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today i'm coming here to talk to youabout how i became fluent in english. it's a question i get asked a lot oftimes, and also to share some tips from my personal experience on speaking aforeign language or second language, on how to communicate well and beunderstood in a foreign language when you're living abroad. if you don'tknow anything about me, and this is the first video of mine that you're watching, i am originally from brazil, i was bornand raised there and i lived in brazil for 23 years. then i moved to the ukand i've been living here for the last nearly six years now.

nowadays, i can say that i sometimes, wellmost of the time, i feel more confident speaking in english than i do inportuguese, and i think that's quite an achievement for someone who wasn'tbrought up in an english-speaking country and learned english as a secondlanguage. so i thought this video may be interesting or useful to anyone outthere who's learning english now and who is struggling to become fluent or toknow what to do to better their english. my english is far from being perfect andi make mistakes all the time, but i consider myself capable enough ofholding a conversation, and i do all my youtube videos in english, which isgood practice as well. so i'll just get

started with how i started to learnenglish. when you go to school in brazil and you get to a certain age, english becomes part of the curriculumand it's one of the mandatory languages to learn, and so i started learning inschool. but the curriculum in school is very limited and you really don't learnan awful amount of english in school. so if you want to be able to speak english properly, as a general rule, you have to enroll ina private english school. and that's what most people do in brazil and most of myfriends did and when i was growing up. i was about 13 when i started studying english, or 14. around about that age, 13 to 14.

and i was going twice a week to aprivate english school. it wasn't something that was forced bymy parents. my mum always liked english. she did do private english lessons whenshe was much younger, so it was something that she was keen for us all to know andto learn from a young age. and we were just generallyinterested in the english world, in the english-speaking world and theculture. american culture, british culture, which were the two biggest cultures thatwe were exposed to in brazil, growing up. we had lessons, and we started with basic,beginners and stuff, and carried on progressing to intermediate, then advancedand then we got our degrees.

what happened to me was that, i veryquickly realised i had a passion for languages, and that i actually reallyenjoyed learning english. and so, very quickly i progressed and developed myenglish because i was practicing so much and enjoying it so much. i wasn't justlearning in the english school, i was going home, and i was watching things inenglish, and i was listening to music in english and trying to understand thelyrics and translate it. and that kind of helped a lot with my fluency and ithelped just to solidify the concepts that i'd learned from the books in myenglish school, and i'd come home and it wasn't something that i was forced to do,it was something that i wanted to do.

so i would watch things in english and try tounderstand what they were saying. i loved my dictionary, i walked around everywhere with my portuguese to english dictionary translating words that i'd come acrossand that i didn't know. so, then when i was 14 to 15,my sister and i went abroad. we went to disneyland, and that was our firstexperience in an english-speaking country. and i just thought it was amazingthat i was able to understand certain things. i wasn't fluent at all at that point. i just had a very basic knowledge of english, but i just got so intrigued and interested in all of it.a year later, i made my first trip to london.

i came to stay with a friend. i was 15 at the time. yeah, i think so, 15 going on 16, and i absolutely loved it. i fell in love with the british culture then and i just did not want to do anything else, i just wanted to learn english. i was staying with a group of friendswho only spoke english, which kind of forced me to speak english as well andto kind of get out of my comfort zone, which was the best thing for me. so after i came back from abroad i didthe placement test to see where my level of english was after having spent thattime abroad, because that does boost up

your english level quite a lot, and i hadjumped quite a lot of levels. so i went from being the start ofintermediate, to going straight to advanced and i skipped the whole of theintermediate course because i had already built up so much for vocabularyand learned so much just by being abroad. so that really really helped me. i finished the advanced level and i didn'tstop there. i carried on studying because i didn't want to lose my fluency and ifany of you out there are learning english abroad, you know how easy it is toquickly lose your fluency if you've been abroad, if you studiedabroad or did an interchange programme.

and then suddenly you're back home andno one speaks english on a daily basis. it's really hard to keep up with thelanguage if you're not constantly talking. so i enrolled - my english schoolat the time offered what they called a conversation course, which was basically,you finish the class, you finish the course. there's no more grammar or anything to learn, you've learned everything that we offer. but now we offer you the chance to keep coming back twice a week with a group of people whoare still interested in keeping that english alive and we will just haveconversations, basically. there will be topics to be discussed every week, we'llhave hand-outs and things,

and i'm sure you still be learning. so i did that and that was brilliant. i loved that and i recommend that anyone who has finished their whole english course and is wondering what to do. go and find a conversation course. you might think that you're putting money down the drain, but you're not, becauseyou're keeping that whole investment that you made in your english course, alive. you're basically saving your fluency in english, because you're practicing twice a week at least and you get to speak english that you wouldn't get to speak otherwise. and you also have a teacher there to answer any questions.

that was basically what happened to me. it's not groundbreaking, i didn't doanything different to what anyone does but i think i just already had apredisposition to languages, and the fact that i went abroad really helped buildup my confidence in speaking english. so for starters i had a very very strongamerican accent because my teachers in brazil, they all had american accents andthen when i came to the uk, i fell in love with the british accent and somehowmy brain was able to completely change my accent from being american to british.and my husband being british, at the time when we were going out, we were still boyfriend and girlfriend.

