How to Learn English in 2025!

Have you ever made this New Year's resolution? This year, I am going to finally express myself in English, understand fast conversations, and maybe even become a fluent English speaker. But then another year passes and you haven't become a fluent English speaker. Well, never fear, today I would like to give you my top tips to help you speak fluent English in 2025. Hi, I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com. And like always, I have created a free PDF worksheet, but this one has something special. This free worksheet includes over 15 links to all of the tips and ideas that I'm going to share with you today. The top podcast recommendations, TV show recommendations, audio book free to access recommendations, all of these links will be in that PDF worksheet. You can click on the link in the description to download that free worksheet today and get access to all of the links so that you can start becoming a fluent English speaker. Sometimes my friends ask me, Vanessa, why do your students want to learn English? And I tell them, you know what? Over 60% of the internet is in English. And English is the language of a lot of high paying fields like business, technology, and medicine. You know why you want to become a fluent English speaker. And today I want to help you get there. So without further ado, tip number one for becoming a fluent English speaker in 2025 is to listen to podcasts. My first podcast recommendation is one that I love to listen to, and that is called Stuff You Should Know. These episodes could be one hour, but I recommend listening to their short stuff episodes, which are 10 to 15 minutes and focus on any topic you could possibly imagine. Podcasts are a great way to improve your listening skills, your vocabulary, and just enjoy English, because I guarantee you will find a topic that interests you. The second podcast recommendation that I use and listen to in my daily life is people I mostly admire. In these podcast episodes, the host interviews various experts in different fields. These interviews could be really challenging to understand, but do you know what? The experts know exactly how to make their technical fields more understandable for normal everyday people like you and me. So I've learned about such incredible topics in an easy way. So I highly recommend checking out the podcast and try to find a topic or interview that interests you. And my final podcast recommendation is This American Life. These one hour episodes are great for testing your listening skills, and each one focuses on a different aspect of American culture or American life. As you can imagine, you'll be exposed to a lot of different styles of speaking, which is excellent for testing your listening skills. The podcasts I just shared are not for specifically learning English. These are podcasts that native English speakers also listen to. This is a great way to boost your skills and your confidence as well. If you have a podcast that you recommend, please write it in the comments and other people can find it, and I will too. Tip number two to become a fluent English speaker in 2025 is to watch English only YouTube videos. Please keep watching Speak English with Vanessa, but it is also very useful to watch English YouTube channels that are meant for native English speakers. They're not specifically teaching you English. You are just consuming real life English. I want to give you four recommendations. My first English only YouTube channel recommendation is Tom Scott. He presents fascinating topics in easy to understand and kind of funny ways. The video I recommend watching is this one. Does the language you speak change the way you think? No, but probably? Intriguing. You can find the link to this video and the podcast I mentioned and everything else that I'm going to mention in this video in the free PDF worksheet that you can download in the description. The second English only YouTube channel I recommend is School of Life. These are often self-help videos, and this is one I recommend. A dark way to predict what might happen in your relationship. The third English only YouTube channel I recommend is Geography Now. He has yes, 10 years, making a YouTube video about every single country in the entire world, and this year he finished. What I challenge you is to go to the YouTube video about your country and find out if he got it right. Did he miss something? His videos are fascinating, and you can always click CC at the bottom of every video to view the full subtitles and catch everything that he's saying. If he missed something about your country, write it in the comments. I would love to learn about it. And the final English only YouTube channel that I want to recommend is one that I personally have been watching a lot lately. It's quite different than the other channels, which are more general. This one is The Minimal Mom. I love her so much. She is focused on helping moms and families live a minimal, clutter, clean life, and stress-free. So I recommend starting with this video, How to Keep a Clean House in 2025. I have followed so many of her tips, and they have improved my life a lot. So if you are a mom, or you are not a mom, I recommend checking out her channel so that you can have a clean, stress-free house. Plus, you'll learn a lot of English along the way. Tip number three to help you become a fluent English speaker in 2025 is to write a few sentences in English every day. You can take a notebook, something like this, and I recommend following this pattern. This is something that my family does every day around the dinner table. It's called Rose Bud Thorn. You can write your rose. What was the best part of the day? Then you can write your bud. Do you know what a bud is? It's a flower that's closed. You're waiting for it to open up and become beautiful. So you can write your bud. What are you looking forward to? This will help you to talk about wishes and the future. Just write one sentence. I'm looking forward to my vacation next week. Great. Then you can write your thorn. The thorn is the prickly part of a rose. You don't want to touch the thorn. So the thorn is, what was the hardest or the worst part of your day? You might say, waking up today was the worst part of the day because I felt so tired. I need to go to bed earlier. Okay. If you write that out, you are going to be on your way to success because simply following this pattern, it's just a suggestion. You could write anything, but writing your rose bud thorn each day is helping you to keep a journal, express your thoughts, but also to write in English. Maybe there's something that you want to say about your day, your rose. Oh, how can I say that in English? You might need to look it up. You might need to learn some new vocabulary so that you can write out your rose bud thorn each day. This is just a recommendation for something that you can write. If you don't know what to write, it's good to have a little outline, but I recommend writing a few sentences every day in English. Tip number four to help you become a fluent English speaker in 2025 is to be consistent every day. Yes, that's right. I want you to imagine these two scenarios. The first scenario is you wake up in the morning, you go to work, you come home, you eat dinner, you go to bed, and then on Saturday, you wake up and you spend two hours studying English. And then Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you don't do anything with English. Okay. Well, this is a normal busy life, right? You wait until the weekend to do your hobbies