Speak English FLUENTLY Step by Step | English Speaking Practice | Best Speech By Jack Ma

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Hello my friend. Today I want to start with a question that may feel a little uncomfortable.

[00:00:06]How long have you been studying English?

[00:00:09]1 year, 2 years, maybe 5 years. You have watched many videos. You have learned many words. You have studied grammar again and again. But when someone suddenly speaks to you in English, in real life, what happens inside you?

[00:00:28]Maybe your heart starts beating faster.

[00:00:30]Maybe your mind becomes empty. Maybe you understand the question. But your mouth cannot answer. For example, someone asks you, "Where are you from?" It is a simple question. You know the words, you know the meaning. But in that real moment, your voice disappears. You smile. You feel nervous. You try to find the sentence but nothing comes out. If this has happened to you, I want you to know something very important. This does not mean your English is bad. This does not mean you are not smart. It means you have been practicing the wrong skill.

[00:01:11]Most English learners make one big mistake every day without realizing it.

[00:01:15]They train their brain to understand English, but they do not train their mouth to produce English. And these are not the same thing. Understanding English and speaking English are two different skills. You can understand this podcast right now. You can understand the words. You can understand the meaning. But if your mouth has not practiced making English sounds, building simple sentences and connecting ideas in real time, then when it is time to speak, your mouth does not know what to do. It freezes. Think about it like this. Reading about swimming is not the same as swimming in water. Watching someone ride a bicycle is not the same as riding a bicycle yourself. In the same way, understanding English in your head is not the same as speaking English with your mouth. Speaking is physical.

[00:02:10]Your tongue needs practice. Your lips need practice. Your breath needs practice. Your brain needs to connect meaning with sound quickly. This only happens through repetition, not through thinking alone. So today we are going to fix that not with a complicated method, not with a long list of rules. We are going to fix it step by step in a simple and real way. By the end of this episode, you will understand how to train your mouth, how to build speaking confidence, and how to stop waiting until your English is perfect. Let me say something that I really want you to remember. Fluency is not about speaking perfect English. Fluency is not about having a perfect accent. It is not about using difficult vocabulary or speaking without grammar mistakes. Real fluency is much simpler than that. Fluency means you can express your thoughts when you need to in a real moment without stopping every few seconds to translate everything inside your head first. For example, someone asks you, "How was your day?" And instead of becoming nervous and silent, you can answer naturally.

[00:03:30]Maybe not perfectly. Maybe your grammar is not 100% correct, but you can respond. You can communicate your idea.

[00:03:38]That is fluency. Simple real communication. And I want you to understand something important. This is absolutely possible for you. Not someday far in the future, much sooner than you think if you practice the right way consistently. The problem is that most people spend years waiting. They wait until their grammar becomes perfect.

[00:04:02]They wait until they know more vocabulary. They wait until they feel confident enough to speak. But while they are waiting, something dangerous happens. Their fear grows stronger.

[00:04:14]Their silence becomes a habit. And the longer they stay silent, the harder speaking feels emotionally. Because speaking confidence is not built by waiting. It is built by speaking slowly, imperfectly, one small sentence at a time. So let me say this clearly. Do not wait for perfect English before you start speaking. Start now. Even if your sentences are simple, even if your grammar is broken, broken English spoken today is far more valuable than perfect English trapped silently inside your head. Because spoken English can grow.

[00:04:55]Silent English cannot. Think about when you learned to walk as a child. Nobody told you to study balance for 6 months before taking your first step. Nobody expected you to walk perfectly on the first day. You stood up, you fell down, then you stood up again and you fell again many times. But nobody called you a failure because falling was part of learning. Your body learned through repetition, through trying, through movement, not through explanation.

[00:05:29]Language works the same way. Your brain does not truly learn speaking from explanations alone. It learns from repetition. Real repetition. Daily repetition. Imperfect repetition. Every time you open your mouth and try to speak English, your brain is building connections. Your mouth is building muscle memory. Your confidence is slowly becoming stronger. That is how fluency is built in real life. So remember this, broken English spoken every day will slowly become stronger English. But perfect English kept silently inside your head will stay there forever unless you give it a voice. Now I want to give you a real system. Not 15 different tips. Not a huge list that you forget after one day. Just three deep things that actually work. Because the truth is most English learners already have too much information. They watch many videos. They save many lessons. They learn many grammar rules. But information is not the problem anymore.

