Improving English as a native speaker - Page 3

On November 19 2010 23:15 riptide wrote:
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 <em>The Language Instinct</em> 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.

Anyway, good luck!

On November 20 2010 03:44 emythrel wrote:


i suggest that you have just proven that Tv isn't a good way to improve english since you can't construct a grammatically correct sentence. You used three periods that should be either comma's or not punctuated at all.

Reading has been proven to improve vocabulary and grammar, listening to someone speak isn't a great way to improve grammar but you will probably learn new words. You will still need a dictionary to find out what they mean and without having them written down, it's a lot harder to do that unless you have a good understanding of the rules behind how words are spelt.

Reading is better for one simple reason, people rarely use idioms when writing. When speaking people use idioms all the time and that can give you a false sense of what the word means.

On November 20 2010 06:27 Triscuit wrote:
I actually think I have a pretty good grasp on the English language, and I don't read very many books at all. I think the main source of my vocabulary, grammar, etc. is from reading forums, articles, and wikipedia entries online.

I think the biggest part of having a broad vocabulary is understanding the roots, prefixes, and suffixes of words. If I see a word I don't understand, my first line of defense is to try to find the root and see if that is familiar in other words I have seen. If so, I look at the rest and try to determine how that modifies the root. It doesn't always work, but thinking critically about a word is probably the fastest way to get it to register in your memory once you do go out and look it up.

On November 20 2010 06:03 VabuDeltaKaiser wrote:
Good news everyone i learned alot by watching futurama.

On November 20 2010 07:55 zzaaxxsscd wrote:


i.e. spend a year or two learning Latin