Good morning, good afternoon and good evening! Welcome to Smashing English!
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Hi my name is Laura and I'm an English teacher, but you don't need me! English teachers are so
last year! I'm only joking, I still would like a job please. But today we are going to be looking
at how you can improve your English on your own without the use of a teacher, I am going to give
you some amazing exercises that you can do for free, you're welcome! Okay so the first thing
you can do relates to being understood, I teach a lot of people every single day and something that
always comes up is people saying, 'oh sometimes when I speak English, people can't understand
me and people don't know what I'm saying to them and it's really frustrating,' so if you want to
be clearer and understood here's a really good exercise you can do, you will need your phone,
now I have an iPhone but I think most phones have this feature, most smartphones anyway, but i'm not
sure, I don't know I'm not a tech expert! If you have an iPhone, definitely, this is what you do,
so open up any kind of notes app and see if you can find the text to speech function, on an iPhone
it's this little microphone down there, so what happens is you speak to the microphone hello hello
hello and it types for you so it types what it thinks you said, so this is what I want you to do,
I want you to think of a story, maybe it's a fairy tale, maybe it's a book that you love,
maybe it's the story of a film, maybe it's a story that happened to you and what I want you to do is
I want you to tell that story to text to speech, let me show you what I mean: in The Parent Trap,
two twins Hallie and Annie decide to switch places so that their parents will get back
together. So that's a nice short version but you can do as long as you want, you can tell the whole
story of the lord of the rings if you want. Now why is this useful? Let me tell you, so if you'll
notice with the text-to-speech function, you have to be really clear so that the robot understands
you, we're talking to a piece of technology here we're not talking to another human being
so the way I spoke when I was talking to the text to speech function, I was speaking much more
clearly, I was spacing out my words, I was making sure that I finished every word, so the reason why
I recommend this is because it is a great way to practice speaking so that you can be understood,
you know there is nothing wrong with if you are saying something to someone and it's important,
talk to them like they are a text-to-speech function, you know, like you can talk to them
like you are making sure that everything you say is being understood and it's not getting
mushed up. Obviously the aim, the long-term goal is to speed up your speech to the point where you
sound natural and native but to start off with try just slowing it down completely, try just going
back to the basics of I am a person who lives on the earth you know, O'm talking in this very
clear way, try it, see what happens! Okay so the next exercise you can do involves youtube, I know
you have a youtube account because you're watching me right now so there's no excuses, so I want you
to type into the search bar something like Charlie Chaplin or silent movie or silent movie clip,
okay? Anything like that, we don't really want there to be any words in this clip, so any clip
where there's a story but there's no words, Charlie Chaplin is a great place to start. So
what I want you to do is I want you to watch about a minute of the clip, just watch it, enjoy it,
then I want you to out loud I want you to tell the story of what you've just seen in as much
detail as you can imagine you are a narrator you are David Attenborough you are narrating exactly
what you just saw and you have to give it in nice detail. Even better? Record yourself doing it, you
could record yourself on your phone or you could film yourself and then listen back and see if
you made any mistakes. A lot of the time English learners can hear their own mistakes it's like,
oh that was wrong why did I say that? And then you can work on it and maybe write down the mistakes
that you made, I love this exercise it's easy it's quick it's fun you get to watch a little
video it's great try it! And the next thing I want to suggest to you is a little bit similar to this
so let's say you are waiting for a train or you are sat in the dentist waiting to go
in and you think, what can I do? Go on your phone again find your photos choose a photo
and I want you to in your head describe what you see in as much detail as you can, imagine you are
talking to a blind person and the blind person really wants to understand what that picture is,
every single bit of it. What are the colours? What's in the background? What's in the
foreground? What's to the left, what's to the right? What feelings do you get from this picture?
What are the- describe the people in the picture, what are they wearing? What does their hair look
like? Everything you can try and get all of it okay. My next little tip for you is something
that I actually do to help me learn French, so if you are a fitness person, I'm clearly not a
fitness person but if you are someone who likes to do at home workouts maybe it's yoga or sometimes I
know you can do like you can do boxing workouts from youtube at home, do your workout videos in
English, so if you have two options for a workout you've got one yoga video and the instructor is
in your native language and you've got another yoga video and they're in English, always choose
that one because you will learn things you never thought you would need to know, like
I remember when I was doing a workout in French I learned the words for abs and and thighs and
glutes and press up like I learned all these words that I never thought I would need but it's good
to know them you want to know all of these words because you never know when you might need them.
