Hi, good morning, Julian here.
So today I have a question from Bhuntay, I hope I pronounced your name right, and John.
Although, actually this question isn't unique to them it is a question that I get asked
very, very often.
How to improve English speaking skills?
So that's the topic of today's video.
Okay, so how to improve English speaking skills?
I have made videos about this before and basically every person who makes English teaching videos
on Youtube has made hundreds of videos about this topic.
Yes, there are thousands of videos on Youtube about improving speaking skills.
But I'm going to say that, well not just speaking but all English basically comes down to a
very simple two-step process.
One, learn the language that you need to use in your specific situation and two, do it.
It really is that simple.
It basically just comes down to those two things.
Learn what you need and then use it.
And at first it might be difficult but it will get easier over time.
This said, here are some tips, free tips, a few fact that will help you make a process
a little bit easier and a little bit faster.
My first tip is to make very specific goals.
This is why I said learn the language that is specific to your situation.
And I've talked about this in the videos before, but the different situations needs different
kinds of English.
If you're going to be a news caster you're going to need very different skills to what
you're going to need if you just want to have a conversation on travel.
If you need to use English in your job for example giving sales presentations overseas,
or being an Engineer, or something to do with I.T. or something like that.
Each kind of field is going to need its own kind of vocabulary, its own kind of language.
So make very specific goals, really think about what you need in your situation and
why, and focus on that.
My second tip is to focus on vocabulary more than grammar.
The reason I say this because you can communicate a lot with only vocabulary.
But with only grammar, you can communicate nothing.
And to be honest, although English learn is learned a lot of different kinds of grammar
like the present simple and then the past progressive, and the past progressive perfect
and you know the list just goes on and on.
There are so many of these kinds of tenses and grammar forms.
But the reality is that we don't actually use most of those most of the time.
So yes I guess you do need to learn them although I'm still not too sure whether you actually
do or not.
I guess yes you do need to learn grammar but no grammar isn't the most important thing.
Definitely focus more on vocabulary much more than grammar.
Learn the words that you need for your kind of specific situation.
Focus on that mainly.
My third tip is to try and get used to Speaking in phrases not in individual words.
This is where a lot of problem with kind of translating in your head comes from I think.
It's kind of the way we people teach in schools, white people get taught in schools.
You learn grammar rules and then you use that rule with vocabulary and then you, what you
end up doing is you end up having a sentence in your native language and then try to translate
it.
And that doesn't work very well.
Try and get used to speaking in phrases because we do tend to speak in very fixed kind of
way.
There isn't much, we don't use much creative language if that make sense.
For example, this is why we have things like collocations, kind of fixed phrases.
You know we always say 'Good morning'.
We don't say 'happy morning'.
We always say 'ride a bike', we don't say 'take a bike' with the meaning of riding it
anyway.
Whereas we do say 'take a train' or 'take a taxi' but we don't say 'ride a taxi' so
much.
Try and get used to speaking in these kind of chunks, in these kind of phrases and you'll
find things to be much, much easier.
Because you don't need to rely on grammar rules quite so much.
If you want specific exercises for learning these kinds of phrases, these chunks and getting
better in using them, check Doing English+.
It's not free but I provide a lot of exercises for building fluency with this kind of chunking
and using phrases.
And that's about it.
Again to be honest it really does come down to these two things, learning the language
you need then doing it.
Again check out Doing English+ for more kind of specific exercises and things you can do
to speed up the process but that is
about it.