1 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:34,618 Alright. So, I'm back on the beach again. Hold on a second. Let me wind up this window. Hopefully it's not too loud, I don't know about the ocean. I'm on the other side of the car, right? Because I can fit here, the wheels are not in my way when I'm using my laptop, so I have to like plug the keys in to actually be able to... Actually, I'll see... I don't have I have to plug them in. I don't have to plug the key and I can just use the thing here and then I can close the window. 2 00:00:35,953 --> 00:01:00,530 Anyway, side tracked. Some down here and I want to talk to you guys about islands. Not those islands, silly. The islands that I want to talk to you about of the islands in your English, in your language, the language that you are learning, ok?So, I have been reading lately this amazing book on 'Working With Advanced Foreign Language Students', by Boris Shekhtman, I think, I think I pronounced that right. 3 00:01:00,710 --> 00:01:49,024 And he... I remember this from another book of his, he talks about islands and this is one way in which you can rapidly improve your speaking, your confidence and your ability to have conversations in English by developing islands, ok? So, to define islands, I think, broadly, there are kind of two types of islands. There are subjects, so big topics of which you are very familiar with, your personal life, your family, your profession, your hobbies, your interests, your travel, whatever it is, things that you're very passionate about that you talk about in your native language anyway. They're the sort of macro large scale islands, where they're subjects that you are familiar with, that you're passionate about and which you're going to talk about all the time in conversation anyway, ok? 4 00:01:49,630 --> 00:02:07,760 So, those islands are important to develop, so that you can talk about them naturally. So, in terms of developing those islands, you need to know vocabulary, obviously, to be able to talk about those things, you need to have the right grammatical structures in place and have learnt those, as well as collocations and expressions that are related to those large islands. 5 00:02:09,101 --> 00:02:31,739 Now, all of those things are the kind of micro scale islands, so, sentences or structures within sentences that you can remember by rote without having to think are those kind of smaller islands in a larger island that is the entire subject. I sort of... That's my sort of take on what he's been talking about in this book and I sort of have a few stories here to tell you that will, hopefully, help you get your head around how to do this and how to apply this. 6 00:02:36,960 --> 00:03:00,235 So, remember for me in the first in year 12, when I was at high school and I was studying for my French oral exam, so I had to speak in French, it was my sixth year studying French at school and I had my final exams. I think I'd written one and a oral one and I was terrified about the oral one because, like with most of you guys I think you learn languages at schools, oral exams tend to terrify everyone because speaking is one of the things you practice the least, right? 7 00:03:06,648 --> 00:03:33,794 You tend to be using workbooks, writing things down, watching the teacher write on the board and listening to the teacher, but you never, or at least very rarely, get a chance to speak yourself. So, I was terrified I had to get a private tutor. I remember, her name was Madam Mirza, Madam Mirza. She was from Lebanon, but she spoke French fluently and she was a character, far out. She was spicy, she was... She took no shit from the students, and she was about 60 years old. I wonder she's still around... Madam Mirza she was a... She was a firecracker. 8 00:03:37,216 --> 00:04:08,919 So, I had private lessons with her, she was my teacher when I was in Year 10. She was still at school, but I didn't have a fear 12, and so I sought her out, I found her and I said 'can you give me some private lessons and show me how to prepare for the oral exam?'. Now she showed me they're going to ask you specific questions related to, you know, your your hobbies, they're specific questions, but they kind of open ended to allow you to talk about what you're comfortable with. So, first and foremost, obviously don't go into this oral exam Pete blind, don't go into it blind, be prepared and have some kind of islands that you can talk about. 9 00:04:11,835 --> 00:04:30,308 So, the first thing she got me to do was to sit down with her in Geelong library, I remember that, I was 18 years old, sitting down in the library and she was saying 'what are you interested in? What do you like?', right? So, I was telling her I remember about the fact that I like to surf at the time and she was asking me 'do you have any pets?', 'tell me about your family'. 10 00:04:33,260 --> 00:05:05,773 And, so we were finding these sort of subjects about my personal life and my interests, writing them down and then underneath those subjects we would come up with phrases and sentences to describe those topics, right? So, I would say things like, you know, 'in my family I have this many people', I'm thinking in French literally translated, 'there are this many people, there's my sister, my dad, my mom, we've got these pets. I have always had pets and I love animals', and you know, it kind of feeds on itself, but that was what we did. 11 00:05:05,881 --> 00:05:48,166 Structures. To create those sort of outlines of the islands and then under those large macro scale islands you come up with phrases that you will eventually learn just by rote, that you don't have to think about when you say, ok? So, you can kind of...those micro islands you can kind of, you know, throw in and out of the macro island, which is the discussion of that topic. The good thing was this worked so well for this exam that I had in French, because my level in French wasn't bad, it wasn't horrible, it was nowhere near fluent, at least my view of fluent today, I probably at the time thought it was pretty close to fluent. Ignorance is bliss, right? 12 00:05:48,800 --> 00:06:58,380 But because I had practiced and I had developed these islands and I knew what I wanted to talk about and I had sort of an understanding of how to direct the conversation towards these islands, my little safe points, where I knew what I wanted to say, I knew how to say it and I was comfortable there, when I went into the oral exam I wasn't as nervous, I was still pretty, pretty nervous, but I wasn't as nervous as if I had gone in blind, unprepared. I knew what I was going to talk about and when they asked me questions like, you know, 'what are your hobbies?', instantly, boom! Ok, I have pets, I love to surf and I had all these sentences and the structures within the sentences just memorized by rote and I could just spit them out. It wasn't stressful, right? And I can remember to this day one of the phrases that she taught me because I believe in the oral exam, from memory, we had to talk about a specific film or book that we had read and I think it was Mille Neuf Cent Soixante Huit, so that is 1968 when the riots in Paris took place. I can't believe I can remember that. So, that was the film that we watched and I had to talk about that and I remember she taught me this phrase, right? That will never leave me: ce qui m'a le plus interessé de..., which means 'that which is the most interesting to me' or 'the thing I find most interesting about... ce qui m'a le plus interessé de... and then the thing. 