... You get faster when you read more.

It just happens. It's like running. I mentioned this a few days ago. I was talking about running and training for a marathon and how, especially for beginners,

Just by running more, you will automatically get faster. You automatically get faster just by running a lot more. Your body adapts and you don't even realize you're getting faster. This happened to me.

So my first three marathons, each marathon got faster. I didn't do any speed training. Now, there are ways to do speed training for running, of course, but I didn't need to.

I just ran more. I just did more. I went longer. I did a larger amount of running. And just that made my body stronger and therefore faster. And I think it's quite similar with reading that you don't need to make an effort to read faster.

In fact, that kind of goes against the point of reading, I think. Like I said, the whole point of reading is you can do it more slowly, take your time, figure out the meaning. So there's no need to rush. Just go at whatever speed is necessary to understand.

Okay? And over time, as you learn more vocab, more words, as the grammar becomes more obvious to you, as you do more and more and more reading, you'll naturally get faster. You'll just speed up. I read very, very fast now in English, but...

I never tried to read fast I never made an effort it's just because I read a lot and I have been reading a lot for you know lots of years now so this is naturally fast but it was never a goal of mine so I recommend just focus on understanding and go slowly with reading it's no problem there's no it's not a race with reading there's no point in reading fast you don't need to now listening is different listening we need some speed

I want to join the challenge, but I'm so lazy, I don't want to count the hours. Oh, well, then I guess you can't join. Ah, Rosetta Stone for zero level. Yeah, Pimsleur.

I use Pimsleur for zero level. I'm doing Pimsleur Japanese right now. Um... That's not a bad suggestion, if he likes that kind of thing. Okay. Ashalal says, I'm from India.

I'm an advanced level. There's nobody available to talk to. English native speakers. What should you do? Well, you can try websites like italki. There are other ones.

Okay. Wait. I can't remember. I always forget them. But anyway, Italki is the one I know. You can do that, and you can find native speakers to chat with.

Yeah, and for Vodafel's dad, if any of you have ideas for Zero Level, please jump in and give your suggestions. Yeah, right. So, Fernanda says, I usually just listen to VIP lessons while walking or doing other things. When I sit and listen to it, I like to read the PDF at the same time.

This will be worthy for the challenge. Yes, that's great. And when you're reading along, you can count that as reading, too. So, you're doing both. So, yes, indeed.

That's great. Wonderful. Deepak Vorah says, when did you start teaching spoken English? My first job was in 1996. So, 06, 23 years ago. Sabza says, I have a problem memorizing meanings of vocab words, but I understand them in a sentence.

Well, great. Don't worry about it. You don't need the definition. So you just need to understand it in a sentence. So you're doing fine. Nothing's wrong.

You're doing great. That's normal. Totally normal. Even in English words, I have to stop and think about when I'm teaching you vocab sometimes, you all.

I also have to stop and think about the definition. I mean, I know the meaning, of course, but for me to give you the dictionary definition, I don't automatically know it. I have to think like, what is the definition? And try to explain it to you.

It takes me a minute sometimes to think about it. So it's totally normal. Even for native speakers, that's the normal thing. We don't memorize dictionary definitions.

Yeah, so here's Vladimir saying, I agree, Goosebumps is interesting, easy to read. I read before I go to bed, 30 minutes, I've already read 35 of them. Fantastic. See, there you go.

There you go. There's a huge number of them. I think Goosebumps are at a nice level. And, you know, like for someone like, again, who's very low level, like Vladislav's father, maybe the first Goosebumps book will be very tough for him.

And he has to use a dictionary a lot. And he can just, if you don't mind, if you got the paperback book, just write the meaning, you know, put it in, write it above the word, you know, put it in Russian or whatever. And, you know, I do that with Japanese books right now. because just, like, check the meaning really quickly.

And so the first couple books, he might have to go very slowly, read them many times, you know, read them and read them again and read them again. And then the second book will be very slow. But maybe by book three, four, five, six, seven, it'll start to get a little easier for him.

Ah, Knowledge Lanka says, I've learned lots of things about English, even about life. Most Sri Lankan people don't know about you. Could you do a program in my country? Oh, I'd love to visit Sri Lanka.

That would be nice. Someday, maybe. We'll see. Good. And same happening in Pakistan. Umar says, I'm from Pakistan. Salute your way of teaching. I improved a lot by following you.

I tell this technique of learning to many friends. Please say Pakistan once. So there you go. Pakistan too. I've never been to Pakistan. Not yet. But maybe in the future too.

I'd like, you know, I could do a whole visit. I'd love to go back to India again. I'd love to go back to Nepal again. Excuse me. And, you know, maybe visit Sri Lanka and Pakistan in the same big trip.

