Incotaku
Hehe, hello again to my Spoken English Tutorial series, where I’ll be continuing my classes on how to acquire that American accent.
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PART 1 – Spoken English Tutorial – Improve Your American English Pronunciation. Part 1.
I’ve already mentioned in the previous article that one of the principle a person who is a non-native should follow is to not say words one by one, as it makes the Spoken message really choppy and just not fluent and American. What actually should happen is the so-called liaison or word connection which act as a glue between words instead of just abrupt spelling word by word.
Do you guys remember from the previous tutorial the example of Bob is on the phone? I’m talking about that.
So in this section we will go a little bit deeper into the subject of the glue between the words – the liaison, the 4 general rules you should follow and examples to make you understand the principles better. You already got acquainted with intonation in the previous tutorial, we will be doing liaisons today and then we will move to pronunciation.
Let’s Review what consonants and vowels are
A consonant is a sound that you can produce only when one part of your mouth touches another part of your mouth. Try to say ‘K’ with you mouth open and you won’t be able to.
A vowel is a sound that can be produced even when no part of your mouth touches any other part of your mouth. Try to say ‘A’ with your mouth wide open and you will see that it is possible to do so.
(Besides, we also include W,Y and R as semi-vowels. Sometimes they are called glides)
Ok, now that this is done – let’s move on
So, again. “Bob is on the phone” is a sentence in written form. If we were to examine how you pronounce it actually it would sound more like [bäbizän the foun], or Bobiz on thefoun.
Now, let’s get cracking and start the tutorial already, because I know you guys just want to learn quick tips on Spoken American English here.
To illustrate how important word liaisons are try to listen (or speak) these two sentences
They tell me the dime easier to understand.
They tell me that I’m easier to understand.
If you speak them like a true American both of them will sound very similar. In fact, almost the same. Again, Spoken English – don’t try to imagine how you would read it – it would be a wrong way to go about speaking English anyway.
Let’s see how words can be connected –
Consonant – Vowel
Words are connected when a word ends in a consonant sound and the next word starts with a
vowel sound, including the semivowels W, Y, and R.
Easy – just link them together whenever you see a consonant-vowel chain.
For example, “take whatever” should be spoken as Teikywatevah, not “teik watevah”. The first sounds much better.
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Consonant – Consonant
Look at this chart.
| Sounds behind the teeth | Sounds produced at lips | Throat sounds | |||
| Unvoiced | Voiced | Unvoiced | Voiced | Unvoiced | Voiced |
| t | d | p | b | k | G |
| ch | j | f | v | h | |
| - | l | - | m | - | Ng |
| - | n | - | w | - | R |
| s | z | - | - | - | - |
| sh | Zh | - | - | - | - |
A general rule – if a word ends with a consonant sound in the same sound location group (Sounds behind the teeth/Sounds produced at lips/Throat sounds) as the beginning consonant of the next word then you should link those two.
Take him – it is physically easier to connect those two words.
Take Dan out – physically harder to connect those two words, anyway.
Vowel – Vowel
Semivowels are included in this link rule. So if you see a word ending with a vowel or a semivowel sound W,Y, or R and the next word also starts with a vowel or a semivowel, then don’t hesitate to link these two words.
Consonants + Y
You should always connect two words when one word ends with T,D,S, or Z and the other one starts with a Y sound. When I say Y sound I also mean the instances when the second word starts with an unwritten y sound.
Hello and welcome to this How To Improve English Speaking Section, where we will discuss the common problems that arise when a person tries to expand his lexicon and what you need to know about learning Vocabulary in general.
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Having a strong vocabulary is , in my opinion, one of the most important thing that one can acquire if he wants to sound more educated, smarter, and in order to just be able to express his ideas better. I will present the general principles you need to know about expanding your vocabulary that you might want to implement into your knowledge arsenal later.