13 00:07:21,873 --> 00:07:47,218 And since then I just I practice that phrase again and again and again and I've been able to use it as an entrance since then whenever speaking French into any topic that I want to talk about that I find interesting, and it just rolls off the tongue because I practiced it so much. So, this is why I guess it's so important to practice those macro scale, large scale islands, guys, in English for you. 14 00:07:47,250 --> 00:08:24,279 What are you interested in? What do you find yourself talking about quite often, What's your profession? You know, build islands, study vocab, write about those things and then have them corrected by natives, have them checked, get a tutor to give you some ideas and some really cool sentences that will help, and then once you've sort of developed those macro islands and then the micro ones underneath with those phrases quite often you can take the verbs or the nouns or the adjectives out of those phrases and substituting other ones and use them in other areas, right? 15 00:08:26,120 --> 00:08:58,857 Ce qui m'a le plus interessé de... I can use that anywhere that I want to talk about something that's interesting, right? Ce qui m'a le plus interessé des voitures..., 'what you what interests me most about cars', ce qui m'a le plus interessé du surfing... what interests me the most about surfing', it's never going to leave me, right? So that is how I think you will have better conversations in English if you develop these macro and micro islands, you'll feel less nervous, you'll feel more confident when talking about things, because you've already effectively prepared and it's kind of... It's that 80 20 rule that we've talked about on this channel before. 16 00:08:59,360 --> 00:09:40,240 You need to spend 80 percent of your time practicing the stuff that you're going to use 80 percent of the time. Spend 20 percent of your time practicing all the other stuff that you're going to be using much, much, much, much, much less often, ok? So, don't waste all your time learning random vocabulary, complicated grammar, crap that you're not going to use very often, you know, you kind of have to work out where is your energy and time best spent and it's best spent addressing and trying to improve the things that you're going to be spending most of your time talking about or thinking about, discussing, in whatever language it is, but in English. 17 00:09:40,310 --> 00:10:02,752 Anyway, I hope this helps. I hope it gives you an idea. The other story I had it kind of... Again, I always talk about Jiu Jitsu and it's so funny how much I feel Jiu Jitsu it's a language. Once you start doing Jiu Jitsu, every single time you fight someone, because Jiu Jitsu kind of differs from karate and all these other martial arts in that you have to test your actual skills that you've been practicing every single time you train with other figthers. 18 00:10:06,678 --> 00:10:23,436 So, it's a contact sport but it's full on. There's no...In Karate, I mean, you can fight other people, there are those full contact versions of Karate, but they're not very common in Australia. In Jiu Jitsu there's no known contact Jiu Jitsu. You have to actually wrestle and fight and the other person is trying to win, you're trying to win. 19 00:10:25,942 --> 00:10:43,435 So, it is, it crosses over into language in that every single time you have one of these kind of fights, obviously, the fights can only be between two people in Jiu Jitsu, because it's wrestling and it's grappling on the ground, they're kind of like conversations, except for the fact that they differ in that you're kind of trying to beat the other person. 20 00:10:43,578 --> 00:11:12,793 It's not a given take, unless you sort of just warming up and practicing and there's no... The other person or each of you isn't trying to win explicitly, but the reason I brought that up is because in Jiu Jitsu you also practice islands both macro and micro islands. So, there are many different positions that you can practice in Jiu Jitsu. 21 00:11:13,750 --> 00:11:39,450 It's impossible to effectively learn all of them to, you know, a black belt level because it's kind of like English, you know, even I can't talk about the majority of topics in English, like the... You know, the most fluent speaker in that topic, right? There's just not enough time in the day, my brain's not big enough for me to learn every single topic in English. It's the same with Jiu Jitsu, there's no way to be able to learn every single different position and to master it. 22 00:11:39,463 --> 00:11:59,340 And, so what happens is that people end up finding the positions that fit their body type, right? They're called guards. So, you have different kinds of guards that you can use with your legs and with your arms to sort of entrap the person and then you get a hold on them and get an arm bar or choke in. 23 00:11:59,830 --> 00:12:17,911 And, so quite often what happens with fighters is that they become a master in certain islands. So, when they fight someone, they're always trying to get to where they're most comfortable, right? If they're not comfortable in a certain guard, they're not going to use that guard, they're going to go straight to the guard they're comfortable with, so that they can win. 24 00:12:18,675 --> 00:12:37,956 And, so it's the same kind of thing. I always saw this as the same thing in English or in any other language you're learning, in Jiu Jitsu it was the same where you don't try and just learn everything. You spend all the time, or the majority of your time, practicing the positions that you constantly get in and that suit your body type and that you're good at, right? 25 00:12:38,800 --> 00:12:58,239 You spend most of your time practicing those and you spend a little bit of time dabbling in the other stuff. So, it's the same with languages when you're trying to work on vocab and improve your conversation ability and everything, keep thinking about what is it that I'm passionate about? What do I do? What can I talk about with regards to my family, my hobbies? p. 26 00:12:58,631 --> 00:13:11,220 Practice those things that you're going to be talking about and thinking about, discussing most of the time. Okay. Anyway I would love to hear what you guys think down in the comments below. Let me know and I would check to you later.