It would be kind of nice visiting that whole region. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, here's the yeah says. Yeah, yeah, Camille. I've been listening two hours a day.

I almost understand all the speech, but I can't speak. What's your advice? Do try doing some shadowing. And then when you feel like you really, really know it, just get something new and start again.

The speaking usually is behind the listening, okay? It's just normal and there's kind of a delay between the two. But the shadowing might help you. Okay, here's that question again.

If I talk to a person via web video, is it counted as listening? I would count half of it as listening since you're also speaking half of the time Roughly.

So maybe you can count half as listening. That seems fair. Someone just asking, can I explain the challenge again? There's two challenges. It's four months, starts tomorrow, August 1st.

For me, that's three hours from now. And we're counting our total listening time. and counting our total reading time per day, and then total for four months. So the total number of minutes or hours in four months.

So beginning August 1st, ending November 31st. I think there's 31 days November. So last day of November. And the idea is to get the most possible hours of listening and or reading.

So there are two challenges, a listening challenge and a reading challenge. We count the times separately. And that's because some of us might focus mostly on listening.

Some of us might focus mostly on reading. Some of you might try to do half and half. So it's up to you, just more flexible, because they're both really good. Reading is great and listening is great.

So that's what we're doing. And the idea is that all of us will increase our normal time. If you normally do two hours a day, try to do three hours a day. If you normally do seven hours a day, try to do eight or nine.

So the idea is to make an extra effort during these four months. Hi from Kansas. Cindy's in Kansas. Hey, we were talking about Kansas, remember? In the Matrix, they mentioned Kansas, which is in the United States.

Hey, Albro, good to see you. Ah, let's see. Aladib says, is it useful to study from the BBC Learning English website or do you think listening and reading is more useful?

Listening and reading is more useful. That kind of school type stuff, like, meh. No, listen and read. That's what you should do. Yeah, this is fine. Mohammed Bashir says, I will focus on reading more this month.

Next month, I'll focus on listening. What do you think, AJ? That's totally fine. You can do that, yes. You could change it each week. We could do like a week of listening focus.

The next week, focus on reading, then listening, then reading. You could do it month by month like Mohammed. Or the whole challenge, you could focus on just one.

So it's flexible. Carzon says, I have a single question. I've memorized a large number of vocabulary words. When I try to speak up, I make mistakes. The words don't come to my tongue easily.

What's the solution? Well, the solution is don't try to memorize them from big long lists individually because then you're not learning them in phrases. What that means is you're not learning them in a real situation, a real context, real sentences, real stories, real meaning. And so you're not quite sure how to use them.

and it's much more effective to learn these words within, inside of, you know, real stories, real audios, real paragraphs, phrases, etc. There'll still be a gap, you know, you're still going to have, it's still a gap, and it's normal to struggle to use them correctly for a while, so don't get upset about it.

Igor says, do you know about applications like Duolingo? What can you say about it? I don't like Duolingo. I found it so super boring. Duolingo, to me, is just like the same old textbook approach.

It was just the same. I tried it, I think, with Spanish for a short time, and I found it so boring. It was just like an online textbook. So, yeah, I didn't do it.

Cool. Now, see, Albert Amani's reading a very serious book. I started reading 1984 by George Orwell a few days ago. That's an adult-level serious book in English.

Impressive. It feels so good to try the method you recommended last time. Now I can read smoothly without worrying about understanding everything. Yeah, exactly.

That's a tough book. That's a high-level book you're reading. So, yeah, some words you won't understand. But you're just trying to get the main meaning, right?

And if you have an e-reader... You can quickly look up some words as you read, but you'll probably forget a lot of them, but keep going. And you're still, overall, by the time when you finish that book, you will have learned a lot of new vocab, and you will have read a whole big book in English, and a very, not an easy book, in fact, a challenging book.

Nagindran says, is it effective to learn English reading novels? Yes, super effective, fantastic, wonderful, incredible. Yes, I highly recommend read, read novels. If you like novels, that is a wonderful way to improve your English, to learn a lot of new words.

If you prefer listening, you just get the audiobooks. That's more difficult, of course, because you can't use a dictionary and it's fast. But that's why it's often very nice to have the book and the audiobook both. And you can use the book to learn a little more vocab, and then the audiobook really helps that listening ability.

But just reading is also fine. You can also do nonfiction books. That's why in our book club, we do nonfiction and we do fiction. In general, the nonfiction is a bit easier.

So, Tenerife again, where can I join the challenge? Yeah, on my gab, gab.com. You'll see a link. I just deleted it because I need to change it, but it'll be up in a few minutes after this show.

