If you’ve decided “I need to finally do something about my speaking skills and
I want to do it as soon as possible”, Then forget about everything else but
listening and actually speaking.Forget about writing, reading and grammar.
To really develop or improve significantly or master speaking you need to concentrate solely
on speaking for some period of time and make time for it. Let all of your time be spent on speaking.
Obviously you can learn all of it together - reading, writing but if you focus
on just speaking you will have a lot more progress in this one
area in a much less amount of time than if you were to spend it learning it all at once.
If you want improvements and you can’t obtain them doing what you’re doing now,
the following is logical - you need to switch things up. Start doing things differently
and this might be exactly the thing you need.
Plus I guarantee that by simply working on your speaking skills you’ll boost your confidence,
it’ll help you with vocabulary and a lot of grammar rules are going to start to make sense.
And all of these things are going to happen organically and listening
plays a very important part in this process. You have to listen to English a lot. Your brain
accumulates data and lets you use it in situations when it’s needed. By listening
you’re getting used to the intonation and stress patterns, to the proper ways of pronouncing words,
to the proper ways of pronouncing the sounds not mention the language per se.
One tip that I’d like to give you based on my experience:
Get out of your head. Don’t think about sounding perfect or speaking like a native,
don’t be afraid of making mistakes and actually go for it. Let yourself make
mistakes and suck. You’ll learn from them. Just let all of this go and just practice.
Just speak. When you actually practice regularly improvement will inevitably follow.
So for starters all you will have to do is just copy native speakers. Just repeat after them.
pretty simple right? But I keep literally raving about this because if you do it, if you really
put in time and effort it really works. It’s one of the best if not the best method there is to
improve or perfect your speaking skills. Focus just on repeating what
you hear and just on the context. It might be difficult at the beginning to repeat
even one sentence without dropping words or making mistakes. But it will get better and better.
And this would be the second important thing - make sure you repeat exactly what people say.
So put on subtitles for starters for sure. If you work on this on your own then please
record yourself because otherwise you might not catch or even notice that you’re repeating
not exactly what was being said. And you need to be precise so as not to learn incorrect patterns.
Do it for as long as you can and as many times a day as you can.
Start with one sentence. Then more. And then you can even repeat conversations. Doing this will
allow you to understand and memorize what and how to ask and answer in different situations.
First choose to repeat what you understand. If you want to you can search for the meanings of
unknown words. But your main focus should be on speaking. A lot a lot of speaking.
You need to get used to this process per se. You need to get used to opening your mouth
and producing English words and sentences. And sometimes it might be really tiresome.
So something simple for starters. One line,
one sentence, but you will be repeating it for the whole day or perhaps even longer.
Accurate pronunciation is a very important part of speaking and I want to recommend to you
a very useful app that will help you with your pronunciation - “Elsa Speak”. It’s
an app that will help you improve your pronunciation, intonation and fluency.
This is the first of its kind app as it pinpoints your pronunciation mistakes using
cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology.
You can go ahead and download it right now for free and get 7 days of pro membership
for free., the link is in the description.
ELSA Speak currently has 1,600+ lessons and 40+ topics for you to practice and
great community features for you to learn from people all over the world.
Community feature that allows you to add your friends, colleagues
and compete with a Leaderboard, as well as
“Ask for help” byposting a word you’re struggling with and having friends help you correct it.
It also has an amazing dictionary that shows you how to pronounce any words or phrases.
Now let’s proceed to the practicing part. Let’s say you’d like to practice some
conversations. It’s going to be a bit more advanced as you will hear
one line and then you’ll need to read your line out loud without prior hearing it and you get
instant feedback on how you have done, compared to a native speaker.
If you’ve mispronounced any words you can click on them and see which sounds were incorrect
and listen to how they are supposed to be pronounced and practice them. Also you can
click on “watch other people say this” and watch how native speakers say this phrase.
So as you can see you can practice saying whole sentences, separate words and even
individual sounds and get instant feedback compared to a native speaker.
In addition you will be able to pick up phrases and even sentences for
daily communication and increase your vocabulary.
With this app, anyone can speak English.
