The English language plays a crucial role now more than ever. From interviews to converting more global leads to customers, many companies rely on English as a common medium of communication. In this globalized world, products and services are exchanged among countries that use English to communicate with one another.
It is absolutely necessary to improve your English speaking skills to climb your career or academic ladder. But most do not know the effective ways to learn the language, and so they keep postponing the process.
So, in this blog, we are going to list a few ways to help you improve your English vocabulary and speaking skills.
Here are the 15 Tips on How to Improve Your English Speaking Skills
1. No Magic; Just Speak
Speaking makes you get comfortable with the English language. Grab the chance to speak in English whenever you get one. Never hesitate. Hesitation is never a good sign for someone who wants to improve their Language Skills. Throw it away and start speaking.
2. Work on Your Vocabulary
Learn five new words every day. Write it, find the meaning and usage and practise it the entire day. Create the context to use the words you learned that day. If you are not certain which words to learn, read an article from an English Newspaper and choose the words that you do not know the meanings of.
3. Read Books to Practice Reading
Books teach you a lot of new words to help you build your vocabulary. On the other hand, it also helps to practice reading English. Read the sentences aloud to practice the natural flow of the language. Watch yourself read, record it and compare it with natural English sentences you hear in English movies or online.
4. Watch English Movies
Movies give us a lot of slang words. But pick only the phrases and idioms that they use, definitely not the bad words (No kidding!) Repeat the sentences after them with the same intonation. That helps you speak like a native speaker.
5. Always Have a Pocket Dictionary
Wherever you go, have a pocket dictionary near you. That might help you learn a few words instantly. While reading a book, attending a lecture, participating in a business conference, etc. At some places, you can’t use it immediately but you can use it later, perhaps once you come out of the meeting.
6. Learn the pronunciation of Words
Whenever you learn a new word, never forget to check its pronunciation too. If you don’t pronounce it correctly, the listener might not understand you well. Just Google the pronunciation, be it Indian or UK or US, or you can just use the online dictionary which contains an audio symbol (pronunciation) right next to the word you are looking for.
7. Enroll in a Trainer’s Course
Find the best English trainer with genuine reviews online and enroll yourself in the course. You will learn the natural flow of sentences, and also you will get a chance to learn from the speaker. All your doubts, just clear them with her.
8. Use Technology as much as You Can
Download the language applications on your mobile and learn from them. Games like word builders also help to improve your vocabulary. Focus on apps that connect you with a foreign native speaker so that you can have great conversations or get yourself into an online community that serves this purpose.
9. Your Mobile Assistants Help a Lot!
You already have a bot friend with you to help you out. Siri or Alexa. Chat with them and learn more about how to chat in English. You will have to form sentences in the right way to get your idea across clearly. Here, you can implement all that you have learnt and see if you are doing it well.
10. You do not Always Need a Friend
What if you don’t have a partner to practise with, are you going to stop? No, you should not. Start speaking to yourself. When is your brain too active? Morning or evening? Find the time, stand in front of the mirror and start speaking. That way, you will gain confidence and your public speaking skill will develop too.
11. Podcasts or YouTube English Talks
Listen to English podcasts and YouTube channels like TED Talks and Josh Talks that have great speakers. You will learn a great deal about various things. Also, observing them teaches you public speaking, articulating your thoughts well and simple sentence formation.
12. Have a Journal
Think in English and write the day’s journey in English in your journal. That will help you improve your writing and work on your basic grammar. How basic grammar? Well, after a few days, if you don’t understand your own sentences, you will revisit your grammar or fill in the gaps where you go wrong.
13. Never Miss a Day!
Never ever take a break from practising. Then, you will have to start all over again. Even if you go on a vacation, how about choosing an English country? Or if it is a local place, just take twenty minutes of your time in 24 hours. Why? Because taking a break will make you keep postponing the process and eventually you will forget all your new vocabulary. Your months of hard work will be destroyed by just a few days of pleasure. This is not to instill fear but for you to be aware.
14. Learn Idioms!
Idioms make you sound more like a native fluent speaker. One idiom a day is 30 a month. Just try to include the popular ones while speaking. This is one great way to improve your English speaking skills.
15. Grab Every Opportunity
No matter what, when you come across a chance to speak in English, grab it and start speaking. It is time to throw away your hesitation and shine in the outside world. Check the level of your English speaking skills from your audience. Remember, rejection is a part of life.