Yeah, FullRate says, this challenge also improves speaking and writing, listening more to improve speaking, reading more to improve writing. Yeah, it will. It will have that effect. Your speaking and writing will improve by doing this for sure.

Okay, so see Twan's reading The Hunger Games. If you doubt for something to read, try The Hunger Games. This is a thrilling and interesting book. Right, they made movies, right?

They have all those Hunger Games movies. So those are popular. Someone else, I think, was it Carol? Or someone else was reading The Hunger Games. Oh, what about the live show?

This, is it just listening or both? It's just listening because we're not reading anything right now, right? So this is all listening. Yes. Every podcast I do, every show I'm doing like this right now, count it as listening.

Now, Ambas has a point about this and he or she is right about this. It's better that we don't count Time watching movies. Because most of the time in movies, there's nothing to listen to.

Now, this is true. Compared to an audio book, a movie has much less listening time. And especially an action movie. Right? So, like even in The Matrix, you know, I'm skipping most of the action parts when we're doing our movie club.

If there's a bunch of fighting, blah, blah, blah, you know, for a couple minutes and not much talking, And in the future, there's going to be a few scenes where there are some famous scenes where there's really cool action scenes, but there's really not much English talking. So yes, overall, if you're just focused on English learning and getting the maximum amount of listening time and vocabulary and practice, then for sure an audio book is much better. Or even a podcast like this where I'm just talking continuously.

Better than a movie where there's a lot of action. Or even some comedies, there's a lot of time where they're not talking. Now some movies, or maybe dramas, there's a lot more conversation. So it depends on the movie.

But movies aren't bad, okay? So we're not going to be so picky. I'm not going to be so picky about this. So if you want to count movies, go ahead. I just want to encourage you all to listen as much as possible.

So listen to what you enjoy listening to. Ashalal says, I want to be a good motivational speaker. Please suggest me which type of language in English is good for me. Well, if that's the topic you want to focus on, motivation, leadership, then you probably should...

Read a lot of books on those topics, and you should listen to a lot of audiobooks on those topics. And in addition to be a great speaker, watch videos of great speakers. So watch Tony Robbins' videos. Not just watch, but study them.

Use them for your English learning, but also use them for learning how to be a good public speaker. And pick your own. Choose your favorite motivational speakers. There are a lot of them.

And they each have a slightly different style of speaking, and you can learn from all of them. So you just kind of have to focus on those people, that content, and that will help you a lot.

Great. Sarah says, I don't like reading at all, but I decided to try it during the challenge. Maybe I'm going to like it. Yeah, that's great. So you can use this challenge to, you know, I like that.

It's nice where she's going to push herself a little bit. This is why I'm also doing the reading challenge because for me in Japanese, reading, it's really not easy.

So I also find the same thing. My motivation to read is much lower in Japanese. It's kind of, because I know it's, I really got to, It's like study and work.

I can listen. It's a little more relaxing. But I need to learn to do it. So I know I have to do it. I know it's beneficial and helps me in the long run.

So that's why I'm going to count my reading. But I'll be doing less reading still. But I am counting it. I'm doing both challenges still. Yeah, Namal says, I want to read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

What do you think? Is that about money or self-discipline? It's about money and thinking growing rich is not so much about self-discipline. It's more, I'd say, about motivation.

Yeah. Oh, this is nice. Paola says, I started reading stories from my for kids, with my kids. My pronunciation was awful the first time. I didn't understand some sentences, but I'll keep trying.

I'm doing also your VIP audios. Very nice. That's a great way to do it. Learn with your kids at the same time. Yeah, I was right. Carol said she's reading The Hunger Games a couple years ago.

Fernanda's currently reading them, and she's enjoying them. So several of you all are doing The Hunger Games. So there you go. That's not just one book.

I think that's a series of books and movies too. So you can read all the books, then watch all the movies. Hafiz is asking, have I visited Kerala? I have not, but I've heard very nice things about Kerala.

So I do want to visit. I could do a speech there. He says, so yeah, I would like to. Well, listen, most audiobooks are British English. American speakers should read more books.

Really? I don't know. I would think it depends on the writer. If the writer is American, I think the audio tends to be American as well. So I haven't noticed that.

I don't know. Maybe fiction, they do more British because it's... I don't know. Maybe it sounds more dramatic in British English. She says, I'm in the 12th grade.

This is my last year in high school. I have to make a lot of effort to have a seat in the university. I don't know. Should I join the challenges or not?

Up to you. Your choice. Do you want to improve your English a lot in a short time or not? So it depends on how important that is to you. If you have other things you have to focus on, like math and science and stuff, then I understand.

