Natalia Tokar | Native-Like Fluency

What looks effortless is not done without effort. A fragment from my free video course "Daring Learner." Years of practice transform numbers and rules into intuitive knowledge. As Josh Waitzkin puts it, "What was once seen mathematically is now felt intuitively." When you become an intuitive learner, you are able to apply a lot of effort effortlessly. Native-like fluency means that you're able to manage many things at the same time: rhythm, accent, words, sentence structure, clarity, grammar, etc... It takes deliberate practice but it's so worth it! https://community.nataliatokar.me/c/welcome-course/

What is a practice routine? If you want to improve your wheel pose, you need to spend more time in the wheel pose 🙂 If you want to improve clarity or pronunciation, you need to do specific exercises on a regular basis. A practice routine always has a FOCUS. For example, your big goal is a confident wheel pose. Great! The FOCUS of your practice, however, must be more specific: shoulder mobility, hip flexor flexibility, or maybe wrist strength. If you choose wrist strength, your practice routine must include very different exercises than a wheel pose. If you simply insist on doing what you don't have the capacity to do yet, you will be hurting yourself - physically and emotionally. If your goal is better pronunciation, your FOCUS may be thought chunking, the shape of specific vowels, pausing, connected speech, etc...depending on where you are on your learning journey. When you know what your FOCUS is, choose the exercises that align with your focus. As you do the exercises, ask for feedback. Get the feedback and re-iterate. Improve the application. Develop your learning skills. It's the best investment because they will allow you to learn anything. Watch my youtube video on metacognitive strategies and meta-skills to learn more. If your goal is native-like fluency in English, join the community of practice. You will get help to choose your FOCUS, and you will unlock over a hundred of exercises that you can include in your practice routine in order to make your learning efforts meaningful. Remember that practice routines are finite. You're supposed to revisit your practice routines and welcome change and adjustments. Learning in and of itself is infinite though🙂

Effort Reinforces Learning Our key finding, replicated across both experiments, was that greater effort increased learning rates following positive outcomes and decreased them following negative outcomes, which corresponded to a differential effect of effort in boosting positive RPEs and blunting negative RPEs. Interestingly, this effect was most pronounced in individuals who were more averse to effort in the first place, raising the possibility that the investment of effort may have an adaptive effect on learning in those less motivated to exert it. By integrating principles of reinforcement learning with neuroeconomic approaches to value-based decision-making, we show that the very act of investing effort modulates one's capacity to learn https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36096671/

TEASER. Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast app https://shows.acast.com/nativelikefluency/episodes/accent-or-poor-pronunciation

There is No Evidence Supporting Auditory and Visual Learning. It's always been more complicated than that...but people like easy explanations and quick solutions. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-styles-debunked-there-is-no-evidence-supporting-auditory-and-visual-learning-psychologists-say.html

ADD THE FREE WORKSHOP TO YOUR CALENDAR! Feb 14, 2023 Memorable presentations in English: a practice routine to help you craft ONE BIG IDEA You can easily add events to your calendar once you click RSVP https://community.nataliatokar.me/c/calendar/memorable-presentations

Exercise #111 includes a 3-min movie scene (with and without subtitles), detailed instructions, THE BOOK that inspired the movie, and individual feedback on your work. You can teach yourself to understand anything and any accent. You just need to know what you're doing and in what order.

EXERCISE #111. HOW TO UNDERSTAND EVERY SINGLE WORD, EVEN IF THEY SPEAK WITH SOUTHERN ACCENTS? Self-test your understanding: can you hear every word of what they say? Do you understand what's going on?

A new exercise in the community of practice. Let's take it step by step. It includes instructions, the link to the real-time video lesson, video feedback given to the student who inspired this exercise, and of course - feedback to everyone who does it https://community.nataliatokar.me/c/exercises/exercise-110

WHAT IS GOOD FEEDBACK AND WHY DO YOU NEED IT? I'll be sending an email with a video example of what feedback can look like to help students learn better. It's the feedback that I gave to one of the students on her reading. How do you SEE what you read? And what is sentenсe stress? I'm going to show you how I work with texts in this video. I'll send it only to my email subscribers. It's not for social media. If you don't receive my emails, subscribe here https://nataliatokar.me/sign-up The email will be sent tonight.

Do this exercise with me to practice CLARITY https://youtu.be/9kJOV3IpLEg