Active and Passive vocabulary
See, every person on this planet has two kind of vocabularies in his mind – active and passive. The difference between the two is that the active group includes words that are constantly used in everyday life, while the passive one includes words that are not. For example, you don’t expect people to use the words like “engine” as often as “hello” or “want”. So, usually people you talk to use the “common” words. (keep this in mind when you are trying to surf the Internet forums or talk to natives for the purpose of educating yourself and memorizing some new words. )
What I’m trying to say that, well, obviously I just wanted to educate you on this interesting principle of active/passive vocabulary because I think I’m awesome, but also that when you talk to Native speakers don’t expect to learn a whole heck of sophisticated, Shakespeare-level vocabulary from them, but the words you learn will probably be enough for you to be able to communicate with Natives freely , that is, unless you start to participate in scientific meetings and that’s when you will encounter some new vocabulary problems.
There is no quick fix. Don’t ask for them
See, it is impossible to learn anything in this life quickly, unless you are a genius (and even then the notion is questionable). No, certainly there are merits to the articles like “ten ways to build a strong vocabulary” (if you want the methods – check our Tutorial sections), but let’s get the general principles and the mindset right before going off on the journey.
Instead, you should just focus on the process and lower your expectations of the results – it is natural for a person to forget a lot of words right after he first learns or hears them, which brings us to another problem.
It is Ok that you forget the words almost instantly after you see them
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There are tricks that might help you to minimize this problem, but even if you try to go through a word list 10 times in several minutes – your mind will still throw the words out of its container pretty soon enough.
Here is the fact that helped me to settle my mind with this issue – I’ve accepted that in order to improve my vocabulary I had to constantly revise the words I had learnt in the past. Let’s state it as a rule “you need to expose yourself to the new words at least 4 or 5 times before you memorize them completely”. And by that I don’t mean 4 or 5 times in a row. You have see them once, then wait for a day, for example, when your brain stops thinking about them actively and repeat another day.
You have to be active
You see it is always a good idea to always look up the meaning of an unfamiliar word in a dictionary. Don’t rely purely on your ability to guess the right meaning. If you are so bold – you can try and be disappointed because guessing words is just that – guessing them. If you want to truly have a strong vocabulary you have to always put active effort into learning new words.
Hello, friends. In this week’s How to improve English Speaking rubric we cover the topic of “How To Improve Vocabulary”.
It is a very important topic for you ,folks, who are learning English as 2nd language. As we know, the amount of words you know directly corresponds to your ability to produce a coherent, convincing speech and to your overall ability to express your ideas fluently. There are many ways to increase vocabulary, and I will be talking about at least some of them today.
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In the beginning I wanted to make a “Ten ways to build a strong vocabulary” article, but I’ve decided to just list the ones I liked the most first. The reason is that they are the methods that were used by me in the past and I can attest for their efficiency and explain in detail the pros and cons of each of them, as well as the exact process you need to go through to maximize their efficience.
So with that said we can start. Here they are – the methods I’ve personally used to quickly cram into my head the 3000+ word list (the GRE one) and if you want to hear about other methods – subscribe to the website and follow the possible updates.
The first method – gorilla style brute-force word list cramming strategy
You can use a pen+paper or a software like Excel for this one, but I certainly recommend you using a software for the following reasons:
-Typing new words into Excel is much faster than writing into a notebook by a pen or pencil
-It easier to sort, organize and edit the data once they are entered.
Maybe some people will benefit more from actually writing the words themselves, but the point is moot – I personally prefer the ability to edit and sort the data.
Ok, so basically, what you do is that you create an Excel file and type in all the words of your interest – whether they are the words of your personal interest or they come from popular word lists, like GRE vocabulary word-lists or TOEFL word-lists.
The next step is to go through these words one by one, coloring the ones you don’t know into red color, for example, the ones you know into green color and the ones you are not completely sure about – into yellow color. That should be enough for the first iteration and now you should rest until your head is fresh again and then try to go through the list once more. Of course, you want to pay attention only to the words colored in yellow and red and just ignore the green ones.
Also I really recommend you to put the yellow and red words into a new Excel list after every iteration you go through – that way the green words won’t be distracting you during your next study iteration.
Combining words into synonyms groups. Mnemonics style.
You will use Excel again. The gist of this method is to group the words under the same category of your choice – the categories’ name will be up to you to be chosen.
The motto of this strategy is – “as long as it works – it is awesome”.
For example, what I do is I put the words like “denunciate” , “slander” and “diatribe” under the category/label of “criticize”. All of these words have a slightly different meaning (actually, not all of them), but they have something in common – speaking ill of a person, attacking one’s integrity and reputation –you get it.
