Fluency, confidence and teaching English on YouTube

TRANSCRIPT

Hey everyone, it’s Hadar!
Welcome to my channel, and today I have a special treat for you.

So you are exactly where you need to be because today we have a special guest, and that guest is Andres from Andres en Ingles.

Andres is a remarkable youtube creator based in New York City.

He is originally from Colombia. His videos are engaging, fun, and creative and he has helped thousands and thousands of English learners change the way they speak English.

This video is going to be divided into two parts.

The first part is where Andres will share with us his inspiring story about turning from an English learner to an English teacher and coach on his channel.

And how he started his channel just because he wanted to help his friends learn English in a fun way.

And on the second part we are going to answer questions from Andres’s community
about how to pronounce the most difficult words.

And yes, the word world is going to be there.

World.

Oh my god, it’s groundbreaking!

Also I appear as a guest on his channel,

So definitely go and check out the video there where we had a beautiful conversation about English, English learning, different methods, fluency, limiting beliefs, and so much more.

So make sure you check it out as well.

And when you’re there, make sure to subscribe, especially if you’re a Spanish speaker.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s check out the interview I had with Andres.

– Andres!

– Hi Hadar.

– Hi! Welcome to my channel.

– Thank you so much for inviting me.

– Oh, It’s such a pleasure actually you’re inviting me, because I’m in your apartment in New York City.

– Yeah.

– In Chelsea.

– And why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Wait, I’m gonna say that Andres is a good friend and he is also my student.

– Yes.

– And we’re gonna talk a little but about that, but I think that the most incredible thing about you is your journey.

– Thank you.

– Um, so I know it and I think a lot of people don’t necessarily, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to do what you’re doing now.

– How much time do we have?

(laughter)

So my story started thirty something years ago.

I’m originally from Colombia and my whole life I wanted to live in the States, in New York, and I didn’t have the means to study English when I was younger. My family didn’t have enough money to study, to put me through bilingual school.

I might look young but I wasn’t that… yeah, it was like twenty years ago, when there was like no internet, there was like, you needed to buy books and you needed to pay for a higher education, and that was like twenty something years ago, thirty years ago, and so I decided to study on my own.

I didn’t want to study.

I was very curious about the English language so I started watching movies, I started watching TV shows, and that’s how I fell in love with living in the USA.

– Yeah.

– Because I was watching those shows, those movies. And in a way, you know I’m from Colombia and I was like, maybe I want to live there.

– Yeah.

– So I,

– The American dream.

– Yes.

– Everything looks nice and pretty and flawless.

– Until you come here and realize it was all BS.

(laughter)

– No, actually, it could be, it depends on…
– It depends. -what you do with it.

– Yes, exactly.

– When I was going to class I realized that they were boring and I didn’t want to go and sit down for forty minutes for an hour.

– And like answer questions in books.

– And reading books and you know reading copies and it wasn’t engaging enough for me.

– Yeah.

– So I was like, maybe I should keep studying on my own.

– Yeah.

– And I did.

Then you know I started working, I graduated, I start working and I used my English a couple times but I spent more than thirty years speaking only Spanish.

– Yeah so even if you learn, you don’t really put it to practice. Unless you take action, specific action, and then you know it goes away.

– It did give me a little bit of advantage when I was working, because I was the one that my boss would take to the meeting with the international contacts or clients. And that did give me an advantage, and I started learning what it meant to have that knowledge.
– It really put you in a different box, it really gives you that advantage, and I started feeling that I needed to improve how I was speaking English.

– Right.

– So,

– Because you realize that English was not just a language that you need to learn, it’s your leeway. Like its your door to like all the opportunities to…

– Totally.

– To fulfill the dreams or the goals, and to like live the life that you want.

– Totally.

– It’s just a tool.

– And then,

– And you get what you want.

– And it’s not really about not feeling like a Latino or owning my voice in Spanish, but it is about being comfortable enough to speak to a crowd that only speaks that language.

– Yeah.

– And if they can understand what I want them to understand from my own perspective on any different topic, I needed to be clear enough.

– Yep.

– Then I start pursuing learning more about English. I was always learning grammar, I was always learning writing or like reading from books. But honestly, Hadar, I never ever
ever studied pronunciation. Or intonation.

– Right.

– Or any of that for that matter.

– So I thought I knew enough and then I moved to New York three years ago. To make a long story short, I wanted to give my friends an opportunity to work here in the States, for us to have an apartment and the lifestyle, and have the same opportunities as any other person in New York, but they didn’t speak English. So I was like I want you guys to start speaking English, so go to Youtube and find some lessons and learn.

– So they said to me, everything is so boring on YouTube, they’re like just only teachers with big boards.

– White boards.

– Yeah and hey its all yum.

– And hey if it works for you,

– I respect that.

– Stick with that.

– But for them that wasn’t engaging enough.

– Yeah.

– It’s funny cause I decided to start my own channel for my friends. I never thought that it was going to be what it is right now, the opportunities they have brought into my life. Uh you have no idea, I only have to make a video, only about how speaking English changed my life forever.

– Yeah.

– After a couple of years making videos, I felt this need to go deeper.

– Yeah.