[00:06:39]The real problem is depth. Most people practice many things one time, but they never practice one important thing deeply enough for the brain and mouth to change. One thing practiced deeply every single day will improve your English.

[00:06:55]More than 15 things practiced only once in a while. So instead of trying to learn everything, let's focus on a few things that truly build fluency in real life. The first is active listening, not passive listening. And there's a very big difference between these two things.

[00:07:13]Passive listening is when English is always playing in the background while you do something else. Maybe you're scrolling on your phone. Maybe you're cooking. Maybe you're cleaning your room. Your ears hear English, but your brain is not fully focused. And most importantly, your mouth is doing nothing. This is why many people listen to English for months or even years but still cannot speak.

[00:07:46]They train their ears a little but they never train their mouth to respond.

[00:07:51]Active listening is completely different. Active listening means you stop for a moment and give your full attention to one sentence. You listen carefully. Then immediately you repeat it out loud with your own mouth. Not tomorrow, not later, right now. Even if your pronunciation is not perfect, even if you feel awkward, even if your voice sounds strange to you at first. And this part is important because many learners secretly avoid repeating out loud. Why?

[00:08:31]because it feels uncomfortable. They feel embarrassed even when nobody is around. They think I sound stupid. But that uncomfortable feeling is actually a sign that your brain is learning something new. Your mouth is entering unfamiliar territory. That is not failure. That is training. Every time your mouth creates an English sound, your brain builds a connection between meaning, sound, and movement. And fluency is built from thousands of these tiny connections repeated again and again over time. So start with something very simple, just one short sentence.

[00:09:16]For example, I am going to the market.

[00:09:20]Listen carefully to the sentence. Then say it out loud again and again. Listen to the rhythm. Listen to how the words connect together naturally. I'm going to the market. Feel how your mouth moves when you say it smoothly. This physical feeling matters more than many people realize. Your tongue is learning. Your lips are learning. Your breathing is learning. Your mouth is slowly building muscle memory for English sounds. And this kind of training is something no grammar book alone can give you. If you practice this every day with simple sentences, something interesting starts happening after a few weeks. Your mouth feels less frozen. Your reactions become a little faster. Some sentences begin coming out more naturally without so much thinking. not perfect, not fluent overnight, but more comfortable, more automatic, more real. And that is the beginning of real speaking confidence.

[00:10:30]The second step is speaking small sentences every single day, especially on the days when you feel like you have nothing important to say. This is where many English learners make a very common mistake. They save their English only for real situations. They think I will practice speaking when I meet a foreigner or I will practice when I find a speaking partner or I will start speaking seriously when my English becomes better. But this way of thinking creates pressure every time you speak.

[00:11:09]Because if you only speak in big moments, then every speaking moment feels important. Your brain becomes nervous. Your body becomes tense and your mouth freezes more easily. The truth is the most important speaking practice usually happens when you're alone. No pressure, no audience, no fear of judgment, just you, your voice, and simple repetition. Stand in front of a mirror sometimes. Look at yourself and speak simple sentences out loud. I'm tired today. I had coffee this morning.

[00:11:48]The weather is hot. I am learning English. These sentences sound extremely simple, maybe even too simple, but that is exactly why they are powerful. Many learners try to jump immediately into difficult conversations. long vocabulary lists or complicated grammar. But fluency is not built from difficult sentences first. Fluency is built from automatic sentences first. Your mouth needs to become comfortable producing simple English before it can produce complex English naturally. When you repeat simple sentences every day, something important begins to happen.

[00:12:33]Your mouth stops fighting the language so much. Common sentence patterns become easier.

[00:12:40]Your reactions become faster. You spend less energy trying to create every sentence from zero. And when simple sentences become automatic, your brain suddenly has more space available for harder ideas, longer thoughts, and real conversations.

