Hi everyone, welcome back to English with Max. In this video I'm going to give you
some advice on how you can improve your English speaking skills all by yourself.
I get lots of messages from people asking me how they can improve their
speaking, because they don't have anyone to talk with in English. Well, don't worry,
because there are several things you can do. In this video I'll talk about four
easy and free ways you can practise speaking alone, and of course you can use
these techniques to practise any language. Before I go on, remember that
you can also follow me on social media, and if you would like to watch this with
English subtitles, you just need to turn on captions.
Now obviously the best way to improve your speaking is to talk with another
person, preferably a native speaker. But as everybody knows, it's not always easy
to find a native speaker to talk to. That's why it's good to know other ways
to practise your speaking. I also want to say that there are other more difficult
exercises you can do that I'm not going to talk about much in this video.
For example, you can choose a topic and then record yourself talking about it for one
or two minutes. Then you listen to yourself and you basically do a
self-evaluation. If you have the motivation to do that type of thing and
you can do it on a regular basis, that's wonderful. Honestly, hats off to you, you
have my respect. Those types of exercises are very effective, but they tend to be
quite difficult. And let's be honest, not many people, no matter how interested
they are in the language, find the motivation or the energy to do that.
I know that might sound a bit pessimistic, but I think I'm a realist. So today I'm
going to explain four easy ways you can work on your
English by yourself. Now when I say "easy", I don't mean that they don't require any
effort. We're still learning a language here, we're not just sitting down and
watching reality TV. You still need to work a little bit, but I don't think that
these exercises are very difficult.
The first exercise is simply reading aloud.
What does that mean? It just means taking an English text and reading it out loud.
It might be a book, a magazine or something online, like a news article or
a text from a website for learning English, such as BBC Learning English.
Just to show you, this is me reading aloud in English.
(reading) That worked well enough
for flavour, but there were many older people who couldn't manage the walk into
town or haul heavy buckets home. No one had much strength left for such chores.
This is me reading aloud in Spanish.
(reading) Sobre la mesa quedó una caja de bombones
mucho menos inocente de lo que su apariencia insinuaba. La abrí con una
mano, mientras con la otra me secaba las últimas lágrimas.
I know this might sound
really basic and you might be thinking: "How is that going to help me?"
Well, one of the difficulties when you learn a new language is getting used to moving your
mouth in different ways. A foreign language will feel different in your
mouth, and the more you practise saying words
and sentences aloud, the more natural and comfortable it will become. Speaking a
foreign language can also feel quite unnatural if you haven't done it in a
long time. I remember about two years ago I had to give a speech in German,
and although I was reading the speech, it was quite difficult because I had barely
spoken German in about eight years. My mouth just wasn't used to saying German
words anymore, so it felt quite strange. There are two things that are important
to remember if you do this exercise. Firstly, you really have to SAY the words.
Don't whisper them. This is an example of what you should NOT do.
(whispering)
Similarly, you shouldn't just vocalise the words inside your head while you move your lips.
Something like this.
(moving lips)
That is not the same. I've often done it myself.
I've often imagined saying something in a foreign language, or I practised it
inside my head, but then when I actually said it, it didn't sound how I had
imagined it. Let me know if you can relate to that. Let me know in the
comments if you've had a similar experience. The problem is that if you're
just whispering the words or saying them inside your head, you're just imagining
how you sound, but you don't actually know how you sound. And you're not
exercising all of the muscles in the mouth and the throat that you need for
speech. Secondly, when you do this exercise, you shouldn't choose texts that
are too difficult for you. For example, if you have an intermediate level, don't try
read The Economist. This isn't a vocabulary exercise. It's best if you
already know all or most of the words in the text, and you already know how to
pronounce them. Particularly if you're practising English. If it's a language
like German or Spanish that has very regular spelling, it's not so important.
But if it's English, choose a text that's easy for you to read so that you're not
constantly stopping and stumbling over words. Even most books are a bit difficult.
Unless you have a very advanced level, I recommend that you
choose articles in English textbooks or on websites that are for language
learning, for example BBC learning English or LingQ. I've already spoken
about LingQ in this video here. Basically you need to choose texts that are
appropriate for your level.
The second exercise I want to recommend is talking to yourself.
If there's no one to speak to in English, then speak to yourself.
"Hello Max, how are you today?" "I'm very well. How are you?" "Not too bad, thanks."
No. I don't actually mean like that. That would be fake and strange. But there are many
other things that you can say to yourself on a daily basis. And maybe you
already do it in your own language. So just take some of the things that you
think normally, and say them aloud in English. For example, in the morning you
might say to yourself: "I'm going to brush my teeth.
Ooh, it's getting late. I'd better hurry up."
We as humans have some very deep and interesting thoughts sometimes.
At lunchtime you might say: "What am I going to have for lunch?"
"I think I'll have pasta. Even though I had it yesterday. And the day before that.
How do people go gluten-free?"
It's just little things like that.
Obviously it's a little easier if you live by yourself. It can be a little
strange and embarrassing saying these things when there are other people in
the vicinity, but if they love you, then they should support you.
The third exercise is imitation (or mimicking). This is when you listen to a piece of audio
and you pause it every few seconds to repeat what the speaker said.
This is particularly good for pronunciation practice. I don't think I need to talk
about it very much, because I think it's quite self-explanatory, but in any case,
here is an example of me doing this.
(demonstrating imitation)
The fourth exercise is very similar to the last one, but it's a little more difficult.
This exercise is called shadowing. When I was studying interpreting,
we were repeatedly told to practise shadowing. So how does shadowing work?
Shadowing is when you listen to a language (it's much easier if you use
earphones or headphones) and you repeat exactly what the person is saying
without pausing the audio. So if you do it well, you will be saying exactly what
the speaker is saying, but with a slight delay. Normally about a second.
This is me demonstrating shadowing.
(demonstrating shadowing)
Like I said, it's normally easier if you use headphones,
but I showed it to you this way so that you could also hear the
original audio. Just like for the reading aloud exercise, it's important that you
don't choose material that's too difficult for you. For example, if you
have an intermediate level, don't use podcasts or TV shows that are aimed at
native speakers. If you do that, you'll just get lost and frustrated and we
don't want that. In this video I talk about websites where you can get free
audio for beginner and intermediate levels. I'll put the link in the description.
I think the benefits of shadowing are pretty obvious. It's good
for pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure and speed.
Those are the four exercises, guys.
The last thing I want to say is that you will only notice the
benefits of these if you do them on a regular basis. That doesn't mean that you
have to do all of them every single day, but I recommend doing one or two of them
(whichever ones you prefer) for a few minutes at least every second day.
If you can do more than that, that's great. The more you can do the better.
But even just doing a tiny bit on a regular basis will help you.
You can put reminders in your phone in case you forget.
I hope you found this useful. Let me know in the comments if you've tried any of
these exercises, or let me know what you do to practise your speaking.
See you next time!
Frank fell down... Frank fell down.
(burps) Burped.
... mouth and the throat... th th th.
... well enough... shit.
That was a good example.
... strength left for...