You can go even more abstract than that – for example, I have a category named “too much” and I put there all the words that can be associated with it. They can be the words that are the most direct synonyms – “superfluous” and “slew”, for example, as well as those who don’t have a directly synonymous meaning, but can still be categorized as having/doing something “too much” – “haughty”, “gluttonous” , for example.
By the way, you can notice that I specifically ignore the parts of speech of my words. The noun and adjectives all qualify for the same category, as far as I’m concerned, but I do write notes to my words. (because I’m using Excel and it is easy to do so – just write the notes and exact meaning of the word inside its cell right after the word itself) Again, whatever works for you is fine.
Vocabulary software
Another way how to learn new words is to use a software. There are some programs that provide quizzes, tests and games that can help you memorize the words better.
A software is actually very helpful if you are a little bit lazier than average. Some of them have even have more sophisticated features like marking those words you’ve gone through and putting them aside (just like what you would do with an Excel list), although I still prefer Excel, because it is just better.
I couldn’t find a software that could divide the words into all three “don’t know”, “vaguely know”, and “know for sure” categories (and I think it is very important to have all three of them), because they automatically group them as we answer the questions, leaving no real control to us and we all know that just because you managed to answer the meaning of the word once, doesn’t mean that you actually memorized it for the rest of your life.
Before I say goodbye, though, I should note that with a software even when you are not fully focused on learning and are operating in “half-conscious” headspace, your brain will still be learning as long as you continue to look at the monitor and pressing the buttons. The efficiency of this learning is not comparable to learning in a fully-awake mode, of course.
Anyway, subscribe to my feeds in order to get the updates on this topic.
Ok, now that we’ve gone through (although not very deeply) the Spoken English Tutorial on the topics of Vowels and Consonants, let’s move on. In this Spoken English Tutorial we will cover the American English Intonation.
(This is Part 3 of the Tutorial series. To look what other parts are available click on Spoken English Tutorial – Improve Your American English Pronunciation. Part 1. )
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Intonation: an essential element!
As we have covered already in the first part of this Spoken English Tutorial series intonation is a major part of a good accent. If you don’t – you might come off as a person has a different accent that natives won’t understand.
Think of Intonation as a language’s music. American English has a different tone than , for example, Japanese language or German or French. Just listen to them to compare.
The thing to remember with Intonation is to always use it,no matter what. American English is a very word-stress / intonation dependent language. Try to say this sentence in a flat monotone way, despite the fact that you have an accent:
“Didn’t he say he stole, and intentionally, all the money?”
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Now compare to this:
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The second sounds at least 30% “more American” and that’s just with a quick change in intonation while leaving everything else untouched (pronunciation, fluency).
Some people think that a good accent is all about just pronouncing sounds correctly, but seems like there is more to it than meets the eye. 
Children when they are little they imitate not only sounds and sound structures, but the way people talk – their intonation and manner of speech.
Now try to say the sentence fast and with the right intonation. There is a reason why I want you to go fast, but we’ll explain it later.
If you listen to Holywood movies you might not notice such a strong intonation as I’ve presented, but believe me – it is there. I think it is crucial to have a certain intonation to your speech. Now which one to use? Try this one – Staircase-like intonation
When and how to stress the words?
As you have noticed, an intonation is basically something like stressing the word (like making a stressed syllable, except we do it with words ) – some come with a higher stress, some come with a lower stress, a kind of rise and fall. Now, how do we how to learn, or know when and where to stress the words?
Stressing when there is an important information
You want to stress the word when you know that it is necessary to emphasize a certain information. For example.
Kids Chocolate
//////// love //////////////
//////// /////// //////////////
You emphasize that KIDS love CHOCOLATE. It is important that’s why you stress the words. (So start identifying them and using the intonation in these situations.)
Now when you know that the noun/pronoun provides not-so-important information, you want to stress the other word – for example, the verb.
. loves
He ///////// her
//// ///////// /////
Statements vs Questions.
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When you question someone/something you want to go downhill with intonation and then you want to raise your intonation somewhere closer to the end. So as the question goes, you speak normally until the end, where you raise your intonation.
. know
. //////// her ?
Do //////// /////
//// you /////// //////
//// ////// /////// //////
Sometimes, for example if it is a rhetorical question, you go like this
. ne?
