AEE 2546: Why Repetition is Key With Hadar Shemesh

Summary

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Episode Summary: All Ears English Podcast – AEE 2546: Why Repetition is Key With Hadar Shemesh

Date: January 12, 2026
Hosts: Aubry Carter (for Lindsay, Michelle, and team)
Featured Guest: Hadar Shemesh (Accent and Fluency Coach, Host of the Influency Podcast)

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Overview

In this episode, Aubry welcomes back Hadar Shemesh to dive into the crucial role of repetition in mastering English as a second language. Drawing from her vast experience coaching global organizations, public speakers, and millions online, Hadar breaks down how and why repetition builds speaking habits, accelerates learning, and boosts confidence. The discussion offers actionable strategies for busy adults who want substance and results from limited practice time.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Repetition Matters for Language Learning

• Building Speaking Habits (02:50 – 05:51)

  • Hadar stresses that fluency in your first language comes from habits: you don’t consciously plan each word, structure, or sound. Replicating this automation in English requires repetition.
    • “Habits are things that you do automatically without thinking about it... When we learn a second language, we want to build the same habits so we wouldn’t have to think about the grammatical structure or the words that we want to use. And definitely not the sounds. Because once we start thinking about it, it kills fluency.” — Hadar [03:31]

• Making Practice Effective for Busy Learners (06:09 – 09:12)

  • Hadar acknowledges the time pressure on adult learners, recommending targeted repetition drills if your time is limited.
  • She introduces the concept of “sprints”: focused, daily drills of high repetition, even for just 10 minutes, which are more efficient than random free-speaking practice.
    • “If you add repetition every day, drills, exercises... What happens is that you make those connections faster.” — Hadar [07:40]

• Intentional Practice and Brain Connections

  • Repetition helps ingrain new knowledge, turning vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation from passive to active use.

2. The Power of Repetition Metaphors

• Running and Music (08:41 – 09:55)
  • Aubry and Hadar explain that, like sprint training for athletes or practicing scales for musicians, language repetition feels tedious but is essential to developing true ability.
    • “...Just like for a runner, doing those sprints... that is where the skills are built more quickly.” — Aubry [08:41]
    • “I used to play the piano... I had to do the scales to train my hands... That’s the thing with pronunciation, with grammar, with vocabulary. The repetitions help you build the skill, make the connection, and then when you speak freely, it’s there for you.” — Hadar [09:24]

3. Repetition as a Confidence Builder

• Transforming Knowledge into Spontaneous Speaking (11:08 – 13:36)
  • Hadar highlights how repetition doesn’t just aid retention, but self-belief.
    • “A huge part, a huge component of speaking freely and of fluency is confidence, is the feeling that you can do something. And a lot of times, we feel confident in things that we’ve already done.” — Hadar [11:16]
  • Using new words or structures repeatedly reduces anxiety and hesitation. Confidence comes from practice and familiarity.
    • “The repetitions help you build confidence as if you’ve said it, you know, 10, 20 times already. So it makes you feel more comfortable...” — Hadar [12:13]

4. Bridging the Gap: Passive vs. Active Knowledge

• Taking Action on What You Know (14:05 – 14:54)
  • Hadar observes that learners often crave more knowledge, but the real leap is making previously learned language accessible and spontaneous—by practicing it actively until it sticks.
    • “The bigger the gap is between the English that you know and the English that you speak—and at the end of the day, what helps you minimize that gap is you take all that passive knowledge ... and you turn it into active.” — Hadar [14:17]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On fluency and habit:
  “Once we start thinking about it, it kills fluency.” — Hadar [03:40]

• On why one-time practice isn’t enough:
  “If you do it once, it will never be a habit.” — Hadar [05:05]

• On maximizing small practice windows:
  “If you only have 10 minutes and you’re not able to spend that speaking with someone, this is the best way you can spend that time.” — Aubry [09:08]

• Confident usage arises from repeated experience:
  “We don’t have the confidence because we don’t have a lot of experience using [advanced vocabulary or grammar]...so the repetitions help you build confidence as if you’ve said it, you know, 10, 20 times already.” — Hadar [12:05]

• Advice for frustrated learners:
  “Instead of just learning a whole bunch of new things, why don’t we focus on what you already know and making it just a bit more accessible? Less work for more impact, which, you know, I love the goal.” — Hadar [14:47]

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Practical Tips from Hadar

(Summed up throughout the episode)

