IMPROVE Your English with These Steps and Become FLUENT

Today I'm gonna talk to you about simple steps to improve your English that you can practice every day and become a better speaker and communicator. If you study hard and you don't see any real results this video will help you. But before we get started I need to remind you I'm Kate your English teacher and my goal for you is to help you speak confidently and fluently. You can do three things to make me feel happy. Like this video, share this video and subscribe. Now let's begin. The first step is make English a part of your life. Learning a language can be hard, demanding and time-consuming. But you can learn English doing the things you have to do every day. I'm not talking about learning difficult grammar rules or memorizing words. I mean simple actions that help your brain consume English and get used to it. You can switch the language on your smartphone to English. You can listen to English podcasts on radio stations while cleaning the house, driving or walking in the park. You can watch English TV shows. You can stick English labels on the things around your house. You can read English books. You can write notes in English. These simple actions are extremely helpful because you make the language a part of your lifestyle and the results would be amazing. The next step is focus on learning vocabulary rather than grammar. Grammar is important but you should not focus on learning grammar rules. If a person speaks with some grammar mistakes you will easily understand them, right? And if a person knows a bunch of grammar rules but vocabulary is not enough, they can't speak at all. Vocabulary is much more important because you need to make sense of how words and phrases mean what they mean. First of all, you can use a lot of apps for memorizing vocabulary. Anki and Memrise are my favorites. When you're watching videos while natives are speaking English, while you see them doing something or talking about something and you hear the words you don't know, you can look it up in the dictionary. But I recommend not using the dictionary every time you don't get the word. You can try to understand it from the context and it helps your brain connect the objects with the English words. Writing down new vocabulary is essential but do not write the translation in your native language. Write the definition in English. It helps you to enrich your vocabulary and better memorize it. Listen to people speaking English and you can notice different grammar patterns. Try not to analyze what you hear, just let your brain absorb it. Sometimes when we hear the same pattern a hundred times, we start automatically use it in the conversation. For example, the construction I've never been. It's the present perfect tense. Students, especially Russians, often make that mistake. I never was. But if you hear this pattern of speech many times, you will memorize it and you repeat it by yourself and you create a speaking habit so you don't need to remember the rules to be able to use it when you speak. The next step is the one that I absolutely love. Quality is over quantity. Students always think that they need to learn 50 words a day. The biggest mistake is memorizing a lot of words without using them. When we write down new words, we put them in our memory and it helps us to recognize these words and understand them while reading. But when it comes to the conversation, we can hardly remember them, right? So, the amount of memorized words doesn't work. It's better to focus on quality. Learn just 10 words a day and try to use them in different situations as much as you can. Use these words while writing or speaking. When you write down a word, never write it down by itself. I recommend you writing a full sentence with a new word and writing a question using this word. Also, I recommend using associated words. For example, when you learn a new word, add more related words so that you can easily remember them. As for me, I look up the words I didn't know and look online for sentences or phrases to give myself a deeper meaning and context. The next step is crucial because it gives you the opportunity to study different styles of speaking. Listen to different speakers, different accents, different voices and different speaking styles. You can find a lot of accents here on YouTube. American accent, British accent, amazing Australian accent, Indian accent and others. When your brain will get used to understanding different pronunciation styles, you can talk to people from all over the world. The next step to reach a good level of English is change your learning style. If you're learning a lot of things, watching, listening, reading, but you're not able to use it, it's frustrating. That means you need to change your learning style. Every student has a dominant learning style. This can be reading English books or textbooks, memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary, listening to English audio lessons or watching English movies without subtitles or with subtitles. All of these learning styles are important for improving your English, but you don't have to stick to only one. Let's say you enjoy watching English movies the most, so it's time to change it with doing something different. The same thing happened to me when I was learning English at the university. I was focused on watching video lessons and it turned out that I could easily understand English, but my speaking skills were not so good. Once again, all of these styles are extremely helpful, but it's better to use them all and mix them at the same time. Another important rule that you need to improve your English is consistent actions create consistent results. If you want to achieve real results, you need to dedicate yourself completely to learning a language. I'm often asked how to become fluent in English in a month or even in a week. It's impossible, it doesn't happen that way. You have to practice consistently and that's the only way you achieve it. And it's not about the amount of actions, it's about small daily actions, but you have to practice them consistently. If you told me to memorize a thousand phrasal verbs at once, I'd be like oh my god, I can't do that, it's impossible. But if you told me to learn 10 verbs a day, every day, I could do that, it's feasible. And eventually you will have memorized a thousand phrasal verbs. Consistency is gonna build fluency over time. The next step is don't try to be perfect, don't try to be a perfectionist. When you are speaking English to someone and your brain is constantly searching for the right words and you feel tensed and afraid of saying something wrong and you want to speak perfectly without any mistakes. If you make a mistake, you have to be able to grow from it. We're all humans and we all make mistakes. Don't be afraid of them. Mistakes can help us at some point. Keep learning and keep speaking. One thing that I always remind myself about when I'm talking to people is no one cares, no one really cares. Practically everyone, I mean non-native speakers, they're focusing on what they're saying and how to say it. No one will judge you for your mistakes or mispronunciation. Actually, it's not that important. What's really important is to deliver your message to your partner, communicate and exchange opinions. As I've already said, reading, writing, listening is important. But the most effective way to improve your English is speaking. So the next step is speak. When I was a beginner, I managed to find a great friend from the United States and she was amazingly helpful. You need to find someone who corrects you, who teaches you new phrases, someone to practice with on a daily basis. To do that, you can join a language learning group on Facebook. Also, in the very beginning, I used conversation exchange to find a conversation partner. I was talking about my first experience in one of my previous videos. You can watch my video about fluency right here. And if it's hard to find a conversation partner, the other thing you can do is speaking to yourself. This tip will help you just get comfortable saying words and phrases when you're saying them out loud. And of course, it helps you become more confident. Okay, I've told you about easy steps to improve your English. I hope this video was useful. Thank you for watching, guys. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me in the comments down below. Don't forget to click the like button and subscribe to English lessons with Kate. Thank you for being with me. Bye!