. go- /////
Why ///// /////
/////// is ///// /////
/////// /// it ///// /////
/////// /// /// ///// /////
(Yes to be exact you want to usually stress the syllables, not the whole words, that’s why one word gone is stressed as above)
A statement is similar to a question , but you don’t stress the end as strongly as you do it in a question.
. know
I ///////// her
// ///////// /////
Also other reasons to raise your intonation might include
Stating your opinion that is opposite to what you sense is right
Basically, it means that the common information tells you one thing, but you have another opinion that is different.
People say that the woman was mad and we should stay away from her, but I THINK that she is PERFECTLY normal and that’s just prejudice of the masses.
Constrasting
He loves bunnies , but he hates dogs
As the subtitles suggests when you want to contrast something to something else.
Saying “can’t”
Can’t is usually always stressed.
I can’t do this – it is too much for me.
And probably others.
Main ways to make an intonation
Now I want to tell you that there are three ways a person can make an intonation. And you can combine them in a sentence in any way you want to.
-Talking louder. That’s an obvious one. You just raise your voice and usually it is used to grab attention. But raising a voice too much will make you sound like you are obnoxious or something.
-Streeeetttchiiing the word. This is a good way to emphasize your point. You don’t want to overdo this otherwise you will sound very strange.
-Talking with a DIFF-errent pitch. The most common way of applying an intonation. Basically you just raise the pitch whenever a word worth stressing comes along the way.
In a nutshell
How you want to stress the sentence is entirely up to you. Remember – you want to raise intonation whenever you want to draw attention to some kind of information you think is important. Because of that an intonation a person uses also reveals what the person is thinking about, so be wary of that. If you say “I didn’t want to rob that bank” you don’t sound as bad as “I didn’t want to rob that bank”, because the latter implies that you wanted to rob the bank anyway – you just chose the wrong bank to rob.
Or look at these examples “he stole the money” and “he stole the money“. Again, the intonation contributes to a slightly different message intended, so keep in mind the intonation of American English as it is very important for understanding the way to speak the language correctly.
Hey, hello. Spoken English Tutorial series here
If you don’t know yet guys – I’m focusing on giving lessons on how to improve or acquire that standard American English Accent. Ok. Let’s roll.
(This is Part 2 of the Tutorial series. To look what other parts are available click on Spoken English Tutorial – Improve Your American English Pronunciation. Part 1. )
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In this tutorial we will go through the basics the vowel and consonant sounds of American English.
You need to first understand what these are, so we will just present you with these following tables that list all the vowel and consonant sounds.
American English Vowels. If you want to – click on the audio to hear how they are pronounced.
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| Tense Vowels | |||
| Symbol | Sound | Spelling | Example |
| ā | εi | [mak] | make |
| ē | ee | [det] | deed |
| ī | äi | [mis] | mice |
| ō | ou | [hop] | hope |
| ū | ooh | [smuth] | smooth |
| ä | ah | [kät] | caught |
| æ | ä + ε | [kæt] | cat |
| æo | æ + o | [ræond] | round |
| Lax Vowels | |||
| Symbol | Sound | Spelling | Example |
| ε | eh | [gεt] | Get |
| I | ih | [it] | It |
| ü | ih + uh | [tük] | Took |
| ə | uh | [səm] | Some |
| Semi Vowels | |||
| Symbol | Sound | Spelling | Example |
| ər | er | [hər] | her |
| əl | ul | [dəəl] | dull |
As you can see, there are 8 tense and 6 lax vowels. The symbols sometimes coincide with the letters of English alphabet, but not always. Those sounds that do coincide are written as these letters. Practice them if you wish. What you do need to understand as well is that British sounds are not the same as American English sounds, although mostly they are the same.
Tense, lax vowels? Not short, long.
The term tense and lax vowels is used here, although alternative names to them – long and short vowels, are sometimes applied as well. So in other words, tense vowels are sometimes called long vowels and lax vowels are sometimes called short. It is generally more descriptive and correct to use the terms tense and lax vowels.
Also, just for general interest, linguists also divide vowels into checked and free vowels categories, with the terms checked and free vowels corresponding closely to the terms lax and tense vowels respectively.
