As mentioned in the title, I am a native speaker of English, but I don't think that my English is that good. I don't make mistakes like "loose" when it should be "lose" and I can use "their" "there" and "they're" properly, but there's always room for improvement. My grammar is pretty good and my spelling is okay, but my vocabulary is pretty low. I struggled with the SAT verbal sections. I'm also not very good at word choice. There are so many words that mean the similar things but used in different contexts.
I'm 24, working full time, so I'm quite busy. I read online newspaper articles occasionally and look up words when I'm not certain of the definition. Unfortunately, even though I look up the words, they don't stick with me. I forget them after a short while. I don't really like to read, but I think that even if I read more books, I'll face a similar problem with vocabulary retention.
So TL, how do you improve your English? or if you're not a native speaker of English, how do you improve your skills in your native language?
Read books with rich language. How can you learn when to use vocabulary without reading it first? Books make a beauty of words, so that's the point where they start to stick with you. I imagine you have to constantly practice writing as well in conjunction. A good example: I just spent like 30 seconds thinking of the word "conjunction" thinking of words like correlation until I got it. You learn the words and then practice using them.
It won't be quick or easy. I never was a big fan of english in school but I'd like to think that I'm pretty well acquainted with the language, mostly from reading, and some of it rubs off in writing.
As a non-native English speaker it already helps me to read english texts or watch english movies (or combine it by watching movies in whatever language with english subtitles ^^)
For my mother language it helped me most to read books and listen to cabarret artists, as there are some who have exeptional language skills (German in my case). I don't know any good English cabaret artists, but there have to be some. Side effect: That only works if you at least partially agree with left wing politics in many cases, as any kind of theatre or cabaret is 90% explicitly left wing for usual.
Edit: Just found out that German Kabarret is a special kind of cabarret which seemingly does not really exist in most countries in this kind of form. It's a humorous critics of society and especially politics - in "real political aspects" like bad economic policy as well as ethic questions and bad developements (such as the descent of middle class while most new jobs are badly paid while the top earners increase their wealth). A huge aspect is the level of phrasing or partially puns, so it mainly displays a high level of language, after all it's not that much different from a political speech - only that it's made for beeing understood (lol ) and is beeing put in a mostly much clearer way.
If you have the time, patience and imagination for it read a lot of books. I love reading. Other people play games, spend hours in front of a tv whatever, I read. word.
Writing will help as well. Something like a journal or a blog isn't too time consuming to get into.
I expanded my vocab by reading a lot of books, have a dictionary near you so you can quickly find out what it means. If I find a really interesting word I don't know I usually write it down where I can look at it later to remind me. I also try to use the word straight away so that it sticks in my mind.
I've got a lot of words written down in that sticky program on my mac. I find that really useful.
A lot of people are probably going to recommend books, tutorials, grammar exercises, and some of they may even be good. As a teacher though, let me just rehash what I tell students all the time.
Language is usually a numbers game. Looking up words is good, but usually you'll need to look up the same word a few times on a few different occasions for it to sink in. Also, in many cases, despite looking up the definition of the word, you will most likely remember the word based on the contexts you have already seen it in. That's why reading is so important - the amount you 'improve' in the written variety of a language is largely correlated to how much time you spend reading and writing in it.
If you are a native speaker, the most effective way to increased fluency is reading. It's unfortunate that you don't like to read, but my advice would be to find something you do like to read. Of course, if you're looking to really expand your vocabulary, read across genres, and read widely at that.
In fact a great way to get started in this exercise is to grab a copy of The Language Instinct by Pinker. It'll help you understand more about your brain's language center and why reading is such an important part of language acquisition.
Basically our brains are wired to 'learn' or acquire (in your case, acquire more, or 'improve') language while we use it, so unless you are reading (and writing, since output cements what you have acquired), you probably wont get very far.
Stop visiting sites with loads of people that only know english as a second/third language and are therefore happy with just being able to communicate .
I don't know about anybody else here but one thing I've always done that apparently is rather brazen for an individual is I'll just ask what a word means in mid-conversation.
