Shadowing Practice: How to Think in English (And Stop Translating) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Have you ever experienced this moment?
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Someone asks you a simple question in English.
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Maybe a colleague.
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Maybe a stranger on the street asking for directions.
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It is a simple question.
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You know exactly what they mean.
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But instead of answering right away, something strange happens inside your mind.
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Time slows down.
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A heavy silence falls.
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inside your head you are running a frantic race first you take their English words
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and translate them into your native language then you think of
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your answer in your native language next you dig through your memory to find the English vocabulary for that answer
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and finally you struggle to arrange those words into a correct
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sentence with perfect grammar by the time you open your mouth to speak five long seconds have passed.
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The conversation has already moved on.
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The person is looking at you with a polite but confused smile, and a wave of heat rushes to your face.
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You feel embarrassed.
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You feel like a failure.
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You tell yourself, I am so bad at this.
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I have studied English for 10 years, and I still cannot speak.
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If this sounds exactly like you, I want you to stop for a moment.
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Take a deep breath with me, in and out.
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Listen to me carefully.
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You are not a failure.
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Your English is not broken.
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Your brain is not slow.
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Your brain is simply caught in a process that is working against you.
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Welcome back to Cozy English Podcast, a quiet and comfortable space where we train our brains to speak English with ease.
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I am so glad you are here today.
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Find a cozy spot.
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Maybe make yourself a warm cup of tea.
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Let us just relax and untangle the knots in our minds together.
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Today, we are going to solve the biggest problem for B1 and B2 learners.
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We are going to learn how to train your brain to stop translating and start speaking directly.
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Let me tell you a story about a girl named Anna.
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Anna is a brilliant marketing specialist.
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If you give Anna a thick business report in English, she can read it perfectly.
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She understands 90 % of the vocabulary.
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She writes beautiful, professional emails to international clients every single day.
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In her head, when she is alone in her room, her English sounds amazing.
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She imagines having long, intelligent conversations.
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But reality is a different story.
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Last week, during a video call, her manager suddenly asked her to share her opinion on a new campaign.
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Anna froze.
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Her heart started pounding.
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She had a brilliant idea, but the idea was in her native language.
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She tried to translate it on the spot.
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But the harder she tried, the more her brain felt like a computer screen freezing with too many open tabs.
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She finally managed to push out three short, broken sentences.
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She felt exhausted and defeated. Does Anna lack vocabulary?
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No. Does she lack grammar knowledge?
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Definitely not.
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What Anna is suffering from is something neuroscientists call cognitive overload, caused by the translation tax.
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Think about your prefrontal cortex.
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That is the part of your brain right behind your forehead.
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It handles complex thinking, memory, and focus.
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When you try to speak by translating, you are forcing this small area of your brain to do three massive tasks all at the same time.
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You are asking it to hold the native thought, search for the foreign words,
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and apply grammar rules, all while trying to control the physical muscles in your mouth to pronounce the words correctly.
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This is simply too much energy.
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It is like running five heavy software programs on an old laptop.
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The battery drains fast, the fan screams, and eventually the system crashes.
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That hesitation, that blank mind you experience, is just your brain crashing because it cannot handle the heavy lifting of real -time translation.
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You are paying a huge cognitive tax every time you speak.
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So, how do we stop paying this tax?
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How do we bypass the translation process?
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To understand this, we need to look at how we learn our native language.
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When you were a child, learning the word for a red, round fruit that is sweet and crunchy, your parents did not show you a dictionary.
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They handed you the fruit and said, apple.
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You tasted the apple.
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You smelled the apple.
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You felt the apple.
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Your brain created a direct connection between the physical object
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and the sound of the word but when you started learning english in school the system changed
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they did not show you an apple they wrote the word apple on the blackboard
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and next to it they wrote the translation in your native language they built a bridge
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and they forced you to walk across
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that bridge every single time imagine you are planning a trip from your home city to a beautiful island.
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You want to go from point A to point B.
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The easiest, most relaxing way is a direct flight.
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You sit back, close your eyes, and arrive at your destination.
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This direct flight is what native speakers do.
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They have a thought, point A, and they speak the words, point B.
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But translation is like taking a transit flight, a very bad transit flight.
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You leave point A, But you have to land at a busy, noisy transfer hub, which is your native language.
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You have to get off the plane, wait in a long line, find your bags, run to a different terminal, and catch another plane to finally reach point B.
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Every time you speak English by translating, you are taking that exhausting transit flight.
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It takes double the time.
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It uses double the energy.