In these lessons, however, we will stick to lax/tense definition, though.
What is a difference
A tense vowel requires you to use a lot of facial muscles to produce it. Try to say them yourself and you will see.
A lax vowel, on the other hand, is very reduced and shortened. When producing a lax vowel sound your face doesn’t need to move much at all. Mostly you only need to move the back of your tongue and your throat. These sounds are very distinguished from most other languages.
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American English Consonants
| In the Beginning | At the Center | Final | |||
| Unvoiced | Voiced | Unvoiced | Voiced | Unvoiced | Voiced |
| Parry | very | afraid | avoid | Off | of |
| Ferry | zoo | races | raises | Face | phase |
| Stew | do | pressure | pleasure | Crush | garage |
| Two | joke | petal | pedal | Not | nod |
| Choke | that | gaucho | gouger | Rich | ridge |
| Think | gum | ether | either | Tooth | smooth |
A consonant is a sound that causes two points of your mouth to come into contact, in three locations—the lips, the tip of the tongue, and the throat. That’s actually what does not happen in vowels sounds, as nothing in the mouth touches anything else in the mouth when we pronounce a vowel sound.
A consonant can either be unvoiced or voiced. The unvoiced is the sound that is whispered and voiced is one that is spoken out clearly. Well, there are probably analogies in your own language, but if there are none – it is easy to understand once you compare the sounds.
Again check this book out and buy if you really want to improve your accent. It is very professionally written book that will definitely give you some insights into the process of improving your accent.
Some Notes before FareWell.
-You might find in some dictionaries that there are two more distinct characters – an upside down V – [ʌ] and another character that is an upside-down e [ə], the schwa. In American English they are pronounced the same, so since you can’t hear the difference between these two sounds, in our lessons we’ll just be using the upside-down e to indicate the schwa sound. It is pronounced uh.
- Another two sounds we will not differentiate between are [ä] and [ɔ]. Yes, they are different , as in the first one is pronounced as ah, and the second one is pronounced as aw. This aw sound has a “back East” sound to it, and it is very rare in USA, so we will not be including it.
- R can be considered a semivowel. Remember that in consonants something in a mouth has to touch something else in the mouth – this does not really occur that much in the case of R, so for the sake of utility we will treat it as a vowel in our lessons, rather than a consonant.
- [äu] is usually used to indicate the sound ow, which would be ah + ooh. This may have been accurate at some point in some locations, but now it is generally pronounced as [æo]. Town is [tæon], how is [hæo], loud is [læod], and etc.
- Besides voiced and unvoiced, there is also a distinction in consonants into sibilants and plosives. When you say the [s] sound, you can feel the air sliding out over the tip of your tongue—this is a sibilant. When you say the [p] sound, you can feel the air popping out from between your lips—this is a plosive. Be aware that there are two sounds that are sometimes mistakenly taught as sibilants, but are actually plosives: [th] and [v].
Welcome to my ABSOLUTELY FREE Spoken English Tutorial video series.
This is going to be a 5-7 parts video series where I will talk about the solutions to the problems that most people experience with spoken English.
My Videos Will Help You If You Want To :
- Get a high-paying job in your country
- Pass an English exam, such as TOEFL or IELTS (or maybe even GRE Verbal)…
- Improve your love relationship – this is for those girls and guys who marry people from the USA/UK/Canada…
- Become proud of yourself for the fact that you will have actually mastered a worthwhile skill, such as English…
Okay, Let’s Move On With My Spoken English Tutorial!
Watch it till the end, and let me know if you have any questions/feedback. (The more feedback you give me, the more I can “finetune” the lessons to address your specific problems, so do it – contact me.)
Oka-ay, you have been searching for a way to go about learning english online and for free? Welcome to my Spoken English tutorial video series.
(This is Part 1 of the series. There are currently 7 parts available. You will eventually get them if you are in my email list. If you are not, then you need to subscribe – scroll up to the top of this page, look at the right sidebar, and enter your name and email into the box that asks you to.)
In this part, I will talk about what you need to know before you can improve your spoken English.
“Of course, before we start doing anything, we need to have the right foundation, the right mindset, and the right understanding of the journey that we are about to embark on.”