But remember, too, you choose the amount. Everybody can't do 12 hours a day. So it's up to you. The idea is to challenge yourself. You're not really going against anyone else.

Tom says, should I read and listen to Harry Potter in both languages? You could do that if it helps you understand. Harry Potter's okay. It's all right.

Our boss is with the technical thing. Should we input the time of our listening and reading once a day in the website, or can we input several times in one day?

I don't know. I think we can do several times in one day, but as I said, I've never used this website, so I'll tell you tomorrow. We'll find out tomorrow how this thing works.

Abraham says, reading science books. How is that for improving English? Yeah, it's fine. Totally fine. If you're interested in science, then read about science.

Oh, this is nice. Nebra says, great teacher. My English is better now because of you. Thank you very much, AJ. Well, thank you. Hey, now see, this is cool.

Nora says, Yesterday, I read 10 stories from Aesop's fables. I can guess the meaning of new words easily. A little help from the dictionary, but I feel improvement.

Thank you, coach, preparing for the challenge. Yeah, see, this is what happens, especially when your language gets, your English level gets high enough. When it gets high enough.

where you understand most of the words, then the new words you can guess. And this is what native speakers do. This is what I do. If I'm reading a book in English and there's a new word I don't know, I almost never use a dictionary.

Usually from this situation, I just guess the meaning. Sometimes I'm right. Sometimes I'm a little wrong. But I don't want to waste time looking at a dictionary.

So I just guess the meaning from the situation, and usually I'm close enough. And then, of course, if I see the word again and again and again in the same book, then after guessing a few more times, a few more different situations, then I will know the meaning of the word, at least the basic idea.

And then that's how I learn a new word in English. And that's how you will, too. On the other hand, if your level's very low and there are a lot of words you don't know, then you can't really do this because you don't know enough, so you can't really guess. That's when you have to start using a dictionary more.

So that's why, ideally, reading something that's mostly easy for you, just a little difficult, is kind of the perfect thing. But you can't always find something like that. that you like that's interesting so sometimes you're reading things that are a bit you know too difficult and you just have to use a dictionary more and sometimes maybe you read something that's too easy and you understand everything but that's still fine because it's still English it's still repetition I think too easy is not a problem oh this is nice Hemingway I'm a fan of Hemingway's

Ichmannson says, I've been listening to one of Hemingway's short stories, Homage to Switzerland, read by Julian Barnes. His stories are interesting. Yes, they are. There's a nice one.

I'm trying to remember the name of it. Snows of Kilimanjaro is another nice one, a short story. It's about a... I mean, it's kind of him imagining his own death, really.

But it's about him visiting... Kilimanjaro, like hiking the mountain of Kilimanjaro. And I'm quite a big fan of The Old Man and the Sea. I have not read his novels.

My friend Joe is just right now reading one called The Sun Also Rises. Of course, his novels are the most famous. And I need to read that one because it's set in Spain in the area where part of the Camino is. So my friend Joe was just telling me, oh, you've got to read this book.

Read Hemingway's book. You'll remember Spain as you're reading because Hemingway loves Spain. He loves, loves, loves Spain and Cuba. Felipe says, hello from Venezuela.

Hey there. I like watching you in the morning to learn to increase my vocab. Thanks, bro. God bless you. Thank you very much. Hello to you. How can I commit myself to the challenge?

You know, interesting. A couple more guys and then I have to go. But what's interesting to me is that this may seem strange. I'll probably do a whole show about this.

All right. I need to think about it a little more. But I believe that fasting has helped my study of Japanese. I really do. I very much believe that all the fasting I did last month for about five weeks, even now, I do one meal a day now, but I was doing more disciplined fasting last month.

But since doing that, my willpower, my self-discipline, I feel, is much stronger, much stronger that the discipline of fasting increased my discipline in other areas of my life. And I'm noticing it most with studying Japanese. Because in the past, I was always very lazy about language study.

And, you know, I was okay with Spanish. And I kept being lazy and avoiding Japanese, avoiding Japanese, and it would be difficult. But then after the fasting, it's like something really did change, and I feel like I just have so much more discipline in my number of hours per day of Japanese now. I started one month ago, and in one month I've done...

Not too bad. I've done about, let me see, I might hit about 90 hours. That's about three hours a day. Not bad. But starting our challenge tomorrow, lately, this week, I've been doing like seven hours a day of Japanese and very focused.

And I really do think that fasting helped that. So, I know I'm always talking about fasting, but I think fasting has some great psychological benefits, not just physical.

