If there’s one thing I tell my students constantly it’s, “Think before you speak”.
It makes me feel like their mother.
But just as the old saying goes, “Mother’s always right”, I know I speak the truth when I say it.
When your mother told you this when you were a child, did you ever take notice?
Hmm, probably not.
Why did she say this to you?
Exactly! To stop you from making a mistake.
Why do I say the same thing to my students?
Exactly! To stop them from making a mistake.
The reality is quite different, though. We don’t often think before we speak.
We just talk. Often too much.
And so, as a result, English learners make a lot of mistakes. Now there’s nothing wrong with mistakes per se. The problems come when you repeat the same mistake over and over and over and…you get the idea.
Why do English learners do this?
Because most depend on a teacher for their learning needs and they depend on a teacher for their correction needs. They think that if they make a mistake, the teacher will correct them.
Well you aren’t always going to have a teacher behind you in every conversation you have correcting you as you talk to people.
You need to stop relying on other people and take action yourself.
It’s time you started correcting yourself.
The vast majority of these mistakes can be eliminated if you just think before you speak.
But you can’t sit there like Le Penseur while having a conversation. 
It breaks the flow. And I definitely don’t recommend Le Penseur’s choice of clothing.
That will only get you into trouble.
I’m going to show you a trick today that if you apply it to your speech, you’ll notice a drastic reduction in the number of mistakes you make.
It’s so simple that it’s almost embarrassing but I feel I have to tell you anyway.
Just as you can’t rely on a teacher to always be there for you to correct, you can’t rely on your own brain to produce correct English all the time.
In speech, the brain produces what comes naturally. This means you will say what feels most natural to you, not necessarily what is correct. What sounds most natural is normally your own language, so your brain naturally produces a quick and direct translation of your own language (there’s a reason why the most common mistakes that Spanish speakers make in English are people is, no ‘s’ in third person singular and mistakes with prepositions).
If what comes naturally is a mistake, then you will repeat that mistake every time you speak.
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So if you can’t rely on a teacher and you can’t rely on your own brain, what do you do?
Well you need to put a filter between your brain and your mouth. No, it’s not the kind of filter that you buy on Amazon.
What filter am I talking about?
Well, you put a filter that checks the words that your brain wants to produce before the words reach your mouth.
Everything your brain wants to say, the filter checks for mistakes and things you aren’t sure of.
Of course, it takes a little time for the filter to check this information so to avoid looking like Le Penseur you need to slow down.
Here’s a fact for you.
If you slow your speech down by 5%, you make 50% fewer mistakes.
When I say fact, I actually invented these figures, but there are actually pretty accurate.
How much is 5% you ask? It just means a little.
You will know when you hit that figure because you will feel your filter working, analysing the words and speech before you say them.
It gives you just enough time to have a quick think about what you’re going to say before you say it.
It gives you a few more milliseconds to analyse the language, grammar, vocabulary and all the rest and modify it if necessary.
When you analyse what you’re going to say, you will come to one of three conclusions:
- “I’m sure this is correct because (+ reason)”
- “I’m not so sure about this so I can ask the person I’m speaking to if it’s correct and that way I can learn”
- “I know this is incorrect or a bad translation so I will say something else”
A few milliseconds is all you need.
The beauty is that nobody will notice.
It’s true that in the beginning, your filter will need more time to process the everything until you become accustomed to it. After a while, though, you will sound perfectly natural and absolutely nobody will realise what you’re doing.
What they WILL notice is a massive decrease in the number of mistakes you make.
They will say things like, “Wow! You speak really good English suddenly! What’ have you done?!”
People will wonder how you did it and how you suddenly speak more fluently.
It’s time to change the way you speak.
If you continue doing what you have always done, you will get the same results that you have always got.
So listen to your mother and listen to me.
“Think before you speak!”