[00:13:00]This is very similar to learning to drive a car. At first, every small action feels difficult. Your hands, your eyes, your feet, your attention, everything feels overloaded. But after enough repetition, simple actions become automatic. Then your brain becomes free to focus on the road naturally. English works the same way. Now, let's move to the third step. And honestly, this may be the most life-changing one of all.

[00:13:35]Thinking in English for a few minutes every day. Right now, your brain probably follows a slow process. First, you have a thought in your native language. Then, you translate it into English inside your head. Then, you try to speak. But that translation step creates hesitation. It slows everything down. It is one of the biggest reasons many learners feel nervous while speaking. By the time they finish translating, the conversation has already moved on. This is why many people say, "I know English, but I cannot speak quickly." The problem is not intelligence. The problem is that their brain is still traveling through translation first. The solution is to slowly train your brain to create English directly without always using your native language as the middle step.

[00:14:37]And you do not need complicated exercises for this. Start with very small thoughts during normal moments of your day. When you look at your phone, think in English. This is my phone. When you drink water, think I am drinking water. When you walk outside, think the weather is hot today. When you feel tired, think I feel tired. These thoughts seem tiny, but they are extremely powerful. Because every small thought teaches your brain something important. English is not just a school subject. English is becoming a real language inside your daily life. At first, this process feels slow.

[00:15:25]Sometimes your brain still wants to translate. That is normal. Do not fight yourself too hard. Just continue gently every day. Over time, something very interesting starts happening. You pause less. You panic less. Small English thoughts appear more naturally. Some responses come faster without heavy translation and slowly English begins feeling less like a test and more like a real form of communication inside your own mind. That feeling when English starts appearing naturally instead of being painfully translated is one of the first real signs of fluency growing inside you. Now, I want to talk about something that no grammar lesson can truly fix. Fear. The fear of speaking English in front of other people. The fear of saying something wrong. The fear of being judged. The fear of sounding stupid. The fear that someone will laugh or remember your mistake or think you are not intelligent. And if I am being honest with you, this fear is much more common than most learners realize.

[00:16:39]Almost every English learner in the world has felt this at some point, maybe even many times. You are not strange for feeling it. You are human. Maybe this has happened to you before. Someone suddenly speaks English to you. Your heart beats faster. Your mind becomes noisy. you know some words, maybe even many words, but your mouth freezes. Or maybe you practiced the sentence perfectly in your head, but when the real moment came, everything disappeared. Or maybe a group conversation switched into English and instead of joining, you became quiet.

[00:17:19]Not because you had nothing to say, but because fear became stronger than your voice. And this is important to understand. Fear is one of the biggest reason people who already know enough English still do not speak. Not lack of intelligence, not lack of potential. If you saw a small child learning to walk and they fell down, would you laugh at them? Would you think they were stupid?

[00:17:47]Of course not. You would smile. You would understand that falling is a natural part of learning. You would encourage them to stand up and try again. But many adults treat themselves with much less kindness than they would ever give to a child. One small English mistake happens and immediately they think I am terrible at English. People would judge me. I should stay quiet. But learning does not work that way. You are learning a skill and every skill includes mistakes, awkward moments and imperfect attempts. You are allowed to say the wrong word. You are allowed to pause. You are allowed to sound imperfect while learning because being imperfect does not mean failure.

[00:18:40]Imperfect means progress is happening.

[00:18:43]And here is something that completely changed the way I think about mistakes in English. Imagine you say he go to school instead of he goes to school. Is the grammar perfect? No. But did the communication still happen? Yes. The other person still understood your meaning. Your message arrived successfully. That matters more than many learners realize. Real communication is not about perfection first. It is about connection first.

[00:19:14]Grammar improves over time through use.

[00:19:18]But silence improves nothing. And something else important happens when you make mistakes. Your brain notices them. Your brain compares the sentence.