• Repeat target words, grammar, and sounds in short, focused sprints (even just 10 minutes a day).
• Don’t chase endless new vocabulary—convert what you already know from passive to active usage through repetition.
• Drill intentionally: Use example sentences, not just isolated words.
• Remember, repetition not only increases fluency, but also your ability to speak confidently and naturally.
• Consistent small practices (like daily piano scales) lead to real, lasting change in language ability.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:50] — Why repetition builds habits that automate language usage
• [06:09] — How to make brief, daily practice effective through drills ("sprints")
• [09:24] — Musical metaphors: scales and skill-building
• [11:16] — The role of repetition in building confidence
• [14:17] — Turning passive vocabulary into active by focusing less on acquiring new knowledge, more on practice

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Resources and Where to Find Hadar

• Website: hadarshemesh.com
• YouTube Channel: Accentsway English with Hadar

“Check it out. And thank you again for coming, Hadar, and for these amazing tips.” — Aubry [15:35]

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This episode is essential for anyone feeling stuck or plateaued in English learning. Hadar’s practical, actionable approach—grounded in both brain science and real-world teaching—shows that the secret to progress is not necessarily working harder, but working smarter and more consistently through targeted repetition.

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Transcript

[Aubry Carter]

This is an All Ears English podcast episode 2546 why repetition is Key with Hadar Shemesh.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Welcome to the All Ears English Podcast downloaded more than 200 million times. We believe in connection, not perfection, with your American host Aubry Carter and today's featured guest coming to you from Arizona, usa. And to get your transcripts delivered by email every week, go to allearsenglish.com subscribe.

[Aubry Carter]

Today. Hadar Chemesh from the Influency Podcast joins us to share why repetition is the key to improving both fluency and confidence in English.

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[Aubry Carter]

Welcome everyone and welcome to Hadar. I am so excited to have you join us. How are you today?

[Hadar Shemesh]

I'm amazing. So happy to be here and to talk to you. Thank you so much.

[Aubry Carter]

Welcome back. I know you've been on the podcast before and our listeners always love your episode, so we're so excited to chat with you again. If you by chance haven't heard of Hadar, which I know is unlikely, I'll give a quick intro here. Hadar is an online entrepreneur, teacher and content creator with over 4 million followers across all content platforms. She's trained teams in large global organizations such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, basically the biggest companies. And you've also worked with leading actors, singers, politicians and public speakers in Israel, which is amazing and this is exciting. Hadar has helped Google develop and design its pronunciation search tool that now serves millions of people around the world. I know we all use that, so this is amazing. And Hadar today is going to share three tips for why repetition is important and building speaking habits how to make sure your practice is effective, which I know everyone out there listening. You are busy working individuals. You don't have a lot of time. You need to make sure every minute you're practicing is effective. So I'm so excited for these tips today.

[Hadar Shemesh]

Hadar well, first of all, thank you so much and thank you again for inviting me to speak. Definitely my favorite podcast to be on. And yes, so I want to talk about repetition. So even though I actually come from pronunciation, right and that is the field of that I. That I teach and coach. What I'm going to share today is definitely relevant for every aspect of English. Building grammar, building vocabulary, building fluency, and definitely pronunciation. I've learned it through the pronunciation work that I have done myself and that I've been teaching my students. And here is the thing about repetitions. And when people hear it, it feels like, yeah, like something that I need to do or something that might feel a little boring. But here is why it is so incredibly important. First, when we think about speaking, especially when we talk about pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, it's important to remember that we are talking about building speaking habits. Habits are things that you do automatically without thinking about it. So when we think about our first language, when we think about words, we don't think about words before saying them. We don't think about grammatical structures before we use them. And this is why it's automatic. It's a habit. And when we learn a second language, we want to build the same habits so we wouldn't have to think about the grammatical structure or the words that we want to use. And definitely not the sounds. Because once we start thinking about it, it kills fluency.

[Aubry Carter]

There's no time for that. Right. You're having a conversation with someone. You can't just sit and think of the grammar you want to use, the vocabulary you want to use. You're so right.

[Hadar Shemesh]

And it takes you away from the conversation. You know, especially you're in a test or you are in an important conversation. You don't want to be occupied with thinking about what to say. You want to be present, you want to respond to the other person.

[Aubry Carter]

Exactly.

[Hadar Shemesh]

This is why we want to build those habits. Now, when we think about habits in real life, right. What turns out? How do you develop habits? How do you develop habits?