Conclusion
Now, you have the top 15 ways to speak English. What are you waiting for? Start right away. Remove the word ‘postpone’ from your dictionary. Throw the fear away and improve your English speaking skills. It is going to get easy. If you have any thoughts to add, feel free to comment and do check out my website www.englishwithsutanu.com
Many students and professionals want to become fluent English speakers to compete in this fast-pacing world. Speaking in English every day helps a lot. At the same time, one should improve his/her vocabulary too to express more clearly and sound like a native and expert speaker. Building vocabulary is also crucial to understand other people better and avoid any kind of miscommunication.
How to improve your English vocabulary? The key is consistency. You can discover a million ways on the Internet to improve your vocabulary but if you do not have consistency, you can never win the game. You should consider the methods as holy rituals and do them every day without fail.
Doing it for two days and taking a break for the next four days is a sure way to always remain mediocre. This blog speaks about 10 ways toimprove your English vocabulary but to attain success, you need consistency.
1) Make Books Your Best Friend
Books have a lot of new words that we do not know. Make your goals clear first. What do you want to achieve and the time period you want to achieve that? If you want to become an expert in urban slang, go for fiction written by contemporary authors. Classics teach you some deep vocabulary that will help you express yourself well in front of an audience. Read ten pages every day and learn the contextual meaning of the new words along with the direct usage. Remember, consistency is the key.
2) Learn Five New Words Daily
Keep your dictionary closer to you. Learn five new words daily and use them in your sentences while speaking. A pro tip is that even if there is no context to utter the word you learned, create the situation so that you can use it (Not kidding. That really works!). Also, try writing the new words by creating your own sentences.
3) Observe While Others Speaking
In a room filled with English speakers, before speaking to others, use a complete session to just observe how they speak and the words they use. This is learning by observation. To truly improve your English vocabulary, you will need to learn a lot and then implement the learnings. To speak confidently, practise every day. You will also know the collocations while observing fluent English speakers.
4) Install Word Apps and Language Games
Games and apps are great ways to build your vocabulary and learn how to use them in the right sentences. Learning can be really fun through games and apps. You will not be too burdened. Playing them regularly will improve your English vocabulary even without you knowing until some situations come up to realize.
5) Read a Blog Everyday
Blogs are often written on a specific niche after extensive research. Reading those blogs will help you to build knowledge on different fields and also the vocabulary to use. You will learn the jargon and understand technical people better at your work or college. You will gain the confidence to speak in English with any fluent speaker.
6) Watch Harry Potter and Narnia!
Those are my favourites. If you do not have any favourites, start with popular series like Harry Potter, Money Heist, Friends, Office. Movies and TV shows teach a lot of new words that are in trend. As you watch many movies and shows, your vocabulary will improve a lot. Never ever start with a boring show, then you will lose interest in watching English series. Look at the reviews before choosing one.
7) Get Fluent Speakers as Friends
There are many platforms where you can meet new friends, who are native English speakers. They will be ready to help you out. Schedule video or audio meetings with them once in a while. Build a strong bond and text them in English but before that check, if they are comfortable with it. Do not try to get friends without doing the basic groundwork needed to initiate and continue a conversation. It is okay if your language has errors but it should not be incomprehensible. While speaking to them, you will learn more new words and more importantly, slang words.
8) Journal your Experiences
How will journaling help you? When you want to describe your day’s experiences, you will learn new words to convey the meaning correctly. That is very important because when you read it again, you would want to understand your own words. That might sound hilarious but it should not be discarded. Eventually, you will learn to capture the emotions well through your words. This is a way to learn sentence construction and verify how well you have built your vocabulary.
9) Improve your Vocabulary Through Word Associations
When you read a word separately, there are higher chances of you forgetting them the very next day. So, try to associate the words with other words so that it is very convenient for you to remember later. For example, you can go by positive, comparative and superlative words. Good, better, best. Else, browse the synonyms of one word and learn new words for the same meaning.
10) Read. Record. Review. The 3R Process
This is a popular technique to build vocabulary. But the learners should use it well enough to improve themselves. It is simple. This is what the entire blog has been saying about. Read a book every day. Record the unknown words and find meanings for them. Review how well you can use them in your everyday language. All you have to do is repeat, repeat, repeat the words you have learned. That is the only way to sound like a native speaker.
These tips can definitely help you to become an expert speaker in English. The importance of consistency cannot be insisted on enough. For all these tips to work, you should make it your routine. Do not treat it like homework. If you do, then your mind will long for a break, which is not a good idea if your goal is to become a fluent speaker. Good luck with your journey. If you have any more proven ways, feel free to comment with your ideas.
