In this third step toward American English fluency, Gabby talks about how you should try to push yourself to listen to materials that might seem a bit more difficult for you. If you’re always listening to materials that you completely understand, you won’t learn new words and phrases.

As your listening and conversational skills improve, you need to find more difficult materials to use. If you read books, you should continually raise the level of difficulty so that you are constantly learning and improving. As you read, or listen to audio books or music, write down the words or phrases that you don’t understand so that you can look up the definitions later.

One way to stay engaged in your American English journey is to vary the types of materials you use. In any given day you can listen to lots of music, you can read a variety of books, newspapers, and magazines, and you can watch different types of TV shows or videos. The key is to keep it interesting and not to let yourself get bored or tired of the materials. The Go Natural English community is there to support you in your learning. Reach out and get to know them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iENT7vHMyg

Episode transcript below:

The third step to fluency the Go Natural English way is to pay attention, or to understand that you don’t know everything.

So, try to understand which areas, or which words in English you don’t understand.

If you don’t understand about 30% of what you’re listening to, that is a good material to listen to because it will challenge you to learn more.

If you understand about 80%, or 90%, or 100%, then that material is great but it should just be regular maintenance.

You are not going to learn a lot of new vocabulary from something that you completely understand.

So, if you are aware that you cannot understand about 30% or more of what you’re listening to, then it’s a good challenge material.

If you cannot understand more than 50% of what you’re listening to, then it’s too difficult.

Try something that’s a little bit easier.

Now, when you’re listening to material that is good for your level and giving you a little challenge you have to pick out or select the words that are new, that you don’t know yet so that you can research them, so that you can ask your native speaker teacher or friends about what those words mean.

And that is how we grow our vocabulary, little by little, listening to the kinds of materials that we want to be able to understand and to speak like.

So, step three is to notice the new words that you want to learn.

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