Learning English is a goal for many people around the world and for many reasons, but learning the language quickly can be tricky and difficult if you don’t organize yourself and know which activities to undertake. This article will show you how to learn English quickly.
The truth is, whatever you do, if you want to learn English quickly, you’ll have to spend most of your free time during that period engaging in activities that help you learn one way or another and one must find a balance between the basic areas of language learning that are listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Can it be pleasant, or will it only be hard work? It can certainly be both, and probably should be if you want to avoid a serious burnout. We’re going to have a look at complementary activities to complete your learning process which people tend to enjoy and will cost you very little or nothing. These are also activities that do not imply “studying” more on your own, but rather enjoying yourself.
So what are these activities? We’ve chosen three that will help you improve your listening and speaking skills:
- Watching movies (or TV shows, documentaries, etc.): Ideally one should try to watch movies in English without subtitles. This may be too difficult for learners who do not possess an advanced level of English but that’s not a problem, the only thing you need to do is to activate English subtitles and be sure to try and listen carefully to the audio while you read the subtitles. It is important to make a conscious effort to listen to the speech and only use the subtitles as a crutch in order to improve your listening skills. There are several specific exercises you can do while watching movies to improve your listening skills but that will be the subject of another article, stay tuned for our future posts!
- Listening to your favorite Anglo music with the lyrics at hand. For those of you who like to sing in the shower (or elsewhere…) this can be a very fun activity that will help you improve your listening skills, pronunciation and spelling… a very thorough exercise.
- Speaking to Native English speakers. Wherever you live, especially in big cities, you’ll have no problems finding Native English speakers who want to learn a foreign language in exchange for teaching English for free! The concept is simple: you get together with an Anglo, for coffee for instance, and spend half the time speaking in English and the other half speaking in your language. To maximize the benefits of this activity it is recommended that you ask the other person to correct your mistakes as a professional teacher would (at Break Into English this is one of the guiding principles of our method: http://englishclassviaskype.com/method/ ) and pick a topic of interest to talk about as this will enrich your conversation and enable you to pick up specific vocabulary and expressions.
These are just three pleasant activities that we recommend to improve your listening and speaking skills, but obviously if you want complete and thorough training and to be able to learn quickly, nothing can replace reading, writing, academic exercises and of course, high-quality classes with trained Native English teachers like the ones we offer at Break Into English ( http://englishclassviaskype.com/ ) where our philosophy is to challenge students in order to help them reach their full potential and show them how to learn English quickly.