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And very often, you lose your luggage along the way, meaning you forget the words you wanted to say.
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Our goal, starting from today, is to cancel those transit flights.
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We are going to build a new airport in your mind, one that only offers direct flights.
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It will take some time, but we will do it step by step, gently and patiently.
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We are going to use a three -step system.
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It is called the Direct Concept Mapping Method.
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The idea is to connect English words directly to images, feelings, and actions, totally bypassing your native language.
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Step one, we start very small, the micro level.
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I call this labeling your world.
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Right now, look around the room you are in.
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What do you see?
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For a long time, when you looked at a flat wooden surface with four legs, your brain automatically said the word in your native language first.
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Then, you translated it to table.
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We are going to break that habit.
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Tomorrow, I want you to walk around your house.
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Point at things and say their English names out loud.
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Do not think of your native language at all.
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Just look at the object and say door.
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Look at the glass and say water.
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Look at the soft thing on your bed and say pillow.
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Let us practice this together right now.
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Close your eyes.
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Imagine you are walking into your kitchen.
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It is early morning.
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You feel the cold floor under your feet.
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You reach out and open a tall, white machine to get something cold.
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What is it?
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Say it softly with me.
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Fridge.
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Yes, just fridge now you take out a round yellow fruit to make juice you feel the bumpy skin what is it
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orange good you pour the juice into a clear container the glass feels cool in your hand
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what is it cup this seems too simple right
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but it is powerful you are retraining your neural pathways you are teaching your brain
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that it is safe to skip the translation hub step two
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the mid -level moving from single words to collocations our brains
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do not like single lonely words single words are hard to
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remember the brain prefers chunks chunks are groups of words
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that naturally go together when you learn words in chunks you don't have to think about grammar
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because the grammar is already built in instead of just labeling
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a book we want to label the action connected to it
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let us practice some collocations imagine the actions in your mind
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as we say them feel the action imagine you are sitting
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at your desk you have a book what do you do you
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open the book say it with me slowly open the book
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now imagine the sun is shining brightly into your room it
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is too bright you walk to the window what do you
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do you close the curtains say it close the curtains you
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are feeling tired your eyes are heavy you sit on a soft chair You take a deep breath.
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What do you do?
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You close your eyes.
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Say it.
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Close your eyes.
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Notice how we are not translating.
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We are pairing a mental image of an action directly with an English chunk.
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If you learn chunks, you speak faster.
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You do not have to think.
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Which verb goes with this noun?
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Is it make a decision or do a decision?
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If you memorize the chunk, make a decision as one single item, you just pull the whole item from your memory.
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It is a direct flight.
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Step three, the macro level.
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This is where the magic happens.
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I call this action narration.
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This is the habit of being a sports commentator for your own life, but instead of talking about a football match, you are talking about your daily routines,
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and you do it entirely inside your head in English.
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When you are doing simple, automatic tasks, your brain has a lot of free space.
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Washing dishes, taking a shower, walking to the bus stop.
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These are perfect moments to practice action narration.
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Let us imagine a morning routine.
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You wake up.
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You stretch your arms.
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In your head, you do not translate.
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You just narrate.
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I am waking up.
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I am getting out of bed.
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I am walking to the bathroom.
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I am turning on the water.
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The water is cold.
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I am brushing my teeth.
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Let us try another one.
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Imagine you are making a cup of coffee.
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Follow my voice and visualize the process.
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See the colors.
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Hear the sounds.
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I am taking my favorite mug.
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I am putting coffee into the mug.
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I am pouring hot water.
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I can smell the coffee.
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It smells wonderful.
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I am stirring the coffee with a spoon.
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I am taking a sip.
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It is hot.
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Do you feel how natural that is?
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You are simply attaching English words to your physical reality.
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If you don't know a word during your narration, do not panic.
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Do not immediately run to a dictionary.
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Just skip it or describe it with words you already know.
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If you do not know the word for a spatula, just say, I am using the plastic thing to flip the egg.
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The goal is flow.
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The goal is keeping the direct flight in the air.
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Now, you might be thinking, but what if I make mistakes?
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What if my grammar is wrong while I am narrating in my head?
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I want to give you permission right now to make as many mistakes as you need.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of fluency.
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When you are narrating your actions, nobody is listening.
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Nobody is judging you.
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You are in a safe zone.
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If you say, I is drinking coffee, instead of I am drinking coffee, it does not matter.
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The neural connection is still being made.
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The habit of thinking in English is still being formed.
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We can fix the grammar later.