Okay this next thing you can do, I get asked about this all the time my students are always saying
how can I learn phrasal verbs and idioms? How can i do it? And unfortunately there's no real easy
trick there's no like oh- drink this magic potion and you'll be amazing at phrasal verbs, it's a bit
harder than that. So annoyingly it's just a bit boring but my advice to everyone who wants to
learn phrasal verbs and idioms is you start your day and you learn one phrasal verb and you learn
one idiom so you get it in your head you can write it on your phone, you can even make the phrasal
verb and the idiom your home screen on your phone so you see it every time you look at your phone
and then try to use those as many times as you can throughout the day, whether it's out loud talking
to people or maybe you're just walking down the street and you see a person and you think
oh he looks a bit sad he should cheer up you know? In your head, you just think it to yourself try
to use it as many times as you can throughout the day and that is a really nice way to embed it into
your brain, and then you've got a new idiom and a phrasal verb. Now so far all of my tips have been
to do with speaking but if you want to do a little bit of typing, a little bit of writing, a great
thing to do is find a dictation practice website, I will leave a link to some in the description
down below, but there are loads of places where you can just practice dictation so they will
give you a audio clip of someone speaking and you just have to type it as you listen to it,
brilliant, brilliant way to practice and you might learn new words that way or spellings and
you know speeding up the process of listen figure out type so that's another really good thing you
could do. Now another thing that students want to know is, they want to know how they can learn
English through watching TV and films, you know, rather than just sitting watching and hoping that
you learn, is there a better way to learn English by watching TV? Yeah there is. Ao this technique
I think I've kind of stolen from an author who wrote a really great book about French, but it's
really worked so I will pass it on to you, I think i've adapted the technique a little bit as well so
I'm sorry if the author is watching, I'm sorry if it's not exactly what you said but it's my
version. So you need to find a tv show that you have seen before, it needs to be something that
you know quite well because you don't want to be focusing on the story because so many times when
you're watching TV in another language you're just trying to follow it and making sure that
you've got the story, so find something like friends, let's say you've seen friends lots and
lots and then find the English version, so find an episode that you know the story of and press play
start watching it but make sure you have either your phone or a piece of paper next to you. Every
time you hear a word that you don't know, write it down, don't bother about the translation just
write it down, carry on, hear another word that you don't know, write it down, carry on carry on,
keep going until you finish the episode or you finish the film or whatever and then you'll have
a list of words that you don't know, if any of the words come up more than once so let's say the word
dude comes up twice, you need to learn that one first, so prioritise the ones that come up more
than once because clearly they're quite common words, so find the translation get your dictionary
get the definition and drill it into your brain maybe write a few new sentences with that word
in you can write your own and then you can look at the rest of the words and do the same thing,
but always start with the ones that come up more than once and then hopefully you
should have a lovely list of new words and you can put them into new sentences and they will
just start to seep into your brain. Okay moving on, so if you've been watching this channel for
a while you will know that English speakers speak english in a variety of different ways there are
so many accents dialects and slang words it's crazy, so another really good thing to practice
is listening to different kinds of english so there's a great website I believe it's called
the dialects archive but I will double check, I'll put the name of it here, this website here,
and I'll put the link to it down below and this is a great website because it has a whole
archive of recordings of people using English with different accents so just take a 20 minutes
and just have a little listen to a few of them see if you can understand what they're saying
if you can't understand what they're saying see if you can figure out why, you know, is it because
they are using a lot of slang words? If so try and find out what that slang means. Is it because
you are so used to listening to voices like mine? Because I think a lot of English learners only
ever listen to people that sound like me and therefore your listening isn't as great as it
could be so challenge yourself try to watch tv shows where people don't sound like me you know
try to watch things where they just speak English in a completely different way, you know? Listen to
an Australian podcast, listen to a podcast that has a Scottish host, really challenge yourself,
don't just take the easy route and listen to people that sound like me because it won't
help you in the long run. It's just about finding more fun and creative ways
of practicing your English, that's what this video is really all about you know obviously
you can get a dictionary and learn English words from the dictionary but I don't think it's as fun,
I don't think it will motivate you, I don't think it will make you want to keep doing it, whereas
if you can find these new and creative ways to practice brilliant you know it doesn't need to be
grammar textbook, obviously learn the grammar but once you're at a level when you know what
the grammar is, just have fun you know, like find what works for you, if you are crazy about golf
when you go to play golf next time I want you to narrate in your head what is happening in
English the whole time, so oh I'm lining up the shot here, I'm teeing off, I don't know how to
speak about golf, I don't know why I'd use that analogy, but it's got to be specific to you and
it's got to be fun for you so get creative with it don't feel restricted to okay grammar book grammar
quiz online it can be fun! If you are speaking English out loud, you are practicing it fabulous
great just challenge yourself, have fun, you're doing amazing! Thank you so much for watching this
video, if you enjoyed it please give it a like, if you would like to follow us on instagram you
could do so there- and if you want a one-to-one online English lesson with me or my partner Bez,
the link for that is down below. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time, tata!