and welcome to Doing English With Julian.

(upbeat rock music)

How to speak English like a native speaker.

It's a very good question.

But in order to answer this question,

first we need to think about how native speakers

actually use their language.

Why do native speakers sound so natural?

How do they speak so fluently?

How do native speakers sound so native-like?

For quite a long time, the answer to these questions

was actually quite a mystery to linguists.

How is it that we speak so fluently?

We believed that native speakers used

grammar rules and added items of vocabulary

to those rules to construct sentences

in their brain, on the fly as they were speaking.

But this doesn't make any sense,

because working memory, the brain's RAM

is actually very, very limited.

Therefore, in order for us to speak

at the speed that we do,

the brain would not be able to keep up.

The brain wouldn't be able to compute

the sentences we need to compute fast enough.

Not only this, but why does a phrase like

good morning, sound so natural,

but the equally grammatical pleasant first half of the day

sound strange?

Why do we say, please marry me,

instead of please become my spouse?

Why do people say hey Julian,

your ugly face needs plastic surgery

but never plastic operation?

Clearly, some of the things that we can say in English

just sound more natural than others,

regardless of whether those others

are grammatical or not.

Simply being grammatical is not enough

to sound natural.

Why is this?

Again, for a long time,

the answers to these questions confused linguists

because we believed that native speakers

speak with grammar rules

and vocabulary attached to those rules.

We now know that this is not the case,

or at least not for most of the time anyway.

Native speakers can use syntax,

that is grammar rules,

and vocabulary and create

creative utterances, expressions and sentences

with those, however

most of the time, native speakers

are actually speaking in chunks.

A chunk is a very common sequence of words

that native speakers store in memory

as a complete unit of language.

When we speak, what we are actually doing

is simply pulling these chunks out of memory

and lining them up.

These chunks may be several words long,

meaning we can speak very fluently

and very efficiently.

We no longer need rules

to process and compute our sentences.

Rather, our sentences are either completely ready made

or only need one or two bits to create them.

Not all language is a chunk, and this explains

why some things sound more natural than others.

Good morning is a chunk.

Pleasant first half of the day is not.

Plastic surgery is a chunk.

Plastic operation is not.

Would you marry me is a chunk.

Would you be my spouse is not.

What this means for you,

the English learner, is this.

If you are learning English in the way

that it is usually taught at school,

you are memorizing grammar rules

and you are memorizing lists of vocabulary

to combine with those rules.

You're actually learning in a way

that is very inefficient when it comes to speaking

and understanding the language.

You're learning in a way that is actually different

to how native speakers speak English.

Rather, a much better way to learn

is by focusing on chunks.

Learning chunks first and foremost

and aiming to learn the language in the way

that native speakers actually use it when they speak.

Put simply, good chunking skills

is the fast-track to speaking English

like a native speaker.

That is, fluently and naturally

as opposed to just grammatically.

How can you identify these chunks in language?

What are the best chunks to learn?

How do we learn these chunks?

All good questions, my friend.

Questions whose answers are revealed

in chapter six of my book,

Master English Fast,

An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English.

To get your hands on a copy of this bad boy

and start chunking your way to fluency,

just head over to MasterEnglishFast.com.

And there we have it.

That is how to speak English like a native speaker.

If you are new to this channel,

make sure that you subscribe to Doing English With Julian

to get more videos to help you speak

extraordinary English.

Thank you and goodbye.