I distinctly remember at a job I worked at I came up limping over a tiny inside bridge that was also a small hill inside the place we worked at (apparently I have hip problems O_o ). My coworkers brought it up, and I asked my manager and she said "I didn't notice anything wrong with your gait." Not knowing what the word "gait" meant, I just asked, and she explained. And while this little anecdote is inescapably uninteresting, it also stuck with me. I do it less now than I did before just because my vocabulary is better than most peoples' anymore, but I didn't know and still don't consider it to be something you should be afraid to do, because I guess you come across as looking ignorant or what have you (yeah, social norms are weak).
3 other things I recommend, in order of what I consider "fun factor":
- Get good at boggle, the game - When speaking or writing, if you notice yourself repeating words often, try to think of a way to restate the same idea in different words. It's obviously harder to do on the fly as you speak, but even in this reply I've done it at least twice as I reread what I type. - Get good at scrabble, the game
I love being good at the English language, and plan on taking my expertise to Korea and teaching it*, and what I really find enjoyable every now and again are fast paced word games you can find dotted around all over the internet. A lot of the attitude of a person is lost over the internet, but if I had to guess, I would venture to say that you probably don't enjoy learning about or improving your vocabulary as much as I do. My perception of your post is "Well, I want this, but do I have to?" and if that is the case (again, not saying it is), it's going to be a real hindrance, in the same way that forcing yourself to learn how to be an automechanic or being good at math is going to be difficult if you don't enjoy the subjects.
* expertise doesn't necessarily mean I'll be a good teacher, but I'm confident I'll be a competent teacher for other reasons.
Like everyone says, its all in the reading. Kinda like SC, you can watch Day9 every now and then or watch some pro games but if you don't get down and dirty with some mass games you aren't going to get better. Reading a lot will expose you to words you don't know and even if you don't know them, if you read them 20 times you get an idea of what context they should be used in and pretty much guess what they mean, and then if you actually look up the word you'll know it for damn sure cause you've already seen 20 examples of it burned into your head.
The way i learned to speak and understand english was through gaming, watching movies and reading comics as a kid. Once we started having english classes at school me and most kids my age already knew way more english than what we were being taught at school, classes only helped with refining certain bits of grammar and such.
I'd say your best bet is to just enjoy stuff in the language you want to become better at, in your case it being english should make things quite easy, i know reading might be slow and tedious but it's pretty much the best possible way to pick up new words and the way to use them properly.
Learn another language that's related to English. French, German, Afrikaansm, Dutch, Scandinavian languages, Icelandic and Faroese etc.
Aside from the obvious benefit of knowing another language, you will also learn the roots of your own language, and learning the roots of your own language will help you remember words that you wouldn't have used otherwise.
English is a Germanic language, a subset of Indo-European languages. The languages I listed above are the other major Germanic languages. The exception is French, but more than any other Germanic language, English is influenced by French.
People said already said this over 9000 times, but reading is the best way. When I needed to boost my vocabulary in high school, I'd write a word down on my hand, whenever I came across one I didn't know. At the end of the day, I'd have over 10 words, and I'd look them up. Of course you dont have to be so extreme and just keep a little notebook with you to jot down new words.
Lastly hanging around people who speak well helps a lot. I went to a prestigious humanity private high school, and I find myself speaking better English than most of my college friends whereas in high school I felt like I was lagging behind in speech and vocab.
I have completely Chinese parents(i.e. when I was born, they spoke about 10 words of English), spent the first 6 months of school in ESL, and then learned fast. Hard to do now, but reading really improved my writing. That and TV, watching the old YTV helped out. Even back then, by grade 2 my English spelling-wise was near perfect, despite the fact that I had horrible grammar. I read books like LoTR by the time I was grade 6 so I guess I was somewhat of an exception, but stuff like that really works your brain and you learn fast when reading. Most of the time you may not recognize a word, but context clues really help. Now I write near perfect English and fail English not because I have bad grammar, or poor spelling, but because I have near zero analysis ability.
On November 19 2010 23:02 pred470r wrote: Listen to a lot of metal, the songs usually have a lot of words in them and that's how I remember certain words and meanings.
This sounds retarded, but I actually learn a lot of words this way too.
EPT
) and is beeing put in a mostly much clearer way.
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