– On pronunciation, and that’s how I found you. And I decided to start learning more about, how could I sound better in English?, And understanding why it sounded different if I thought that I knew how to pronounce things in English.

– Why was it important to you?

– Because I thought that I had this level of knowledge and grammar, or how to express ideas and put together words but I thought, or sometimes I found situations that I thought I was saying something and people understood a different thing, and I was like, why?
I am doing everything I was supposed to do.

– Yeah.

– But there’s so many layers to pronunciation, and I think that’s why it’s important to go deeper in that, and that’s where I’m at right now.

– And that’s why you went through my online program, and what is the hardest thing as a student trying to, or as a learner, trying to work on that aspect of spoken English?

– The thing I found about your course was there, this thing that happened to me was, like, called… You named that, regression, right?

– Regression.

– When you have so much knowledge.

– Yeah.

– And you think, oh I understand now – the T, the ‘flap T’, TH voices, the H.

– And you can make the single sounds.

– Yes.

– Yeah.

– And you try to create them and you get confused. When it comes to the vowels, especially for me because I am a Spanish speaker, we only have like five sounds, and English has like,

– About sixteen.

– Sixteen, yeah. And that for me and when you try to, I had been watching her videos and when she’s like ‘you put your tongue here’ and I’m like – where?

– I don’t get it, like how, I’m trying. It doesn’t sound the same, but…

– You get all tangled up with your tongue, and like it goes out through your ear, and you’re like what am I doing wrong?

– Man, the vowels for me are the most confusing thing.

– So one of the things you told me before we started is ‘I can’t hear it, I’m deaf’, right?

– I said that.

– And I was like, first of all change that language.

– Yes.

– Once you say that, your brain will not hear it, if you decide that you don’t hear it, you won’t hear it.

– Its funny, Hadar, that you mention that cause you know I like to think of myself as a person who doesn’t have those limiting beliefs, and we all do.

– We all do.

– We all do, oh my god, that is so funny that that happened like today with us here, when I was so self conscious – oh, I don’t want to speak English around her, she’s going to start criticizing everything I say.

– And that’s what he was thinking, and I was like at the same time thinking ‘wow, Andres you’re so expressive and fluent and engaging’. And I totally see your personality, and I was so thrilled to listen to him – you.

– Thank you.

– And at the same time he was like ‘oh, she’s judging me’. It’s like we put so much pressure on ourselves.

– It’s in here.

– Yeah, and we like have so many expectations, and we put other people’s opinions like so high up. Like it’s more important than our own expression.

– How many subscribers do you have?

– 460,000 subscribers.

– So 460,000 subscribers later, you know, obviously have something important to say and people want to listen.

– Yes I think so, I hope so.

– And still, what I wanted to talk about and show you is like it doesn’t matter where you’re at in your journey. There is always something you can work on, but especially your mindset.
You can see, oh he’s so successful, it’s easy for him. It’s not easy for him, he’s working at it every single day, but he’s still showing up.

Because you have made the decision – I’m not going to let that stop me, the judgment, you know, like what is she going to say. Still, you invited me, you were like I’m going to speak to her. You could’ve easily said no. You know, Hadar is coming to New York, great to see you, you know, and have coffee and that’s it.

Afterwards I want you to go there to Andres en ingles, and watch the video there, where we talk about the mindset and common challenging sounds for Latin speakers and for non-native speakers.

– We do go over different aspects of what it means to have an accent when you’re not a native speaker.

– Right.

– What it means to have an accent, if that’s right, is that wrong, how far you can go with it and some tips if you’re a Spanish speaker on how to be more clear and confident when you speak English.

– You got it!

(laughter)

– Took a while to figure out how to say the whole thing.

– But no, no, it’s actually really important for you guys to understand that those are not only words, it’s a mindset.

– So I don’t like to use ‘lose your accent’, ‘eliminate your accent’, or ‘speak like a native’. Because not that it’s not achievable, but it takes a lot of hard work, and I don’t think that people need to do that. But I do think that you need to learn pronunciation to speak with clarity and confidence.

– Yes.

– First of all, let’s agree that once you tell yourself something negative – oh I can’t do this, I can’t hear that, I’m just bad at this. It’s not reality – it’s your perception of reality, and it’s called a limiting belief. And your limiting belief has become your reality, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.

– It doesn’t, and I wanna add to it, and I love the fact that we met today. Because sometimes you need somebody else to let you know that what you’re doing is okay, thinking like that is not wrong, it is part of the process.

– Recognizing it.

– Yes.

– Catching it is our work, our constant work.

– The fact that you think that you are perfect, or you need to be perfect, or perfection by itself, is a limiting belief because it is the process.

– There’s no such thing as perfect, and perfect is not interesting.

– And I want to know what I’m doing right, and I want to know if I’m not doing it right, why am I doing it that way?

– Right, so you have the power.

– Yes.

Okay I have to stop here because we have come to the end of part one. In part two were going to talk about the most confusing words for Spanish speaking people, and also for non-native speakers in general because these are tricky words in English.

You also get to see how I work with people, how I coach someone one on one, which is a lot of fun. Okay?

So make sure to subscribe so you’ll get a notification when the new video is out. And don’t forget to check out Andres’s channel.

The links are right below, and you can also click here.

Have a beautiful day and I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.