从英文白痴到流利，你可以复制的逆袭方式（过程全记录）

hey everyone my name is Kevin and this is my story of learning English this stage I call it confusion I pretty much started my journey of

learning English like the majority of you guys pretty average school only difference is probably I was way below average one or two months in the first

semester in middle school I still wasn't able to recite the alphabet letters i pretty much sucked all the way from middle school to high school and fast

forward to University I was still terrible it took me five or six tries just to pass C4 but I didn't really care

that much I blame everything to the fact that I was not working hard enough so I thought if I start study English hard enough I would definitely get better

right until the last year in University I realized I definitely need to become more serious about it cuz I majored in international business and trade and I was supposed to speak at least you know

average English being able to communicate a little bit otherwise I probably become a Jo immediately after graduation I kind of got scared and I

started taking English seriously and I hired a Canadian teacher online so we had conversation I believe 15 to 20 minutes three times every week it

improved my listening a little bit but other than that I I don't think it helped really a lot fortunately I found a job after graduation in international

business company but just working for about I don't know several months I decided to quit my job I just so wanted to improve my English I have no idea why I was so obsessed with improving my

English but I just so wanted to so I decided to you know go abroad but I couldn't afford going to Western countries like like the US Canada So

eventually I decided to go travel around southeast Asia and my reason was you know there might be a lot of foreigners traveling there so I might be able to talk to them and also Filipinos they had

the reputation of speaking English pretty well so I also went to the Philippines and I actually enrolled in a local University sign up for a language

program so I did that for a couple of months I believe four months the program it was not very helpful by the end I was kind of like I actually learned much

much more efficiently uh myself as compared to go into you know those lessons so I kind of stayed at the hostel and started using comprehensive

input M plus one all that kind of thing it was kind of popular back then probably a little bit overrated anyway after that I went back to China several

months later I took how's test so I was able to score 7.5 in out eight in listening and reading and seven in

writing and speaking well just from a scho point of view I was pretty decent but in fact my level was kind of like in

a conversation I was able to understand people but that's pretty much it and then I would go like yes I understand you and here is my opinion and then I

State my opinion and move on to the next question so basically I was not able to make joke I was not able to be funny I was basically not

cool and fundamentally I think it's because I was not able to connect with people in a conversation the conversation pretty much all of them

stayed on a very very surface level and that really upset me cuz I thought I invested so much I tried so hard I even went to Southeast Asia to study English

but I still couldn't quite get there I was so frustrated and I thought I prettyy much tried everything what else can I try maybe immersing myself in a

complete English speaking environment and that is only possible by going to a Western Country so I decided to go to

New Zealand in Australia apply for working holiday Visa and went to New Zealand stay there for half year and then went to Australia but I didn't really improve at all actually I think

my English level kind of graded but my Chinese kind of got a little bit better cuz there are so many you know Chinese people living overseas and I got talk to

them I got listen to different kind of accents so yeah that's kind of funny but I don't want to blame like to say immersing yourself in a English speaking

country doesn't really help I think it's really because I was just physically there but mentally and socially I wasn't really there I was not ready for it I

was just so busy working every single day trying to save us some money to pay for my future tuition fees cuz I've already made made up my mind to further

my study to pursue my master degree I think that pretty much marks the end of this stage it was full of confusions I didn't really know how to improve English I just you know hear a method

here and there online and then tried it out sometimes I was so diligent working so hard but not seeing any result so it

was kind of frustrating but that was a first stage yeah that stage I call it hustle through so after working holiday ID I decided to

stay in Australia to pursue my master degree in TSO teach English to speak as other languages because I thought if I learn how to teach English I'll definitely be able to improve my own

English right but that was kind of a wishful thinking I was to ear on cuz the course heavily focuses on teaching instead of learning so I learned a lot

of stuff about curriculum design assignment assessment and teaching methodology etc etc but didn't really get to discover the secret of improving

your English on your own so the first year I was basically coping I pretty much struggled all the way through and the second year that's when the real

change happened so at that I came across a YouTuber basically what a guy was saying was if you want to improve English you got stop thinking English in

vocabulary and grammar so you got start processing English through a word by word manner or analyzing grammar you need to process English through trunks

so listen to Trunks and speak in trunks because that's how native speakers speak and how they listen you got to match your way of process English as they do

so that's very very essential it kind of make a lot of sense and I think it's pretty solid because once you change your way of processing English from word

by word to chunk by chunk this will significantly improve your accuracy your authenticity because everything has been pretty much preassembled before you even

speak them out it's already being put together that means you have a less chance to make a grammatical error or to say something that that's pretty