I Will Tell You About My Experience…
First, I was not born in the UK or in the USA. Do you want to know my nationality? I’m Vietnamese – quite a non-English nationality, isn’t it?
That means that you don’t have to be physically located in either of these countries (or any other English speaking country, for that matter) in order to become successful at speaking English with confidence.
Second, I actually learnt a lot of English in my highschool and was one of the top students in my class. However, when I started making native English friends on the Internet, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t communicate with them with ease… It was quite an embarassing revelation and a big hit to my ego.
However, after I’ve acquired these Internet friends, I started to gradually improve my spoken English (and just my overall ability to communicate in English) as we often used TeamSpeak and Skype to talk to each other.
Of course, acquiring friends on the Internet is not the whole story – there were many other “little tricks” that helped me a lot on my journey of learning English, and I would love to share them with you, because I think that you deserve to have the kind of English you want, and you deserve the success in your life.
However, you may be asking me…
But How Exactly Good Your Spoken English Is Right Now, An?
Right now, I have absolutely no problem understanding and communicating with native English speakers, and that includes Canadians, Americans, British people, and others. (Remember – I was not born in an English speaking country, and my spoken English used to suck, too!)
I also have no problem passing job interviews that test my knowledge of English – it just doesn’t even cross my mind that I can even have any problems in this area.
Whatever the case, the main point is that you can definitely become as good as I am at spoken English – that’s for sure.
Now, This Is Just The Tip Of The Iceberg…
I know a couple “secret tips and techniques” for improving your spoken English, and I will be revealing them to you one by one in my Tutorial series. Contact me to tell me your exact problems in spoken English, and I will create a tutorial video/edit my existing videos to address your problem.
These tutorials are not “Practice if you wish” types. If you are serious about improving your spoken English, then you must go through these lessons and practice.
I think the main reasons why certain people do not succeed at learning how to speak English fluently and without accent are:
- They are not persistent enough
- They are not learning English the right way, and as I have covered in the video, learning how to speak English by reading textbooks in highschool classes is definitely not the right way to go about it.
Tell me what you think!
Leave a reply below – show me that you are alive!
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Hello, now I’ve been refraining from offering you this, because I didn’t want to show you any English Speaking Software that I didn’t try myself first. I am working on my other posts that will cover some of the more popular How To Improve English Speaking topics, but now I want to talk to you guys about one very good product.
I am talking about Pronunciation Patterns software – an English Speaking software.
It is a software that teaches you how to have good pronunciation and increase your Reading, Listening and overall Speaking skills in English.
The software was made by a Chinese immigrant who graduated from MBA and decided to create a product that would help those who had accents, bad pronunciation to fix their shortcomings.
What does the program offer you?
The software includes :
-over 100 phonics rules , alse groups 4000 words by phonetic patterns, all of which are to help you practice English Pronunciation and learn new English words. Besides there is an option of choosing the range of vocabulary you want to learn. What I mean is that you could choose, for example, to learn all words, TOEFL words, GRE words only or anything in a similar fashion
-mouth exercises
It has an integrated video clips that show you
-what happens on the level of anatomy inside our mouth whenever we speak
-a woman pronouncing the word/sound, so that you can mirror her lips movements as well. A good feature indeed.
and much more
Besides this English Speaking Software has a trial download, although the trial really does not offer you much.
Here are some reviews from amazon
-Excellent program for those who want to improve pronunciation of American English. It is so good probably because it was developed by a Chinese immigrant who knows exactly the difficulties of speaking English as a second language.
The software contains interesting features, including easy link to online dictionaries, mouth video clips, text to speech and other interesting resources.
The layout of the software and sound grouping by pattern are very intuitive and user-friendly.
Online assistance provided was first-class, prompt and customized.
I recommend it for beginners and advanced students who want to improve their oral communication skills in English. – Marcelo Seto
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-I have bought this Pronunciation Patterns Professional for one year.Now i feel very confident to pronounce a word; and I can make other people understand my point clearly. The program has so many functions; and I enjoy the mouth clips most since I can figure out how to say the vowel or consonant correctly after watching the clips. To adults, watching the movement of the mouth is the best way to learn a language since the accent of adults are strongly influenced by a language so it is very difficult to change the accent of an adult. Therefore, knowing how to move your mouth when pronouncing vowels and consonants will help adults to”mold” their mouths to change their accent.