[Aubry Carter]

Yeah. Repetition, right? What is it that's like after four days, six days, what is it? Something becomes a habit. Maybe it takes a little longer, but if you do it once, it will never be a habit.

[Hadar Shemesh]

Exactly. Right. If you want to start going to the gym regularly, you can't just do it once and expect yourself to wake up the next day and be like, okay, I'm, you know, I work out.

[Aubry Carter]

I have this healthy habit now.

[Hadar Shemesh]

Right. I wish it were that easy, but it's not. So have to do it again and again and again. And a lot of times it's really tedious and kind of like harder at the beginning until you turn it into a habit. So that concept needs to be adopted to this idea of building speaking habits. And repetition helps you build those habits. So words become more automatic, your grammar becomes more automatic, and your pronunciation becomes automatic. And that has to happen through repetition. So that is the first reason why repetition is important.

[Aubry Carter]

Yeah, it's so true. It really makes sense when it comes to any habit. But as language learners ourselves, we have seen this, right? Nothing becomes part of our true active vocabulary unless we've repeated it multiple times and we've used it and we start becoming confident, then we can immediately add it to our conversations.

[Hadar Shemesh]

Yes, exactly. And that is why it's so important. And that leads me to the second thing that I want to say is that when it comes to practicing, and you and I both know that it's, you know, like, we live in such a busy life and our students don't have a lot of time to practice. They have very limited time, sometimes no time at all, and they still need to make progress. So what I've come to learn, well, free speaking and practicing speaking, whether other people is critical. So we can't take that away. But if you only have 10 minutes a day, right? And you want to build a habit of practicing daily, if you do repetitions like drills, where you're repeating certain grammatical structures or sounds or words, so you just practice repetitions, it is still super effective for a short amount of time. So what you get with a 10 minute practice drill is a lot more than what you were to get if you were just to speak freely. Now, again, it's not instead, like we cannot replace it, but if you add repetition every day, drills, exercises, I call them sprints. So we create sprints for our students. So it's kind of like drills that you have every day for 10 minutes, repeating words, phrases, sentences, grammatical structures. What happens is that you make those connections faster. So to be able to use those things, you want to build habits, you want to make connections in your brain, create new connections in your brain. And that is something that usually happens when you speak freely, but when you repeat it, it just happens faster if you do it intentionally. And then when you practice just the repetitions, you can be very intentional about what you're trying to achieve and how to do it. Let's say if you practice pronunciation, you can be mindful, something that doesn't happen so much when you're thinking about other things. So the practice, when you just practice drills and repetitions, you is a lot more effective. So you get more for the time you invest.

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[Aubry Carter]

I love this metaphor to running sprinting because just like for a runner doing those sprints maybe not the most fun thing you do. It is where the skills are built more quickly. And the same with conversations are more fun than the drilling, the practicing, but that is where the skills are built more quickly and they work in conjunction. Like, one is not going to progress as quickly without the other. And if you only have 10 minutes and you're not able to spend that speaking with someone, this is the best way you can spend that time.

[Hadar Shemesh]

Exactly. And it's a skill that you build. And you know, I used to play the piano and as a child I remember like always wanting to play those, you know, beautiful pieces, but I had to do the scales to train my hands to play the things that I wanted to play.

[Aubry Carter]

And I remember the scales are the worst. I'm right there with you. I played piano as a kid and your teacher would be too bad. You have to do the scales.

[Hadar Shemesh]

You have to do it. And when you listen to your teacher, you realize that you're building the skill of using your fingers. And that's the thing with pronunciation, with grammar, with vocabulary. The repetitions help you build the skill, make the connection, and then when you speak freely, it's there for you.

[Aubry Carter]

Yes. Oh, this is so true. I'm very excited for any listeners who have sort of plateaued and they're not sure why they don't have a ton of time, but they feel like they're still listening to podcasts, they're still things that they're doing, but they're not seeing the progress. I feel like this could really be a game changer. This could make the difference for them to realize I'm not really, you know, doing repetition with my vocabulary, my grammar, the things that I'm learning, I'm not being really proactive about that. And maybe that's what's missing.

[Hadar Shemesh]

Yeah, and you learn a lot. So people learn, they get the passive knowledge, they don't turn it into active knowledge. So again, when you put it into practice and you, you learn a new word and you don't just keep it to yourself, but you just say it in different example sentences, Then this is something that allows you to like it. It makes it stick a lot longer than just trying to remember it. Right. You build.