Chinglish I don't mean accent but I mean authenticity like if it's authentic expression it's already being pretty you know put together by native speakers you are less likely to make an error and

also you will significantly improve your fluency because you are speaking English chunk by chunk that means a chunk is one unit of information so you're sort of

speaking this as one single unit and everything will start flowing smoothly together I've never heard about anything like that so I started implementing it and

also at the same time uh I was you know starting getting into the the third semester the second year uh I was writing a lot of papers and also dissertations and on top of that I had

to attend some other units so a lot of assignments and also placements my day just got busier and busier and I was like I can't keep on going anymore I

definitely need to figure out a way to manage my life so I started to looking at productivity costes and how to build habits those kind of videos and books I

researched a lot and I consumed a lot of information in regard to that and eventually I sort of Built My Own productivity system so I was able to be on top of pretty much everything that in

turn improved my English learning efficiency so I was able to study chunks for about 6 months consecutively and I

really saw a huge progress especially in listening and speaking and the progress that I made in this 6 months long it's a lot bigger than everything that I

learned all the progress I put together in the previous decades and I'm not even exaggerating that's how powerful it is changing your language processing habits

it is true that I was making progress but every day seemed to be super super busy and I felt like I was fighting forgetting curve every single day if

you're familiar with forgetting curve you know the first day you learn something you feel like you actually know it but you start forgetting pretty quickly so you have to constantly revise

to space reputation to flatten the forgetting curve and that was exactly how I felt I was like trying to flatten the forgetting curve every single day

but the amount of trunk just started accumulating there was just more trunks that I had to revise every day and the trunk that I had to revise was not as

easy as when it just started out it was a lot more difficult so I just couldn't cope yeah I just couldn't deal with it even with this productivity I couldn't

do it anymore so at the end of the six months I was experiencing a severe sty burnout I just couldn't keep on going so

I took a break and that break last quite a while several months but isn't all of our English study full of up and down you know on and off on and off on

and off it's not always on it's always on and off but something happened in the next stage I never stopped learning again I was always um and I never felt

really exhausted tired mentally exhausted not really I just wanted to

learn more cuz I genuinely wanted to so that stage I call it the big picture and that happens after I graduated to

for my master program and I decided to pursue my PhD degree haven't really taken the action yet but I was thinking about it but I was like I kind of got a

little bit tired of T so don't get me wrong I'm still very interested in language learning and teaching it's just that I realized I was more interested in

cognitive science psychology Behavior you know basically how people acquire a new skill and how some people are able to acquire new skill a lot

faster than others how do they manage to do that I'm really curious about that so I started reading papers articles books sign up several courses I think I

actually did a lot more reading during this period of time even though I did whole lot of rating during my master um is T so you know bot of papers but

anyway I was fortunate enough to come across a theory called Bloom's taxonomy basically says there are orders in learning not all learning is equal some

are high order some are low order low order learning is very very inefficient and that includes memorization basically real learning if you're a way of

learning English is through memorization is very effective actually long-term wise I wouldn't say it's effective at all it's just not even close because it

requires zero mental power it just memorization one level above that you have understanding you often hear people say to fully Master something you have

to understand it but understanding is still very very cheap learning very low order learning cuz it's just recognition

you see something you look at a word and you are like well I understand it I know what it means and you move on to the next word there is very very minimum

effort going into it so you requir minimum engagement minimum you know mental power to process the information and as a result it's not as effective as

you may think so understanding is really overrated and what we want to do is not really abandon memorization and understanding all together we still need them but what we want to do is really to

skip these two steps and jum jump into higher order learning direct and higher order learning includes apply analyze

evaluate and create create is kind of difficult creating something is like you taking the bie of information that you acquired somewhere else here and there

and try to put them together as the original thing that you saw you learned or trying to come up with something that's completely new that you could call your own that's very very difficult

to do so the most economical way to go about higher order learning is really through analyzing and evaluating so analyzing and evaluating pretty much is

about rearranging information in a more clear logic and simple way so that they can stand out in your brain and the connections between between information

are just so strong there are so many connections that you won't be able to forget it even if you want to and I can't honestly say that now when I study

something I look at it once I study it once I won't be able to forget it I just remember like 70 to 80% after this one time learning and a month later I still

will be able to recall roughly around 70 to 80% of the stuff that I learned that's just how powerful higher order learning is and you may Wonder how's that possible well that's because higher