The last word is that I rate this program 5 stars for its perfect function. -Linh T.Nguyen.
I honestly think that from what I’ve seen (and I’ve tried the program myself) that the product is of very good quality. Amazon clients agree with me, giving an average mark of 5 to this English Speaking software.
Well, it is a wonder you’ve read it till this point – that means you should definately consider buying it on amazon .
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(click here to see available Spoken English Tutorials)
Topic is peculiar especially to me, because I have met 2 type of completely opposite situations.
While trying to give you English Speaking Tips on How to Improve English Speaking I will try to make conclusions from looking at 2 extremes. So let’s see.
First, the person has been exposed to just way too much Grammar. Writing, reading and very very very little Speaking. I think Japan is one of such countries. To an extent, in fact, most schools in most non-English countries are like that. But no worries. It is ok.
Second, are the people who have been exposed to just way too LITTLE grammar, but have learned how to imitate English through mass media/games/job/etc. I don’t have many other words to describe their speech, except for “trying to imitate”. No offense. But it is funny.
So what happens with the first category? Say, for example, you learned all your years how to use Present tense, Past tense, Past Continuous and etc. Or Gerunds, to Verbs and a lot more. I myself have to revise my Grammar nowadays – I don’t remember these rules by heart now! The truth is native speakers don’t think about these rules. They don’t! They just speak intuitively from whatever their background has taught them. Unconscious competence is the word.
But what happens to you if you actually go this route? Chances are your logical English will be the one improving. What I mean is that you will learn how English language is co nstructed. In your head only, though. When you open your mouth you might encounter difficulties expressing your ideas fluently.
Example. We had a student from a similar background. That was time when I was in Excel School, London (a good place, by the way ). The man was 70 years old, if I estimate correctly, and he was from Japan. What he told us is that he was exposed to a lot of Grammar, and not any seconds in Speaking. Classes helped him a bit, but it was evident that while ignoring practicing speaking, his ability to construct sentences while speaking English on the flow were minimal.
Corollary ?
Now let’s at an example of people who disregard Grammar completely
Second example of extremes would be people who are fans of English speaking, especially if they don’t live in an English speaking country. Dilettantes (look up the word.). They speak English “fluently” as in they don’t have difficulty expressing their ideas non-stop, but they have trouble , and most interestingly – they don’t care about – making them Grammatically correct or learning English Speaking Tips on How To Improve English Speaking. These probably don’t even read this blog 
.
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So what you have are people, who express their English through unorganised self-made structures they made for themselves. I am making generalizations, by the way, but these are people who construct quite peculiar sentences. I don’t understand them, if they are from some really foreign to me countries . But if they are from the culture I’m familiar with – I can understand them well. But the huge grammatical blunders are so evident, it is impossible not to notice. The problem can be of different degrees.
They might have learnt their way of speaking through playing Online Games (a place where people just don’t use proper English at all), or by listening to music (but not paying attention to what is actually said there). They put just enough effort to speak something, not to speak it correctly. At least they like the language.
Well, depending on your goals , you might care about it or not. I’m not here to be a teacher of life. The main thing that is important about learning English is to know for what reasons you are doing it.
But if you want to speak English fluently and correctly, you will have to learn basic grammar and speak A Lot and imitate English speaking from reputable sources. (not chatting to friends from online games!)
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Hello, guys, how do you do? A new topic on How To Improve English Speaking today – is it necessary to join an English class or you can learn English by yourself?
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You might be interested in the issue or not care at all, but you should still read just in case.
MY TAKE ON THE SUBJECT.
Let me tell you my story – yes, I have been learning English since 4th grade and back then I went to extra courses in a pretty reputable English school in Moscow. I didn’t want to study – it was my parents’ decision. But the courses were forced on me, and I studied.
Result – For all the years following I was a top student in English classes in school and university. The teachers basically were catalysts for my improvement – they were there to correct me and they were there to guide me while I was in my initial stage of growth. As with any other skill – get the foundation right and go into the right direction.
But the question remains : Could I have learnt all this alone? The answer is always the same – yes, but there are so many tools nowadays you can use to leverage your learning speed.
Look at business owners. They don’t do everything themselves – that would be humanly impossible. They have others working for them. That way you save your time.
HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OUT OF YOUR LESSONS
The universe rewards the proactive people who are willing to learn. Yes I was more successful than my peers in English, but it took me several years and I improved very slowly at first. At the age of 16 I still couldn’t communicate fluently with Natives (I WAS a top student in school still, but my progress was slow)
So let me tell you my second experience – This time I was preparing for GRE and TOEFL exams.
I attended the classes and this time I commited to learning. It was no longer a 4th grader going with the flow, hoping chips will fall where they may. I told myself that no matter what I will get my scores from 1100 to 1450. And there were others – people who didn’t want to learn. They were casual about it and had no idea what were they doing there. As a consequence there were two major differences between us :
1 – I commited myself to classes.
I did homework. [ads test_one] They didn’t.Doing homework is something you must do. It is one thing to have teacher explain something exciting during classes and another thing to revise it at home. It is a common experience for students to forget everything they were taught recently at classes. Repetition is the mother of skill.
2 – I was proactive during classes. I asked questions.
This is the second point. No one will understand if you have a problem or not unless you speak up and participate. If you don’t ask now – the question will remain unanswered . So it is logical , that you should be proactive. Not for teacher to praise you – but for yourself, because ultimately this action directly helps YOU.
In other words, as a general tip for How To Improve English Speaking you should not hope that your teacher will learn the English for you. For example, vocabulary is something you should learn on your own, because it requires time and repetition and classes can’t be held 24/7.
Those who were active – improved. Those who were passive, were to afraid to ask questions, didn’t do homework, didn’t study extra at home – improved little.
So there you go. Enjoy!
If you can’t understand what your partner is saying – it might end up to be a huge hindrance to the effectiveness of your interpersonal English communication, so when trying to figure out how to improve English Speaking, you should not neglect this area.
[ads test_two] The speech is too fast, or the accent is too strong – it is all a part of the same problem. So, again, you will need a step-by-step plan on solving the problem.
Figure out exactly what you don’t understand
Figuring out the problem is already half of the solution, as they say.
Do you not understand the structure of sentences, or do you not understand plainly because you lack vocabulary? Or just you lack comprehension of the culture, that makes the slangs thrown at you to be alien language?
There is an example of a movie Fight Club, that I watched a long time ago in English, and I didn’t understand a single thing in it. I turned up the subtitles and still had a hard time understanding it. Too slang-heavy, cool, badass movie.
Fight club has a deep meaning, as well, so there were a lot of metaphors and it was hard to catch their meanings, but anyway.
I ended up just not doing anything about it. But years later, I watched again some of it on youtube and realized that I have improved a lot in comprehending the meaning. If I try to backtrack what exactly happened and what was conducive to my improvement, then it would probably boil down to these several points
Expose yourself to a variety of spoken and written English.
All I am doing is trying to backward engineer my results, so it is all subjective, but for the heck of it, it probably works.
You have to start listening a lot to a variety of English. And a lot. And that includes written English.
You have to start listening to academics lectures, to cartoons, to movies and, if you have an opportunity, to real people. I have to actually ask “Sorry, can you repeat yourself?” a lot lately, if I am talking to people with specific accents.
Very important – get used to the structure of sentences and grammar. They help to really understand some minute information nuances.
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Do not use subtitles
All they end up doing is diverting your attention to them. You end up reading them, not listening to the actual speech being said. Try it for yourself and see your behavorial patterns. I bet you will read them more than you actually listen to speech. They might help at initial stage, but just don’t get used to it.
I personally would turn them up sometimes, but usually I just turn them off. Expose your brain to too much simplicity and it will get lazy and end up not improving much.
Vocabulary
Some smart people say “just listen to English and you will guess the meaning of words automatically”. Well, no. There was a reason my listening comprehension increased dramatically after learning GRE list, which has like 3500 weird words.
When you hear such words as “ameliorate”, “abate”, “denunciate” there are multiple ways a human can interpret them. As a matter of fact, I was once a believer that you will just “get the meaning of words”, but when I realized my scores in GRE really suffered despite of this flawless strategy I started really thinking deeper.
Put just extra effort into learning some exact meanings and you will be rewarded. That’s probably the core of how to improve spoken English.
Good luck with your studies on English language, folks.