he is welsh, and my brain just sucked in his welsh accent, and now i have kind of like a welsh accent, mixed in with abrazilian accent and whatever accents i've have absorbed throughout the years. but mostly welsh, i think. i pick up accents very quickly, even in portuguese. it's quite funny, actually. because if i'mtalking to someone - a brazilian person with a different accent to mine, my accent morphs into their accent. i really have no control over it - it just happens. so that happened in english as well. the more i spent time with british people, the more my accent got better,and i just kept on speaking.

now that that part is over, let's get onto my top tips for speaking english and making yourself understood in aforeign language when you're living abroad. my first tip, and i think this is themost important tip when you're struggling to make yourself understoodin a foreign language is: make it easy for people to understand you. pronounce your words, open your mouth and say the words. don't mumble, don't speak quietly, because people will find it difficult to understand you,especially with the accent and all. if you're talking about: 'do you want a cup of tea?' it might seem silly, but that can save a lot frustration when you're trying to

communicate and people can't understandwhat you're saying. gesticulate with your hands, use your mouth, use your facial expressions. and along the same lines, try to pronounce things from your nativelanguage in a way that people can understand. for example, brazilian football playersare very very popular abroad. and that's a topic of conversation wheneverpeople find that i'm from brazil. and one football player that you may know very well is, ronaldo. now, being from brazil i wouldn't say 'ronaldo' if i wastalking to a brazilian person.

i would say 'ronaldo', because that's how we say it in portuguese. but, if i say that to someone who speaks english only, or who only heard his name in the english media being referred to as 'ronaldo', that'sgoing to cause a little bit of miscommunication. so instead of making that conversation easier, you're making it harder, if you know what i mean, by pronouncing it the way thatyou would in portuguese. so if you know how people in english-speaking countries speak certain words from your native language, then make it easier for them. why not? it doesn't really matter, you're not making a mistake. the important thing is that you know that you know the way it's supposed to be said,

but in that particular context, it's much easier for you to make it easier for yourself and for the person that you're speaking to. my second tip is: don't obsess over your mistakes. they really don't matter that much, and if you told me that when i was learning english as a teenager, i wouldn't have followed your advice, but i hope some of you will. as a teenager i worried far too muchabout my mistakes and about what other people thought of what i was saying wrong, and that prevented me from starting conversations because i didn'twant to make mistakes, especially in english.

the first time i came to the uk i would not start a conversation, i would wait until someone would start a conversation with me, because i was tooworried of saying things the wrong way. but soon enough i realised by talking to people how little they care about your mistakes.if you're trying your best, and you're speaking most of it correctly, orif you're getting the general gist of the conversation correctly, people really don't care that much. even native speakers of english make mistakes. and that's something that you'll learn.that your grammar will be much better than

a lot of native speakers. obviously thereare a lot of people in english-speaking countries that have amazing grammar andthings like that, but you'll be surprised how good your grammar and your knowledgeof the english language is, coming from learning english as a foreign language.so don't obsess over your mistakes. if you feel like you've made a mistake,don't stop a conversation to correct yourself. just carry on speaking andkeep the conversation flowing, and that will make you more confident. you know in your mind that you made a mistake, but you'll correct it next time.don't worry that person is not gonna judge you

on that mistake, it's just going to make life a little bit easier if you're trying to communicate in a foreign language. tip number three is: practice, practice, practice.whenever you can, wherever you can. if you have a friend abroad that you talk to online, talk to them on skype, talk to them on facetime,but actually talk to them. writing is good, but you will only get your fluencyby practicing your speaking. and if you've learned english as a secondlanguage, you know the very important parts of english, such as writing, readinglistening and speaking. and speaking is, by far

i think the hardest one for people toachieve fluency in. if you know anyone in town that speaksenglish as a first language, go and speak to them and just practice as much as you can. but if you can't do that, practice on your own, even in your house.i used to do that all the time in my bedroom. i used to have conversations with myself,and you can call me crazy, but that really really helped me because i kindof practiced the way that i wanted to say certain things and the way that thesounds come out of my mouth. because a lot of sounds we don't have in ournative languages if you're speaking a

foreign language for example in englishwe have the th sound which is a the employees we don't have that sounds sothat's the sound that you have to learn and i remember sitting in my bedroomwith a list of words that start with th and literally seeing them all out loudand practicing that th sound i remember watching friends on the tvwith subtitles on in portuguese and trying to copy what they were saying andthe dialogues and you know the intonation and just practicing justliterally being interested in the language and practicing as much as i canand that leads me on to tip number 4 rehearse monologues and conversations inthe privacy of your home before you go

and speak to other people and what imean by that is you know the general topics of conversation that come up whenyou're talking to the people like talking about where are you from you know where wereyou born what do you do what do you study and what do you think of this do youlike tea what kind of drinks do you do drink what's your favorite food just the general conversation topicsrehearse your answers what would you save someone asked you what's yourfavorite food do you know what's your