or to learn English, but you don't want normal, right? You want amazing. So what about this scenario? You wake up in the morning, you go to work, and then for 15 minutes during your lunch break, you study English. Then you come home after work, you eat some dinner, you watch some TV, you go to bed, and the next day you wake up, go to work. During your lunch break, you spend 15 minutes with English. If you did this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, maybe Saturday and Sunday too, how much easier would it be to remember what you're learning? I know for me, if I did not study for six days, I would absolutely forget what I learned. If you don't use it, you lose it, right? So absolutely you need to be consistent every day. If you aren't sure where to start to be consistent with English, I highly recommend joining me and a team of professional American English teachers and hundreds of motivated English students in the 90 Day English Challenge. Starting on January 1st, I will be sending you a lesson for 15 minutes every day for 90 days. You simply open the lesson, study, and take a deep breath because you have used English for 15 minutes each day and you are well on your way to becoming a fluent English speaker. Right now, there is a 55% off discount for the 90 Day English Challenge. You can click on the link in the description to join us and save money. I hope to see you there. Tip number five to help you become a fluent English speaker in 2025 is to listen to audiobooks. I have a couple of tips to help you effectively listen to audiobooks, especially if you've never done it before. But first, I want to give you three audiobooks that are absolutely free that you can listen to on YouTube. The full recording of these wonderful books is available on YouTube for free. You could start today, but after this video, please. You could start listening to a simple book like The Giving Tree. This is a book meant for children. The language is simple, but the story is beautiful and compelling. Then you could move on to a chapter book like the book Matilda. This is my daughter's name. Hopefully, we are better parents than the terrible parents in this book. This is a famous book. It is fast moving, interesting, and it will challenge your English skills without being too difficult. Finally, you could move on to listen to a more challenging book like the wonderful book Life of Pi. If you have seen any of the movies of the books I'm talking about, just put it out of your mind. The book is always better. You can listen to the full audiobook of Life of Pi online, but let me give you a couple tips for how to effectively listen to audiobooks to boost your skills. Tip number one is to listen to one chapter or a section of the audiobook and then read that same section directly after it. This will help to solidify in your mind exactly what you listen to because I imagine it's harder to listen than it is to read. When you're listening, you don't have time to pause or stop unless you actually stop the audiobook, but when you're reading, your eyes have a little more time to slow down and think of the words. Or you could do the opposite. You could read a chapter and then listen to the chapter or read the full book and then listen to the full book. You'll be amazed at how much you can understand if you already have a general concept of what the book is about. Or you can do tip number three, which is super fun. You can listen to the audiobook and read at the same time. That's right. You can follow along. When I was a kid, there were fun follow along books for kids where you could listen to the audio cassette. I think it was a tape, a cassette. And when it was time to turn the page, you heard brring and you would turn the page, especially for children that didn't know how to read well yet. But you can do something similar. Listen to the audiobook and follow along in the written book. This can help to solidify pronunciation. Exactly how is that word pronounced? Oh, you just heard it. Wonderful. Tip number six to help you become a fluent English speaker in 2025 is to watch English TV shows. If you have been learning English with me for a while, you know that I don't know an awful lot of English movies or TV shows. It's just not what I do for fun. But I have two that I have enjoyed that I want to share with you. And these are using real life English. My first TV show recommendation, and you can find free clips for this show on YouTube. It is Young Sheldon. This follows a normal family. It's actually one of the people from the Big Bang Theory. If you have watched that show, it's him as a child. It follows his family and you can see so many daily life scenes. They're talking about work, about family. They talk at the dinner table. I'm going to put a link in the free PDF for a clip where they're having a dinner scene and you can see a family sitting around the table speaking in real daily life English. This is going to be in the free PDF. You can click on the link in the description to get that link. My second TV show recommendation is a little different from the first. It is to watch the comedian Jim Gaffigan. He's famous for his funny, clean comedy that's good for the whole family. If you have children, they can watch it too. There's no swearing, not many adult themes, but he uses daily life scenarios and really makes them funny. If you can understand his jokes in English, you are going to be fluent in English. What a great way to test your fluency. Can you understand humor in English? And final tip number seven for how to become a fluent English speaker in 2025 is to speak out loud every day. If you don't know where to start, remember that in tip number three, you wrote down your rose bud thorn each day. Well, there you go. You can read that out loud, but I also recommend closing that, not reading it and just saying it out loud. It doesn't need to be exactly the same. It's not going to be exactly the same, but this is going to give you a framework for what you can say. If it's the end of the day and you realize, oh, I haven't spoken in English today. Well, there you go. You can talk about the best part of your day, what you're looking forward to, and the hardest part of your day. It's simple, but effective. Another tip to help you speak in English every day is to use one of my many Speak With Me YouTube videos. These will help you to learn some key vocabulary and then practice a conversation with me. Also simple, but effective. For more simple and effective speaking tips, you can check out the video that I made with 15 plus amazing YouTube English teachers. All of these teachers gave their top tip for speaking better English, and some of these will help you in speaking every single day. Well, there you have it. My top seven tips, plus a lot of links and ideas for how to become a fluent English speaker in 2025. To get access to all of the links that I just mentioned, you can click on the free PDF in the description. I will give you every single podcast link, TV show link, free audio book link, all of this. It is my 2025 gift to you. Well, thank you so much for learning English with me throughout this entire year. I can't wait to have another great English learning year ahead of us. I'll see you again next Friday in the new year for another English lesson here on this YouTube channel. Bye. But wait, do you want more? I recommend watching this video next. Do you know your English level? Well, you're about to find out. Are you a beginner, intermediate, or advanced English learner? I'll see you in that video to find out. Bye.