[Aubry Carter]

Absolutely. And just once won't be enough. Just like one sprint wouldn't be enough for a runner, it is, you know, it's going to be multiple times and it's different for everyone. It might be, you know, more than you expect, but if you stick with it, don't give up on the word until you're using it in conversations. Really natur and confidently, then you know it's part of your active vocabulary.

[Hadar Shemesh]

Yeah, exactly. Which leads me to the third tip that I want to share about repetitions. And that is it's a huge confidence builder. Because after all, we are creatures that are not just like, we don't. Don't just have a brain that is a machine and that's it. Right. We have feelings, we have emotions, we have, you know, thoughts about ourselves as speakers of English as a second language. And a huge part, a huge component of speaking freely and of fluency is confidence is the feeling that you can do something. And a lot of times we feel confident in things that we've already done, like that we know how to do them. So, for example, we have this list of words that we know how to say again and again. Dog. House.

[Aubry Carter]

Yes.

[Hadar Shemesh]

No, Right. Like the very, very popular.

[Aubry Carter]

Basically, we're super confident about those.

[Hadar Shemesh]

No issues about those words. But then when it comes to more advanced grammar, more advanced vocabulary, more advanced pronunciation, we don't have the confidence because we don't have a lot of experience using it. Again, it's because we're just learning it. We don't have a lot of experience practicing it. So the repetitions help you build confidence as if you've said it, you know, 10, 20 times already. So it makes you feel more comfortable using these new words. It makes you feel more confident knowing that you'll be able to say it because you've already proved to yourself that you can't, that you can. Right, by, you know, saying those sentences in the past perfect tense in ten of those sentences. And then you're like, oh, you know, something's clicking. I maybe I can try saying it. When speaking spontaneously, because you have experienced saying it, you know that your mouth can produce those sentences, especially if it's new words or new sounds, that we usually feel very embarrassed about saying that. So the repetitions is just like, oh, it's not just in my head. I know how it feels, I know how to say it, I've said it. I can do it. It's just like one step further to trying and expanding, you know, in. In your English and your fluency and what you're capable of saying and doing. So I think that it's a huge confidence builder, and it's a lot of fun because it doesn't. It's not too demanding. Right. Like when you repeat phrases or when you do those drills.

[Aubry Carter]

Right. This is so true. It. And we know this is what our students, our listeners want, because when we ask you to share goals, this is often what we hear. To not build just fluency, but confidence, to be able to spe more confidently. And that's the goal. But do you have the steps that it will take to get there? This is a big part of that, right? When you have done it, you have felt confident doing that, right? You're confident because you've done it before. You know you can do it.

[Hadar Shemesh]

And people are like, they always want to learn the next new thing. It's kind of like, how do I. How do I know more? But, yeah, like, the more you know, and if you don't put it into practice, like, the bigger the gap is between the English that you know and the English that you speak. And at the end of the day, what helps you minimize that gap is you take all that passive knowledge that you have of English and you turn it into active. So, again, like, repeating the things that you learn, repeating, you know, the words that you want to use, but you never use is what's going to help you get there. So instead of just learning a whole bunch of new things, why don't we focus on what you already know and making it just a bit more accessible? And I think that's like, less work for more impact, which, you know, I love the goal.

[Aubry Carter]

Absolutely.

[Hadar Shemesh]

And get a lot of good results.

[Aubry Carter]

Yeah, right, Exactly. I feel like today could be a real aha Moment for our listeners. You may have been stuck. I'm so excited you shared these tips, Hadar. I think they're brilliant. It seems so simple, and yet it might be what's missing. Right? So thank you so much for coming today for sharing these tips. And can you share for any listeners who. Who haven't heard of Your podcast, your YouTube channel, can you share how they can find you, how they can find out more?

[Hadar Shemesh]

Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, again, thank you so much for inviting me. You can just go to my website, hadarshemesh.com or my YouTube channel, Accentsway English with Hadar.

[Aubry Carter]

Yes. And those videos are amazing, especially for pronunciation learning. Pronunciation tips. But so many great strategies and tips. So yes, check it out. And thank you again for coming Hadaran for these amazing tips.

[Hadar Shemesh]

Thank you so so much. Thank you for having me.

[Aubry Carter]

Thanks. Have a great day. Bye.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Thanks for listening to Allears English. Would you like to know your English level? Take our two minute quiz. Go to allearsenglish.com fluencyscore and if you believe in connection not perfection, then hit subscribe now to make sure you don't miss anything. See you next time.

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