favorite food in english go and lookthat out and rehearse it beforehand and if someone asked what's your job goingand rehearse how to say that in english also rehearse a few questions as well sothat you can ask them a few questions and where do they live and what aretheir hobbies what they like doing how old are they and things like that and that is so souseful to have because then whenever that sprung on to you on a conversationyou don't freeze and panic because you think god i have all this vocabulary inmy brain but i just can't get it out in a sentence

but if you practice beforehand then youhave these sentences sentences ready in your brain to be used and i used to dothat all the time i think my mom and my sister probablythought i was absolutely insane because i used to speak to myself in the bedroomjust rehearsing the dialogues with myself in english literally i'd have full-on conversations aboutnothing or everything with myself but i think that really helps tip number five is speak confidentlyeven if you're not confident in your english that can be a little bitintimidating but if you get the balance

right of being confident and beinghumble at the same time in admitting that you don't know everything then ithink that's the perfect mix if you too arrogant in your english you're sayingthat you know it all you won't get any sympathy from peoplewho can detect that in the conversation but if you're confident but at the sametime you admit that you don't know certain things you know kind of likeasking them like hinting that you need a little help maybe you're talking about aship and you don't know certain parts of the ship what are they named in english so youcan say to them you know a ship what's

that part called you know just kind ofbe gauged a little bit but be confident and what you're speaking and i thinkthat really helps with making yourself understood and that leads me on to tipnumber six which is if you can't find the word try describing what the wordmeans very very often i'll be speaking to someone and i won't know a certainword or i will have forgotten it completely and i still want to carry onthat conversation without interrupting me to go and look in the dictionary orto go and try and get my brain working and so whilst you're in the conversationin the middle of it if you forget a word try describing whatit means for example if you're talking

about a dslr camera and you can'tremember what the word dslr is you say you know those big can rose that usually have the detachablelens i'm sure someone else will say yeah dslr camera so you know they will helpyou out in the conversation if you're asking for help them in the right waybut if you stop and you say i can't remember what i'm trying to say thenthat person that you're trying to speak to won't be able to help you becausethey also don't know what you're trying to say so yeah make yourself easier to help bydescribing what you mean when you don't

know what you want to say tip number seven's to look foralternative words of the words that you don't know and all i can think of rightnow is that most of the times i don't know the name of social fruits and thereare only available in brazil i don't know the translation to english and ifi'm in the middle of a conversation i will refer to the fruit as the generalcategory for example if it's a type of orange a specific type of orange i'llsay we have an orange and this kind of orange does this and that tastes likethis and looks like that instead of trying to find what that name of thespecific orange is so that's just like a

small example but you can find lots ofsynonyms and similar words to the things that you don't know you don'tnecessarily have to go for that specific words that you don't know tip number eight don't be afraid to askpeople to repeat things if you don't hear them it's much better than beingmisunderstood or misunderstanding other people the majority of people are verykind when you say pardon or when you say sorry i didn't hear you can you repeatthat please just don't be afraid of asking people to repeat things that youdidn't hear

tip number nine is to surround yourselfand immerse yourself in the language that you're trying to learn as much aspossible even if you don't live in an english-speaking country or you'retrying to learn english but you don't have many english friends try to immerseyourself in terms of tv shows music and reading one thing i used to love doingwas buying books in english and yes they were a challenge and yes they took a lotlonger to read that they did in portuguese but it paid off becausenowadays i can read any books in and it would take me just as much timeas it will in portuguese i read the whole harry potter series in englishwhen i was 15 and i found the first

couple of books harder because i wasgetting used to it but from then onwards even if there were words that i didn'tunderstand i would try and understand the context and that helped with theregion as well region is a great way because you learned so many new wordswhen you're reading and it's not something that people usually make timefor these days with the internet and with youtube and people kind of spendtheir time or watching videos and reading blog post rather than reading abook but it's so important to read books the vocabulary that you get from readinga book you can't get it anywhere else well you can probably but in my opinioni think you get a lot out of a book

tip number 10 and my last tip is tolisten carefully it's so important to listen to what whenother people are speaking but especially if they're speaking in the languagethat's not your first language because it will be much harder to understandpeople if you tune out a little bit if youdon't listen to everything that they're saying also trying to lip-read as wellif you can't hear what they're saying that sometimes helps if you're talkingto someone in a very loud place and it's really hard to hear them look at theirmouths and time trying to figure out what they're saying like that that is avery basic tip but it's something that's

so important and if you neglect that itmay cause a lot of confusion if you miss what people are saying because youweren't listening so this is my story of how i becamefluent in english and my top 10 tips for speaking and making yourself understoodin a foreign language if you have any questions about myenglish speaking journey that make sure to leave them in the comments below andif you have any other questions about you know living abroad or speakingenglish as a foreign language i'll be more than happy to answer yourquestions if you like this video make sure to give it a thumbs up and ifyou're not subscribed to my channel

already make sure you do so you don'tmiss any of my videos thank you so much for watching and i'llsee you in my next video bye