Speak English Fast
English is one of the most spoken languages in the world
and as a business language, it’s worth learning it. While it is argued that to
achieve complete mastery of the language can take around 7 to 10 years, lots of
methods and tips are available to help learners speed up the process and help them speak
correctly in less than a year. Also, if you can devote 5 hours or more a day, you
will see amazing results in less than six months. One common problem that
arises is that most English learners understand around 50% of what is being
said to them but can’t actually speak. Worse, they lose their words when
starting a conversation. Because English learners want to speak fluently in a
short period of time, these problems definitely need fixing.
In an effort to help learners who struggle to speak
English fluently, we have put in place some methods that will greatly boost their
confidence and help them speak like native speakers.
Start with the basics
If you’re just starting, make sure to learn the 300 most used words in English
along with the numbers and alphabet letters. Most English speakers use around
300 to 1000 words in their daily conversation. You might need more or less, but
these 300 words will definitely come back regularly. Make a list of every word
you find worth using in your conversation and be familiar with or simply memorize
them all. Some of them include articles, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and more.
if you are concerned about tenses, I recommend you focus on the present, past
simple and future tenses. While learning these words, make sure you also listen
to them on your phone or online to get an overview of how the sound of that
word might be. Lastly, always build basic sentences with these words so as to
know how to use them in real conversations.
English dialogues
At this point, you are pretty much ready to start using
what you have learned. Get yourself a lot of short English dialogues about various
topics such as medicine, friendship, job search, job interviews, business, travel,
etc. and read them aloud. Take time to learn the sentences therein to make sure
they sink in and pay attention to their construction and grammatical rules.
Once you are familiar with these sets of sentences, it will be easy for you to
use them in any conversation. More importantly, you won’t find it difficult to
learn new words. You can also edit those dialogues to adapt them to your daily
vocabulary-words needs or simply create yours that fit in each context (exactly
following the same sentence construction).
Listen more basic English
Now it’s time to get things more exciting. Until now, you
have only been listening to yourself or to some random people who may or may
not struggle to speak English fluently. To actually test your listening skills,
you need to listen to native speakers. For that, YouTube should be your best
friend. Type in whatever you like “how to choose a laptop”, “How to speak in
public” in English (or your target language), not in your mother tongue and
then click on the video you prefer. Now that the video is playing, click on
caption or cc, then click on the
settings icon and click on playback
speed. Next you want to click on custom
and drag the bar to 0.8x. Voila! You
can now watch the video slower with an auto-generated caption. You can drag it
to less than 0.8x, but I don’t
recommend doing that. Make sure the videos are from native English speakers.
Watching TV news in English is also another great option.
It will help you greatly improve on your listening skills and discover new
vocabulary words.
This is a good method because it actually helps you learn something in particular in English. Don’t look for grammar-related videos as these may confuse you a little. Take time acquiring the language naturally rather than focusing on the technicality of the language. Also, listen as much as you can with or without the captions or sub-titles.
Read
Once on the listening stage, you will notice that your grammar skill will build up naturally. It will now make sense to jump into a more organized, structured way to learn the language. That’s when reading comes in. You can start off with story-telling books and gradually move on to more complex books like novels, magazines, etc. Don’t worry if you come across new or difficult words while reading, just focus on the story being told. Words are generally understood in the sentence in which they are used. But in case a particular word is key to understand a sentence, you will definitely have to look it up in a dictionary.
Learn a little bit of grammar
Now that you have acquired most
of the language naturally through listening and reading, you are now mature
enough to get to the rules of the language. Since you are now familiar with the
language, it won’t be difficult to grab all the grammatical rules used in it.
Some of the key topics are:
-Verbs and tenses
-Adjectives and adverbs
-Nouns
-Pronouns
-Questions
-Concord
-Determiners
-Sentence types (simple,
compound and complex sentences)
-Clauses
Some topics might be easier than others, but give yourself time to understand them well and use them in sentences. Do a lot of exercises to test your knowledge and check the answers if need be.
Start short conversations
This is probably the most important part of the learning
process. Your goal is to speak fluently, so more speaking practice will help. It
will allow you put in practice what you have learned including the
pronunciation and sentence construction. This is the stage where many people
fail because they feel shy of making mistakes or talking to people. You shouldn’t
feel shy when it comes to speaking English because speaking a language is the
end result of our learning it. Here are things you can do to improve your English
skills:
-Record yourself speaking English
-Talk to yourself
-Join local English clubs
-Teach someone
-Find an English-speaking partner in class or online
Learn tongue twisters
This is one of the best ways to both speak fast and improve your pronunciation skills. A tongue twister is simply a series of words or sounds generally difficult to say correctly, but allow you to practice one or two sounds and help you pronounce them correctly. Some of the examples are: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper” and “Betty Botter bought some butter”.
Change the language of your devices into English
Surround yourself with English. The language of your smartphone,
tablet, and computer should be English. This will help you discover new words
and, obviously, enrich your vocabulary.
Write
Last but not least, writing will help you master the
spelling of words. It will also help you think in English and build more
meaningful and accurate sentences with respect to grammatical rules.
Conclusion
By respecting and applying these tips, you can speak English fluently in less than a year. Practice more often to keep your memory fresh..
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