5 easy ways to start thinking IN ENGLISH!

Practice having conversations with yourself. You can practice speaking about different topics every single day. You don't need anything for it, and don't make a big deal out of it. Do it on the go. Connect it to something else that you're already doing, and that is going to help you stick to that habit, and that habit is going to help you stop translating in your head and become more fluent in English. Hey, you're listening to the Influency Podcast. I'm Hadar, your host, a pronunciation expert, fluency coach, and a proud non-native speaker. With over 16 years of experience teaching, I am here to share with you all my secrets on how to show up in English clearly with confidence and freedom. On this podcast, I'll provide step-by-step strategies, lessons, stories, and practical tips to keep you inspired and motivated on your English journey. Are you ready? Let's do it. Are you still translating in your head to English? If yes, you need to start doing these five easy things that you can do every single day. These are tried-and-true methods that I have used myself as a non-native speaker of English, and I've used with thousands of my students for over 17 years. Are you ready? Let's get started. The first one is to journal in English. It only takes five to 10 minutes a day. It's a great way to start your day, and when you journal in English, you train your brain to think in English. You can take your time, but the moment you sit in front of the paper and try to do it with a pen and paper, the old-fashioned way, you are able to just let the thoughts come up in English and practice thinking and writing in English. I can tell you that this is something that I have done personally. I used to write morning pages every day, three pages when I was 21, and it has significantly changed my fluency. I did it for an entire year, and the results were amazing. Now, you don't have to do three pages every day. You can do one page, half a page, or up to five minutes every single day. Just stay consistent with it, build the habit of doing it regularly, and I promise you will see results. The second thing is practice having conversations with yourself. One of the biggest challenges that we have is to speak to real people in real situations where the stakes are high, but when you are on your own with yourself, it's really easy to just have easy, casual conversations with yourself and practice speaking immediately. That means whatever comes to mind, you want to be able to say it quickly. When more people are involved, we tend to filter ourselves, to edit ourselves, or to overthink things, and as a result, we won't be as fluent and as immediate, so it's not so much about translating, it's about being able to think quickly and to speak quickly. So you can just simulate conversations with yourself, you can practice speaking about different topics every single day, you don't need anything for it, and don't make a big deal out of it. Do it on the go, connect it to something else that you're already doing, and that is going to help you stick to that habit, and that habit is going to help you stop translating in your head and become more fluent in English. By the way, I developed a tool called Hadar AI, and Hadar AI can have real conversations with you, so you can simulate conversations with her, you can get coaching on your confidence or fluency, get advice, Hadar AI is trained on hundreds of my coaching sessions and videos and content, so you can ask real questions and get real answers, and also you can simulate conversations with her or just speak and get feedback on your grammar, vocabulary, and accuracy. And Hadar AI is available inside my English practice membership called BEYOND, and you get unlimited access, you can have live calls with Hadar AI, you can record yourself and get feedback, so it's really cool, super effective, and if you feel like you need that extra motivation to practice, not only Hadar AI will help you, but BEYOND is a fantastic place for you to do all the things that I've shared with you regularly inside the membership, so check it out, all the information is in the description. The next thing is to label what you're doing out loud, so whenever you're walking around the house, let's say you're making coffee, you can say, okay, now I'm pouring the hot water into the cup, I'm adding coffee, I'm adding sugar, I need to go get milk, I'm going to get milk, or maybe you're stuck in traffic and you're looking around and you're like, oh, this is a nice car, so you say it out loud, whatever it is that you're observing right now, this woman is in a hurry, I can see that there are three kids walking down the street right now, oh, I need to go shopping, so almost like a stream of consciousness processed and spoken whenever you're on your own, and again, the best part is that you don't need to clear out time for it, you do it while doing other things that anyway you're doing, and that way you're leveraging your net time, time that you are on your own, and you can turn it into practice time, so it's super efficient and a lot of fun. The next thing is to take any passive learning into active, let's say you listen to a podcast or you're watching a TV show, try repeating it out loud, shadowing, I have a lot of videos about shadowing, if you don't know my shadowing videos, I'm going to link in the description to all the videos, but for now, just think of this idea of hearing something and repeating it, hearing something and repeating it, so it almost becomes automatic, you are training your brain to hear and say at the same time, so this has been super effective for me as I'm learning Spanish or when I was learning English quite a few years ago, and this is something that my students absolutely love and they find it both entertaining and effective. The next and last thing you can do is to sprint, now I'm not talking about physical sprinting, like jogging or running, I'm talking about a pronunciation sprint, pronunciation sprints are 10 minute exercises designed to level up your pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and confidence through intentional repetition, it is based on my pronunciation confidence method and my students have been using them for years in my program beyond or Sprint Master and they absolutely love it, right, tragedy, strategy, tragedies, hello, hello, good morning to you, something addictive, effective and fun about them that gets people to practice and to remember those words, those sounds and those grammatical structures. So the idea of sprints is to help you repeat certain phrases or tricky grammatical structures or vocabulary in a way that sticks so that you won't have to translate new words, it's just going to be there because you've practiced those words again and again and again or sentences or sounds. So pronunciation sprints are an excellent way to help you think and speak at the same time without that buffer time of you overthinking, analyzing, translating or editing in your head. The idea is to create the same immediacy that you have in your first language from a thought to the spoken words and prevent that extra additional time that you might tend to add when you are speaking because you're thinking, processing, editing and then speaking. So we want to eliminate that and all the methods that I've shared with you today are going to help you do that and it doesn't require too much of your time daily. Sprints could be 10 minutes a day, everything else you can do on the go as you're doing other things, journaling is 5 minutes a day, that's it, it's not a lot but think of the impact it could have. If you were to do it every single day, even for just 30 days, try it for 30 days, make a commitment 5-10 minutes a day, it's not a lot and it's going to make a huge impact on your immediacy, on your fluency and definitely on your confidence. So trust me on this one, give it a try, I know this works. So I'm going to link in the description to sprints, shadowing videos and more resources to help you understand how to stop translating in your head and start speaking quickly and confidently. Okay? So if you have any questions, I'm going to be in the comments section so feel free to ask me. If you want to learn more about how to work with me and how to create an environment where you can practice sprints daily, practice speaking topics, join several conversation groups a day and join a session with a coach every single day because I have all of those inside of my English practice community called BEYOND and registration is always open so you are more than invited to join and to check it out and to really experience English immersion in a fun and effective way. So the link is in the description, definitely you should check it out. Have a beautiful, beautiful rest of the day and I will see you next week in the next video. Bye!