Welcome to 2022 and welcome to E2 English. My name is Jay. In this video,
we're going to talk about how you can improve your English language skills
this year to become as fluent as an English native speaker in reading, writing, listening
and speaking. You can do it and I'm going to show you how.
If you're watching this, it means that you want to learn English in 2022. Maybe you
want to go from a beginner to an intermediate or an intermediate to advanced. Either way,
you have to start thinking about it now. And the first thing you should do is download the
free PDF goal setter from the description below. You're going to use the downloadable
goal setter to set your daily goals and stick to them so you can achieve your main goal of becoming
fluent in English. We'll be working through this PDF as we move through the video together,
download it, print it out, stick it on your fridge, use it. Okay, so when we talk about
learning English, what do we really mean? Because we need to break this big task of learning English
down into smaller tasks. By doing this, you can make your goals achievable.
First things first, when I say learn English, I really mean learn four things.
Learn how to speak English, learn how to listen to English, learn how to read English, and learn how
to write English. And of course, you don't just learn it like this. Learning how to speak listen,
read and write is not a yes or no thing. It's a spectrum. Or you can think about them as levels.
There are three broad levels of English language proficiency, level one, beginner,
level two, intermediate level three advanced, or you can break this down a little further and add
lower intermediate and upper intermediate. And if you want, you can add your test prep
scores as well. But you can't just say my English is level four upper intermediate or level three
intermediate because English is made of four main skills and your four skills might be a different
levels. For example, your reading and listening might be at level three intermediate, but your
speaking and writing might be at level two lower intermediate or level four upper intermediate.
If you want to learn English in 2022, then the first thing you need to do is find out what
level your English is for each of the four skills. If you go to E2 English, you can take our
placement test, it will show you what level your English is. The test only takes about 15 minutes.
Check it out and on your downloadable goal setter complete the table with your English level.
This is your starting point. Once you know your level, you might want to ask yourself which of the
four skills do you want to improve? Do you just want to improve your speaking or your speaking and
listening? That is? Do you want to become good at conversational English? Or do you want to improve
your reading or maybe reading and writing? That is, do you want to improve your academic English?
There are two things to keep in mind when thinking about the four skills. You can put
the four skills into two groups, they're called Understanding skills and producing skills.
The understanding skills include listening and reading. And the producing skills include speaking
and writing. Can you see the difference? You understand listening and reading and you produce
speaking and writing. It's important to understand the difference here because
these are very different skills and actually different parts of your brain.
It's also important to understand that practising listening improves your reading and vice versa.
And practising speaking improves your writing and vice versa. But practising listening and reading
doesn't really help your speaking and writing and vice versa.
In general, you'll probably find it easier to learn to listen and read and more challenging
to learn to speak and write, or it just takes a little bit longer to learn to speak and write?
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, which is the most challenging skill.
On your goal setter a downloadable PDF write down which skills you most want to improve
in 2022 in order from one to four. Okay, so we've broken our large task of learning
English into the four skills, and you now know what you want to focus on.
But let's look more closely at each skill and work out what each skill is made of so you know exactly
what you need to do to improve. Let's talk about how to improve your listening in 2022. If you want
to improve your listening, then you need to focus on two things. You need to focus on vocabulary
building, and speaking. What? To improve your listening you need to improve your speaking.
Kind of. You see, listening is made of speaking, when we listen, we don't actually do anything at
all we just listen. But what are you listening to? You're listening to spoken English.
You're not listening to punk rock music. Or the sound of wind in the trees.
You're listening to spoken English, and spoken English consists of English sounds.
You see, sentences are made of words, and words are made of syllables, and syllables are made of
sounds. There are 44 individual sounds in spoken English. Do you know them all. There are also
other parts of spoken English as well, not just the 44 vowel and consonant sounds. For example,
spoken English has word stress and sentence stress and intonation and connected speech and pausing
and rhythm. On your downloadable goalsetter for daily practice write Listen to English,
and in brackets write 'Notice how native speakers speak'. Feel free to write down
your own goals as well. You should also check out our podcast called everyday English with E2.
In each episode, we focus on English grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation. It's an
excellent way to practice your listening skills by listening to people like me.
I won't go deeply into it here, but it's up to you to begin to notice how native English
speakers talk because the way that we speak is very different to the way that we write.
In other words, written English is different to spoken English. There are words, but speaking is
much more than that. Make sure you subscribe to this YouTube channel to learn all about spoken
English to improve your listening. Let's talk about how to improve your reading skills in 2022.
Like listening, reading includes two things, vocab and grammar. On your downloadable
goals setter write down, learn two new words every day. Or you can write whatever you want,
but make sure it's achievable and you stick to it. Did you know that as a native English speaker
I know about 20,000 English words? So if you learn two new words a day, it will only take
you 10,000 days to learn English. I'm just joking. It's actually much simpler than that.
As we discussed in this video, which you need to watch and which is in the description below.
You only need to learn 550 words to know 94% of conversational English.
This is an important video to watch. And it tells you which 550 words you need to learn.
It's important that you learn at least one or two new words every single day and stick to it.
Make it a habit. But choose your words carefully use the words from that video I just mentioned,
they are super important. Let's talk about how to improve your writing in 2022. So if
you have the vocabulary then writing is all about grammar. And did you know that English
has about 450 grammar rules? The good news is that you should concentrate on what's called
high frequency grammar. What I mean by that is some grammar rules pop up all the time,
like plural nouns, or the present simple, or some prepositions. Most grammar you hardly ever see,
so you don't need to worry about it. Check out the videos we have here on YouTube. Our grammar
videos are the best, we make it simple. And on your downloadable goal setter write 'watch one
E2 English video per week', or you can write down your own daily goal as well. The easiest way to
remember to do that is just simply subscribing to this YouTube channel. We'll make learning grammar
simple. Let's talk about how to improve your speaking in 2022. So if you know your grammar,
and you have the vocabulary, speaking is all about pronunciation. Tell me,
how many sounds do you think there are in English in total? Take a guess. Let me help you out.
So we know that there are 44 individual single vowel and consonant sounds like a, e, p, d, t, j
etc. Okay, so 44 single sounds, but there are another 144 consonant cluster sounds like str
S.T.r as in street or cr C.R as in crinkle, Sm S.M as in smile. So, all up, there are 188 sounds of
English. But before you turn this video off and give up because learning English is too hard.
You already know most of these sounds, you don't need to learn them all. At E2 English, we have an
amazing pronunciation course called Essential pronunciation that takes you through the 44
single sounds. It helps you with your listening and your speaking skills. We also have another
course called advanced pronunciation that focuses on the 144 consonant clusters. Both of these
courses are awesome if you want to improve your speaking. Let me give you a final tip
for learning English in 2022. Okay, so you need to be persistent. You need to be organised. You
need to do something every single day. Really, you need to make learning English a habit.
Make sure you learn a couple of new words or listen to some English or write one or two
sentences every single day. Even if you can't be bothered, just do it. Learning English is a
big goal. So doing a little bit every single day will make it possible and achievable. And with
our help, you can do it. My name is Jay and I will see you soon to teach you more English this year.