Lots of people ask me about how to speak English like a native speaker. According to my personal experiences and knowledge, those who failed to learn the language in their youth, especially childhood(before 7), can never be an actual native speaker of that language due to the atrophy of brain elasticity over age. But don't  be disappointed---I believe we still could infinitely approach to it.

I was raised in local Chinese school for 9 years(aka 九年制义务教育) till 9th grade. Then I transferred to Shanghai American School, where everyone speaks English. That's the turning point where my English level, especially speaking, improved and in fact, upgraded.

When I first went to the school, I was nervous, scared, and didn't know what to do. I couldn't speak fluent English; I didn't have friends. It was tough. How did I grow into a guy who can chat and joke with a bunch of native speakers in English?

Here is my point.

The main reason that we are not able to speak English fluently is that we don't know how to improvise, i.e., constructing sentences while speaking.

But trust me, the native speakers don't just make up random sentences right away, either! They are speaking all day long, aren't they? ---They use those sentences everyday, and therefore are able to produce the similar sentences structures fluently. If you force them to use some obscure sentence structures they've never used before, they will stuck as well, very hard. It's just that the colloquial language that they can easily handle.

Following this logic, we can handle it, too, if we practice. But how? I say, "speak to yourself". This is the method that I found very useful.

Whenever I have some new thoughts in my mind, I will verbally explain them to myself  in English. It could be anything---new math concepts, controversial news, policies, unfinished debates, etc.. When I find some logic that I don't know how to describe, I search it up and then use the new learnt sentences in my speech. During the process of explaining, I'm developing my skills of constructing sentences, and because I use my own words to describe, those sentences are very good candidates for the future possible conversations. I'm not saying that I might talk about the same topics(probably not), but the explanatory languages(sentence structures) I practice are commonly used and are the core of speech.

I do this all the time, and now I can pretty much say that I am infinitely closed to a native speaker of English.

Points to remember:

1. Verbally explain familiar concepts in English to your self.

2. Search up new sentence structures and use them in your speech.

You can say the sentences right away during conversations, because and only because you've used them before.

People might question me, saying that the English environment shapes me the most. I admit; but environment only gives pressure to push me on learning English, and it's the practice that I give to myself, which actually turns me into a completely different person.

Mitchell Ding

Dec.27, 2016

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