The Fluency Workout: Training Sessions for the Skills of Intuitive English

During the pandemic I did an experiment. I started learning Swedish from scratch, and I decided to do it with the most traditional methods. You see, there are dozens of different theories out there about how to teach a language, and no agreement on what is the best way. I had never taken a traditional approach to my teaching, but I wanted to see if I was missing out on some value it might have.

After doing the experiment, I can safely conclude I was missing out on very little. In a few months I learnt all the Swedish grammar and tonnes of vocabulary, yet when I tried to speak in real-life situations I was incredibly slow and sounded like a beginner. Often my mind would almost cease to function when speaking, like a laptop that freezes when you have too many programs running.

So I had made an interesting discovery for my teaching, but I still faced the problem of not being able to speak Swedish. I tried conversation classes, but the improvements were minimal, and I wanted to get a better return from the time and money I was investing. I started reading up on what to do, looking not just at the research on speaking fluency, but also on skills development, on how people learn musical instruments, sports skills and chess.

From that deep dive I developed deliberate practice strategies to give my speaking an intensive workout. And they worked! They got my fluidity going. I became able to use complex grammar in real-life situations. I started to feel more like myself, more agile and expressive, when speaking Swedish.

Then I realised the problem I had faced was the same problem millions of English speakers around the world face. You spend years studying grammar and vocabulary, but rarely get to practice your speaking abilities, and so your speaking lags behind your other skills. And because your brain isn’t used to creating complex sentences in real-life situations, it gets exhausted and confused when it has to.

I developed this class so people facing this problem could, within only a few weeks, solve this problem and level up their speaking abilities. The class is designed like a training session for a skill — because that’s a large part of what speaking a foreign language well is: a skill. Like a sports coach, I make your performance of this skill more coherent, fluid and graceful. Your English fluency neurons will be firing and wiring like never before.