How to Speak Fluently – Part II

As we saw in my previous post, language ability is based on learning language formulas and articulating them by playing with them. And in this post I’ll give you the most effective strategy to becoming fluent in English.

But before we go on, let me tell you a secret: I flunked English in high school. I was an unbelievably bad student; the lessons simply wouldn’t get into my head. I was absolutely incompetent in English.

However, just a few short years later, I was fluent; I could easily maintain a conversation in English with anybody. What happened in between these two moments in my life is that I followed through a very specific strategy to learn English successfully.

Here’s how I did it. First, since I was very interested in electronic music, I’d go to the bookstore (there were no websites at that time – today’s much easier) and would flip through the music magazines and read the photo captions. I couldn’t read the full articles, so I found that reading the captions was easier. Slowly I began understanding a technical term here, a name there…

But the real game-changer came when I decided to read a full book. I was fascinated with science fiction and specifically a book that hadn’t yet been translated to Portuguese: Frank Herbert’s “Dune.”

I had a burning desire to read that book. So, every night before going to sleep I’d pick up the book and read a bit, with a dictionary by my side. The first night I got through half the first paragraph – about a half-dozen lines. I’d stop at every other word and look it up in the dictionary. It was a slow, laborious process, but I really wanted to read Dune, so I kept it on.

I did this every night for one week, and by the end of the week was feeling a bit more comfortable with the phrases and in consulting the dictionary. I was then reading half a page per day. I persisted and at the end of one month reading every day I was consulting the dictionary less and less and was getting a much better grasp of the story. I was really starting to enjoy reading!

It took me four months to read the entire book. Towards the end, I was reading eight to ten pages per day in about one hour, before turning the lights off and going to sleep. But the greatest thing was that I was now able to pick any book or magazine in English and read it with very little effort.

When the opportunity came to speak with someone else in English, I was surprised to hear my mouth open and a hesitant but fluent English coming out of it. With practice reading and speaking, I soon became fluent.

This is the secret that led someone who flunked English in high school to become fluent and extremely proficient in English: I made the effort to read something I loved and enjoyed reading, and at the same time, I practiced speaking!

This strategy works because in reading we learn two important elements of language: structure and vocabulary. And when we speak in English we practice it, we play with the language, and make English our own. As I said before, read, practice, and get good guidance, and you’ll get there!