Seven: listen and answer mini stories. You will continue listening to the
stories daily. You’ll continue shouting your answers to the questions.
Then you will add this next step. After you finish listening to the story,
turn off the audio. Stand in front of a mirror. Get yourself into a peak
emotional state — jump, shout, smile. Get energized!
When feeling great, retell the mini story you just heard. Do not try to tell
the story exactly, word for word. Do not try to memorize it word for word.
Rather, as quickly as possible, retell the story using your own words. You
can even change the story if you want.
The most important point is to do this quickly. Strive for speed! In a loud
and energetic voice, tell the story to yourself in the mirror. This will only
take you a few minutes. When you finish, take a short break and then repeat
the process again. Try to retell the story even faster the next time.
The purpose of fast retells is to bypass your logical (and slow) left brain.
By speaking quickly, you are forced to speak more naturally and more
intuitively. As you do this daily, your fluency will increase. You’ll speak
faster without effort. English will flow out of you more and more easily. At
this point, you are ready for the final step: pronunciation.
Pronunciation Retells
Earlier in the book, I described the movie technique and taught you a
method for using it to improve pronunciation. You can use a similar
technique with mini story retells.
First, repeat the steps in the previous section. Do a few fast retells of the
story. When you can do that easily, it’s time to work on pronunciation.
Play one sentence from the mini story and then pause the audio. As you
play this sentence, listen very closely. Focus especially on the rhythm and
intonation. Notice when the speaker pauses. Notice when the speaker’s
voice goes up and when it goes down. Notice when it gets louder and when
it gets softer.