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Right now, we are just trying to get the engine running.
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Let us go deeper into the core metaphor of our podcast today.
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The transit flight versus the direct flight.
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When you book a transit flight in real life, why do you do it?
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Usually because it feels cheaper or safer.
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It is the route, you know.
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Your native language feels like home.
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It is safe.
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When you try to speak English, your brain panics.
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It wants to go back to the safe place first before it travels to the unknown.
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But we need to teach the brain that the direct flight is safe, too.
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We need to build trust.
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And trust is built through repetition in low -stress environments.
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You cannot learn to think in English while you are in a high -pressure business meeting.
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That is the worst time to try.
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The pressure is too high.
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Your brain will automatically default to the transit flight because it is trying to survive the stress.
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You must build the direct flight paths when you are calm, when you are alone, when you are doing the laundry, when you are waiting for the bus,
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when you are taking a shower.
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You lay down the mental tracks during peaceful moments, so that when the stressful moment comes, the tracks are already there, ready to be used.
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Think of it like clearing a path in a dense forest.
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The first time you walk through the grass is high there
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are branches in your way it is hard work you have
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to push your way through this is what it feels like to think in english for the first time
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but if you walk that same path every single day tomorrow and the next day and next week
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soon the grass gets flattened down the branches are cleared away the path becomes wide and smooth Eventually,
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it becomes a paved road.
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You can walk it effortlessly without even looking at your feet.
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That paved road is fluency.
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Fluency is not knowing 20 ,000 words.
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Fluency is knowing 2 ,000 words, but having a clear, paved, direct road to access them instantly.
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So, I have a gentle challenge for you.
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A small, five -minute challenge.
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Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, I want you to spend the first five minutes of your day entirely in English.
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Before you check your phone, before you read the news in your native language, protect those first five minutes.
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As you make your bed, narrate it am making the bed as you open the window
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say it I am opening the window look at the sky
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is it cloudy just say it is cloudy do not translate
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do not judge your grammar just let the words flow from
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the action directly to the English language keep the flight direct
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if you do this for just five minutes a day for 21 days, you will be amazed at how different your brain feels.
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The translation tax will slowly disappear.
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You will feel lighter.
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You will feel more present in your conversations.
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You have done a wonderful job today.
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Just by listening and understanding this process, you have taken a huge step forward.
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Be patient with your mind.
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It is learning a new way to work.
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Give it time and give it kindness.
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But what if you do practice this?
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What if you can think in English perfectly well when you are making coffee alone in your kitchen, but the moment you stand in front of a real person,
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your jaw locks up and your throat goes dry?
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Why do we freeze like a musician who can read notes perfectly on paper, but whose fingers are paralyzed when they touch the guitar strings?
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That is exactly what we will talk about in our next episode.
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We will explore the freeze response and how to gently unlock your voice around other people.
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Until then, keep taking those direct flights.
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Have a beautiful, peaceful day.
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See you next time on Cozy English Podcast.
Why Translating in Your Head Slows You Down (And How to Fix It)
Have you ever frozen when someone asks a simple English question? You know the answer, but your brain races to translate—first their words into your native language, then your thoughts back into English. By the time you speak, the moment’s passed, and you feel frustrated. The video explains this isn’t a failure; it’s just your brain stuck in a habit. Let’s break free and start thinking in English, one step at a time.
Top 5 Phrases to Start Thinking in English (No Translation Needed)
- “Let me think for a second” – Buy time without panicking.
- “What I mean is…” – Clarify if your words feel jumbled.
- “That makes sense” – Respond naturally without overcomplicating.
- “Could you repeat that?” – It’s okay to ask for clarity.
- “I see what you’re saying” – Show you’re engaged, even mid-thought.
Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide to Master Thinking in English
Ready to try the shadowing technique? This method, often called “shadowspeaks” or “shadowspeak,” trains your brain to speak without translating. Here’s how to use it with the video: Step 1: Watch the video once to understand the story (like Anna’s struggle). Step 2: Play a 5-second clip, pause, and repeat it out loud—mimic the tone and speed. Step 3: Focus on english speaking practice by skipping translation. If you stumble, replay the clip. Step 4: After 10 minutes, try speaking along with the video in real time. This builds muscle memory for natural speech. Step 5: Record yourself and compare it to the video—you’ll notice improvements in improve english pronunciation and fluency!
Remember, every learner starts where you are. With the shadowing technique, you’ll soon find yourself responding faster, thinking in English, and feeling confident. You’ve got this—let’s start practicing today!
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.