order learning for higher order learning to happen lower order learning will just naturally happen to evaluate something

to analyze something to apply something you have to understand if you don't understand it you won't be able to do higher order learning so if just skip

the lower order learning steps and start with higher order learning the lower order learning will just happen naturally that's why it is possible to

remember things so efficient way basically everything that I talked about here is called encoding so essentially better encoding equals better

memorization if you want to remember something the key is now to memorize it many many times that kind of helps but long-term R you going to forget about it

what's really efficient here is improve your encoding quality and that can only be done to higher all the learning so better encoding equals better memory

that's a key and that really change the game for me aart from Bloom and taxonomy I also learned to copes learning experimental cycle copes is really the

guideline of developing a growth mindset in your life a growth mindset is I just couldn't emphasize how important it is

it really teaches me to open my heart to embrace failure cuz failure is the faster way to get better without failures you won't be

able to learn and this growth mentality brought up by C's experimental CYO together with Bloom's taxonomy higher order learning gave me a lot of

confidence and for the first time in my life I felt so confident I was like if I really wanted to acquire a new skill I could make it happen I could definitely

make it happen and for the first time in life I was no longer running away from failure running away from trying new

things I was opening my heart Embrace failures but am I really not really I didn't really have everything figured out yet but I think I was kind of on the

right path uh and something else happens in the next stage completely changed the trajectory of my journey of learning

English and my life this stage I call a have fun throughout my journey of learning

English I had this fear for failure I was afraid of making mistakes I was afraid of talking to foreigners I was afraid of how other people might think

of me will they perceive me as silly or stupid what if I do this wrong what if I do that wrong what if this what if that there were just so many

doubts but I so wanted to get better English so there were always be a little voice inside of my head telling myself

hey do you want to get better or not if you want go ahead and do it put yourself together get your ass off just suck it if you want to get better sometimes I

did overcome my fear I got out my comfort zone I go ahead and do it but it was so exhausting cuz the next time I

will still be fearing the same thing and later I find there were just so many fears in my life cuz I'm a human being and I will never be able to overcome all

of them so I felt like I was fighting a battle I would never be able to win and that never changed until this year 2022

it's only March but this 3 months a lot of things happened completely changed my life I reflected my life a lot and I thought there's

really no cure for that problem there's no cure for fear cuz fear will just exist we're human beings and the only way that we might be able to make the

situation a little bit better is to approach it in a different way through curiosity instead of thinking about overcoming our fears instead of thinking

about getting out of comfort zone when you are wanting to have a conversation with a foreigner but you are afraid of doing that stop thinking about

overcoming the fear start thinking about what he's doing here I find this guy pretty cool I want to know more about him start getting curious about it again just go ahead and have a conversation

with him to find the answer that you're looking for a lot of things were just naturally happen without you even realizing it happened that's a power of

curiosity once you start getting curious about things you just naturally do it without anybody pushing you without this voice inside of head telling you go do

it suck it up no you just naturally do it and I think this not only applies to English learning it applies to life as well you want to be curious about strangers you want to be curious about

whatever you're learning you want to be curious about your life you want to be curious about your loved ones once you lose your Curiosity on someone you love your relationship dies once you lose

your Curiosity on something that you do you no longer do with your heart once you lose your curiosity towards the world you die even though you're

physically alive and I think life really is a choice it's either you decide to go about your life with the mentality of overcoming your fear getting out your

comfort zone or you decide to be curious towards the world yeah so that's basically the last

stage and I can see that is at the opening of a new eror it just made my life a lot more interesting and I'm not

really fearing about the future anymore and I'm not regretting about what happened in the past because it really it's not something that I could change I

totally don't have control over that um and I'm really excited about what the future has in store for me cuz I'm full

of curiosity now yeah so these are the four stages in my Learning Journey and just to be clear it's not that I complete one stage and I

just compl it for go that stage and move on to the next one no that's not true they are actually a ho they work together just like we become a person

who we are now because what happened in the past we don't abandon the past just because we think they are a waste of time instead we build a p the past

sometimes when we don't see the result out it's not our efforts going to waste it's sometimes because we have the wrong expectation to believe that efforts and

meant to give us results no efforts are not meant to give us results efforts are meant to show us a direction the more we try the more effort we put in the

clearer the road will become even if it's a road that we've never traveled before or if it's a road that no one has ever traveled before it will become

clear if we keep on putting in the effort for me my story of learning English is really more than that it's a story of finding myself I hope this

video give you a little bit different perspective towards language learning and my name is Kevin and this is my story [Music]