[00:19:30]Your brain slowly adjusts. Maybe today you say, "He go to school." Next week you catch yourself and say, "He goes to school." That small correction is not embarrassing. That is growth happening in real time. Every mistake you make while speaking English is teaching your brain something valuable. The only mistake that truly stops your progress is the mistake you were too afraid to make. So today I want you to make a very small promise to yourself. Not a dramatic promise. Not I will become fluent in 3 months. Just one simple promise. I will speak one English sentence today that I would normally be too afraid to say. Maybe to a friend, maybe to a c-orker, maybe to a cashier, maybe talk to yourself in the mirror.

[00:20:25]Just one sentence. Because every time you speak while feeling afraid, something important changes inside your brain. Your brain slowly learns that speaking English is not dangerous. It is not survival. It is communication. And little by little, the fear loses power over you. Confidence does not arrive before speaking. This is where many learners misunderstand the process.

[00:20:53]Confidence comes after action, not before it. You build confidence the same way you build muscle. Repetition, small effort, daily practice, one sentence at a time, and one day something surprising happens. The thing that once terrified you starts feeling normal. Not because fear magically disappeared overnight, but because your voice became stronger than your fear. I want to show you something important now. I want to show you what real progress in English actually looks like.

[00:21:31]Because many people imagine progress the wrong way. They think one day they cannot speak at all and then suddenly one morning they wake up fluent. But real fluency does not grow like an explosion. It grows quietly and slowly one small improvement at a time. Imagine this. On day one you say, "I go school."

[00:21:53]The grammar is wrong. The sentence is incomplete. But something important happened. You spoke out loud. That took courage. Then maybe 10 days later, after repeating simple sentences again and again, your brain notices something small. Now you say, "I go to school." A tiny improvement, just one extra word.

[00:22:19]But that one word shows your brain is learning. Then after more practice, maybe around day 30, your sentence becomes, I go to school every day, now your idea is becoming clearer, more natural. You are not only speaking anymore either, you are building thoughts. And then maybe around day 60 without forcing yourself so much you say I go to school every day because I want to learn something new. Now you are expressing a complete idea naturally. Do you see what happened there? The day one sentence was not perfect but it was spoken. And because it was spoken, your brain had something real to improve. The imperfect sentence became the better sentence. And the better sentence slowly became a more natural sentence. That is how fluency is actually built in real life. Not through waiting, not through silent studying for years, not through perfection before action. Real fluency grows from small spoken attempts repeated over time. And this is something very important to remember.

[00:23:44]People who become fluent do not wait until day 60 before they start speaking.

[00:23:49]They start on day one. Even when the sentence sounds broken, even when they feel nervous, even when they make mistakes. Because speaking badly at the beginning is not proof that you are failing. It is proof that you are finally training the skill that matters most. Here is something that many English learners do not understand at first and I want you to really hear it.

[00:24:15]The days when you feel like nothing is improving. Those quiet, frustrating, invisible days are often the most important days of all. Because on those days, your brain is still working underneath the surface, even when you cannot see the results yet. It is processing sounds you heard last week.

[00:24:38]It is organizing patterns you practiced yesterday. It is slowly building automatic connections piece by piece in places you cannot observe directly. The growth is real. It is just not visible yet. This is why learning English can feel emotionally confusing. You practice for days or weeks and it still feels like you hesitate, still feels like you translate, still feels like you make the same mistakes. And many people quit during this stage because they think maybe I am not improving. But real progress is never a straight line upward. It has fast days and slow days.

[00:25:21]It has exciting moments and completely invisible ones. And that is not failure.

[00:25:28]That is exactly how the brain learns anything difficult. Think about going to the gym. You do not see a different body after two workouts. But something is changing inside. Muscle is being built.

[00:25:40]Habits are forming. The body is adapting. Language works the same way.

[00:25:47]And then one quiet ordinary day, something small happens. Someone asks you a question in English and you answer before you even realize you are speaking. Your mouth just moves. The sentence comes out and for a second you think, "Wait, did I just say that without translating?" I remember the first time that happened to me, but it was the moment everything had quietly changed underneath. And that moment is coming for you, too. Probably sooner than you think. So, please do not become discouraged during the slow periods. The biggest changes often happen just below the surface before you can clearly see them. And one more thing, do not compare your journey to other people's. Some people have more time, some study younger, some have better opportunities to practice. That is simply the reality of different lives. And it has nothing to do with your potential. Your only real comparison is this. Are you a little stronger in English today than you were yesterday? Maybe today you remember the word faster. Maybe today you spoke one sentence without fear.