I really think it helps a lot with self-discipline and self-control, and that this can help you with your English learning also. At least that's my experience, so you might try it.

Coach, can you tell some success stories of some learners with the number of repetitions to acquire vocab? Well, I just watched a podcast, a video from Steve Kaufman.

And he was learning, I think he was talking about Arabic. He's learning Arabic. And he said he's using mini-stories, just like we recommend. And I think he said that he was repeating these stories like 75 times each.

He was showing like how many times he had repeated the same story listening to it. 75 times. So that gives you some idea of how many times you can repeat, of how much deep learning you can do.

Now, some of you, maybe that seems like much too much, but I think that's about what I would recommend. That's kind of my goal. Already, I'm using Japanese many stories.

Probably some of them. The first 15, I've probably repeated 35, 40 times. and I'm continuing to repeat them. So I probably will repeat each story eventually like 100 times, something like that.

But not everything, right? There's other stuff I don't repeat so much, but the mini-stories especially. And I think with Effortless English, it's the same idea, that you should repeat the lessons, the VIP lessons, the Power English lessons, whichever course you're doing.

Repeat those a lot, a lot. And then other stuff, like the podcast, audio books, other things, you can repeat much less. So then you get the repetition, and I call it deep and wide, right?

Deep and wide. I think Steve Kaufman calls it repetition and novelty. Same idea. All right, a couple more, and then I've got to go take care of babies.

Okay. Yeah. Carol says, Clefie, aren't you yourself one of these successful students? Good point. Good point. Devin Rye says, you're really motivating everyone who lacks in English, really helping us to overcome from low confidence, nervousness, and so on.

Most of the time, I listen to your podcast. Well, that's great, Devin. That's exactly what I hope to do So relax. Keep listening and listening and listening.

Join the challenge and enjoy the... The big thing is enjoy the challenge, guys, okay? Don't make this some terrible thing, okay? This is not like school, okay?

So this is not homework. It's not a test. It's not to be stressful, okay? This is all for fun. So this... Very important. I'm going to finish with this.

Is that... It's very important as we do this challenge, this attitude of it being fun and enjoyable is very important. So when you listen, listen to enjoyable things.

Listen to things you enjoy. You know, whether those are mini stories or lessons, podcasts, audio books, anything. And reading is the same thing. Read things you enjoy.

People ask me, what should I read? Well, read something you enjoy. That's my real answer, okay? Okay. So if you, someone asks about science books. Well, if you are interested in science and maybe you are a scientist or want to be or you just think it's interesting, then yes, read, read, read about science, okay?

Because you enjoy it, you're curious about it. If you're not interested in science, don't force yourself to do it. Then you make it painful, okay? Maybe you like romance.

So read about romance and love and read love stories, okay? Because you like it, because you enjoy it. So this is the whole point. That as we do this, we're increasing our hours a lot.

So we have to make it enjoyable, keep it enjoyable. I had to do this myself. I just was talking about repetition with these mini stories I'm using in Japanese. Well...

Starting yesterday, maybe two days ago, probably I was doing a little too much repetition, and I was starting to get bored with some of them. I was just kind of like, ugh, I'm getting tired, especially because I'm doing a lot of hours.

And so I realized, okay, look, I just relax, man. Just do something else. So I found these other stories that are really neat, kind of cool old stories of Japan, kind of like the old fairy tales, right? Like the old traditional stories about

You know, little magical turtles and stuff like that. And I just focused on that. I've been reading those, listening to those, taking a break. I'll go back to the mini stories again.

I just need a little break. But the point is I'm keeping it enjoyable so that it's relaxing. It feels good. I'm liking it. So if I get bored with something, then I'll just change to something else.

And then I'll go back again. And so you can do this too, I recommend. So do the repetition, repetition, repetition. When you start to get really bored with it, change to something new, relax.

Most of all, choose things that you like. And then this four months will be very enjoyable. You'll like it a lot and you're going to get a lot of hours of listening, a lot of minutes of listening and a lot of hours of reading and make a big improvement today. And we can all do this together, which makes it even more fun, because we're all doing it together.

All right, so the challenge for me, because I'm in Japan, starts in two and a half hours, just after midnight, August 1st. I will be on Gab. Share your time on Gab, too. Just tell everybody.

We have our challenge website. that you need to put your minutes in there. But also, just on Gab, tell people. Tell people what you're doing, what you are enjoying.

Share the books you like. Share the movies you like. Share the audios you like. All right. Motivate each other. Make everybody have fun. Let's all have a good time.

All right. Lots of love to you. I will see you next time. As always, join my VIP program at EffortlessEnglishClub.com. Go to EffortlessEnglishClub.com.

We'll be right back.