Improving English as a native speaker - Page 5

On November 21 2010 04:26 Swagga wrote:
I immigrated to Canada from Korea at the age of 7. In the early years in Canada, i grew up in a Caucasian/Polish-majority community and i spoke fluent English by 2nd year because i was young. Then i went to an IB high school which consisted of 40% Asian, 40% Southern Asian and like 20% Caucasians so i had the experience of observing people who were trying to learn English.

The best way to learn English in my opinion is by hanging out with friends that speak English. There are many Koreans/Chinese that are only friends with their own race, which is understandable, but they have major problems with English. Even the hardcore "fobs" that has been in Canada for over 3 years have issues with English since their friends are like them as well. If you hang out with your country of origin crowd only, you exclude most of the other population from your group, thereby reducing chances of close friends from other backgrounds, whereas if you know English, you can be friends with virtually anyone in Canada.

I would say watching TV would be the second best option because it allows you to learn the casual conversation vocabs. My one friend is like half-fob, and also has a small vocab pool even though he was in Canada for 6 years. It's quite embarrassing that he does not even know some of the most commonly used words/phrases and it's sad that he doesn't even know who people like Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus are. He only listens to Korean music and hang out with too many Korean fobs. TV is good for word choice learning because the things people say on TV shows especially comedy are perfect sentences to say during conversations, so it improves word choices greatly. Plus, comedy could be enjoyable.

What i wouldn't really recommend is gaming because i tried to improve my french through games and it didn't work out too well because the internet uses so much slang and short forms that you're just completely lost and kids on games rarely use vocabs that are useful in real life. Anyways, gaming wouldn't improve speaking at all. I am above average at writing/reading french, but when it comes to speaking it, i wouldn't survive a day in Paris.

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!