[00:27:00]Maybe today your mouth felt slightly more natural. That matters because real fluency is not built from one giant breakthrough. It is built from hundreds of small victories that slowly, quietly, permanently change who you are. Small progress repeated every day will always become something powerful. The only question is whether you keep showing up long enough to see it. Before we finish today, I want to leave you with something you can actually start using right after this episode ends. Not a complicated study plan, not 10 apps, not hours of grammar exercises every night, just a simple daily routine that trains your English naturally over time in small pieces that fit into the life you already have. This entire system takes around 30 minutes spread through your day and you do not need a classroom, a partner or expensive courses. You only need consistency and the willingness to show up in the morning before you check your phone or scroll through anything.

[00:28:15]Spend just 5 minutes speaking English out loud. Simple sentences about your real life. Today I will go to work. I feel a little tired this morning.

[00:28:25]Nothing impressive. The goal is only to wake your mouth up in English before the noise of the day begins. Because when English becomes part of your normal morning instead of only part of a study session, your brain starts treating it like a real language instead of a school subject. That shift from subject to language is one of the most important things that can happen in your learning.

[00:28:52]During the day, in the small moments, walking on the bus, eating alone, choose one short piece of English audio, just one sentence or one short paragraph.

[00:29:04]Listen carefully once, then listen again and repeat it out loud, trying to copy the rhythm and the natural flow. Not perfectly, just naturally. I'm going to the market. Feel how the words connect.

[00:29:20]How I'm and going flow together. How the sentence has its own music. Small pieces repeated deeply will always do more for your fluency than large amounts of content quickly forgotten. And when you practice English in normal moments of your day like this, your brain slowly stops separating real life from English practice. The language starts feeling like yours. In the evening, write three simple English sentences about your day.

[00:29:55]I woke up at 7. I had a long meeting. I felt nervous about something today. That is enough. Writing is powerful for speaking because it forces your brain to organize thoughts into clear language.

[00:30:11]And when your brain gets faster at organizing thoughts in English, your mouth gets faster, too. The connection between writing and speaking is real.

[00:30:22]And three sentences a day is all it takes to build it. And before you sleep, spend just two quiet minutes reviewing what you practiced. What sentence felt a little easier today?

[00:30:37]What word came faster than it did last week? What moment today, even a small one, showed you that something is changing? This small review matters more than most people realize. When you consciously notice progress before sleep, you are telling your brain this is important. Keep this connection. And while you sleep, your brain continues the work quietly on its own. So the system is this. 5 minutes speaking in the morning, active listening and repeating during the day, three sentences written in the evening, 2 minutes reviewing before sleep, simple, real, and sustainable. And if you practice this consistently, not perfectly, but consistently, something will begin changing slowly inside you. After a few weeks, your mouth feels less frozen. After a month, you hesitate less. After a few months, some sentences start coming without you thinking about them first. And one day, without realizing exactly when it happened, you will notice something quiet and beautiful. You are no longer trying to speak English. You are just speaking it. I want to close with something I truly believe. You did not start learning English because it was easy. You started because somewhere inside you, you believed it could change something in your life. Maybe a job, maybe a relationship, maybe simply the feeling of being able to say exactly what you mean and have someone actually hear it. That belief is still true. That possibility has not gone anywhere. It did not disappear because learning felt difficult sometimes.

[00:32:42]It did not disappear because of mistakes or slow days or moments when you wanted to quit. The future version of you who speaks English clearly and confidently, that person still exists, still waiting one sentence at a time, one small moment of courage at a time. Fluency grows quietly.

[00:33:08]It grows in your bedroom when you speak English to yourself and nobody's listening. It grows on a bus when you repeat one sentence under your breath.

[00:33:19]It grows in front of a mirror when you try to say one thought clearly. It grows at night when you catch yourself thinking in English without trying.

[00:33:31]These moments seem almost too small to matter.