Being fluent in English has become a mandatory skill in today’s fast-pacing world. Do you agree? Let me tell you a real-life story. A friend completed his Master but he was not able to get into a job for a long time.
Why? Because he did not have strong communication. It is painful to miss opportunities that you could have clearly cracked if you had spoken well. All MNCs have prioritized the English speaking skills as they deal with majorly global clients. Not just that, even engineers, marketers, startup founders, and entrepreneurs must learn to clearly express their ideas and plans to their prospects.
And what if you made an English friend at an airport? Won’t you be intrigued to know more about his/her culture and lifestyle? Becoming fluent in English is not a herculean task but it is not so easy that you can learn it in a day or two. Consistency and hard work will take you to your goals.
Here are 7 simple tips to speak fluently and confidently in English.
1. Power of Small Steps Everyday
Starting is the first challenge; Consistency is the next challenge. You can overcome both challenges if you set realistic and attainable goals. Planning huge steps will hinder you from moving forward.
Assign a few hours to English learning in a day and follow the schedule like an unavoidable ritual. You will see the difference in one or two months. I am not saying that you will become a proficient English speaker but your vocabulary and confidence would have grown.
Have you heard of Objectives and Key Results? OKR can help you keep track of your steps towards your destination. You should decide what your goal is, and then plan the activities, which will be the key results, to achieve that goal.
2. Listening to English is Inevitable
Listening is an important skill because that is how you learn the native speakers’ accents.
But do you know what the fun part is? You need not go to great institutes to listen to native speakers’ conversations. If you love to watch movies or series, start with popular English movies and dramas. If you watch it with subtitles, you will learn many new words.
Here, for the listening exercise to be effective, try watching them without subtitles to understand the fluent speakers and also learn the accent.
3. Mirror Activity to Become Fluent in English
To become a fluent English speaker, the Mirror technique helps greatly. For 20 minutes every day, stand in front of the mirror, look at your own eyes and start speaking in English, That way, you can remove the stage fear and also increase your confidence double fold. This is an inexpensive way of improving your communication skills.
Besides, initially, you need not be grammar conscious when speaking to yourself or others. But as time passes by, you will not have hesitation anymore while speaking the language but grammar errors. That’s when you should start correcting your grammar errors. It is amazing if you could simultaneously learn grammar and apply it to your speaking.
4. Build your Vocabulary
The most common error many language learners do is that they learn new words every day only to forget them later. There is a procedure to follow when you learn a new word. You will have to apply it while speaking and make yourself familiar with the word. Creating a joke around the word will never make you forget. This is just an example. Find your way of having the new word forever in your mind.
Learn 5 words everyday morning, and spend the day using them in your spoken sentences. If possible, try making study friends in English countries through language forums and try to have a conversation over a meeting application whenever possible.
5. Reading a Book Makes You a Confident Speaker
Books are the best friend not only to lonely people but also to language learners. Buy a popular book because the author would have written in modern language that is in use. By reading the sentences in the book aloud, you will be able to get a clear pronunciation of words which makes speaking easier.
And, for every three to four lines, you will come across at least one or two words that you do not know the meaning of. Highlight those words and know their synonyms in your daily tasks. And, try listening to the audio version of the book to learn how to pronounce the words and intonation.
Focus on pleasure reading later. Firstly, focus on becoming confident and convenient with using the English language.
Pro tip: Listening to English Music and learning the lyrics also help you to learn more. Explore ways of learning and knowing.
6. Sound Like A Native Speaker by Using Idioms
Native English speakers use a lot of idioms while conversing with others. For example, instead of saying, ‘I will listen to you,’ they use ‘I’m all ears’ which means that they are listening and you can share with them. Learn just two idioms a day, not any idiom but the most commonly used ones.
Speak them whenever you get a chance to have a chat with native speakers. I would say, even try creating the context just to use the idiom in your spoken English. If you do not practise every day, you might forget the skill and will have to start from square one again.
7. Change your Mind Voice from Your Native Language to English. LOL
We all have that little voice in our minds that helps us make a lot of decisions from breakfast to choosing the bed sheet for a good night’s sleep. From now on, make English the little voice’s language and even there, you can use all your learned phrases, words and idioms. Once you have well-practiced within yourself, you will not hesitate too much when you land on an opportunity where you need to speak English.
Conclusion
Follow the free simple steps to improve your English communication skills. Once you learn how to express yourself to others, there is no stopping you. Communication is the key to every new beginning, seamless middle and painful end. Conquer your world by ruling your words.