I also have an exclusive discount for you guys to get
85% off of ELSA lifetime membership and 40% off of a one year membership.
All you need to do is just click the link down below in the description.
Then you can try to shadow native speakers. When we shadow we mostly focus on the accuracy
of our pronunciation. However shadowing is not only about improving your pronunciation,
it’s also about getting used to speaking, learning speaking patterns, the natural way
of using the language and of course vocabulary. I have videos on shadowing and how to improve
your speaking using it. Like we take scenes from movies or TV series, break the pronunciation down
and I show you how to practice. So if you don’t know how to do this you can watch and use those.
You can mix business with pleasure and copy your favorite YouTubers that you
watch to learn English. You’ll kill two birds with one stone.
You’ll be repeating the useful information they give while working on your speaking skills.
Just simply sitting by yourself and shadowing and copying will be 70% of your success.
It’s that simple. But at the same time you’re
going to have to discipline yourself because you need to be consistent.
Because while having conversations with other people is definitely something
you need and they will help you with your communication skills,
developing your speaking skills is a little bit of a different thing.
When you’re alone and shadowing or trying to speak using your own words, you make all sorts
of mistakes (grammar, pronunciation mistakes), you correct them, say those words again and
again until they come out easily and correctly. Repetition- this is how we learn. If you repeat
something 50 times you’ll remember it. And that’s the whole point of this - be
able to speak freely without even thinking. And you can most definitely do this with
a teacher if you can’t do this on your own, you just have to find the right one.
But unfortunately when you’re in a conversation with someone you won’t
interrupt it to correct your mistakes or say a sentence a couple of times to get it right.
So as useful and important as both of these things are, they aim for different
goals. Thus we need both of them. Think of shadowing as a repetition
before giving a performance. Actors do this, people before
giving speeches or presentations do this. When we were in school we’d always rehearse our rhymes or
prepare and rehearse answers before exams. And even when people are about to have important
conversations or meetings they rehearse or at least go over what they want to say.
And that’s why I’m saying that this method will help you not
just to speak English but speak English fluently. You’ll be repeating and learning at the same time
because when you repeat something a lot of times in a row you memorize it. You’ll be
literally learning statements and questions, the way native speakers naturally say or ask them
and you’ll be able to recognise the situations in which you can use them naturally.
Moreover by doing this regularly you’ll be able to express your own thoughts with ease.
You’ll see! Needed words and expressions will pop up in your head just like that and it’ll seem like
sentences build by themselves and the language just flows. And in terms of grammar you’ll be like
native speakers, you’ll be like:- “well this is the way I’m supposed to say it. I just know it.”
Now I’ve heard so many times people say “It feels weird to talk to myself and I don’t have anyone to
talk to”. Honestly nothing I say will help you if you’ve already decided that you can’t do anything.
It’s important to be in the right mindset. However you can certainly use help in this process.
You can work with teachers. You can find someone to talk to,
to have real conversations and use everything you’ve learned in the comments section under this
video or under any video or post about English. This way is very easy, effective and free.
You can use different websites for languages exchange to speak with native speakers.
And you know Don’t stress yourself out with difficult sentences and super smart words.
You’re not an encyclopedia or a professor. Frankly speaking people really appreciate simplicity.
Just analyse yourself in your native language. Do you feel comfortable talking to people who
use super big words and terms? You don’t have to prove anything to anyone but yourself. So
just enjoy yourself. If you don’t enjoy speaking English it’ll always feel like a burden.
If you’re having lessons with a teacher ask them to switch the focus of your lessons to
speaking but only in English. The moment you cross the threshold of
the classroom you forget about your native language and use only English.
It’s not going to be easy but the results will be worth it.
So the point is to concentrate solely on speaking for some period of time.
It won’t be long until you see huge improvements in your speech.
It might slightly vary for each person but you will undoubtably see them.
You’ll be more relaxed about having conversations and words will come out easier,
you’ll stop translating in your head and you’ll develop the feel for the language.
Now don’t forget to head down to the description box and get your discount on the Elsa Speak app.
I highly recommend using this it, because it's almost like having a pronunciation
coach in your pocket 24/7. Hope you enjoyed the video. And I’ll see you in the next one.