How to learn English well and improve English quickly is the most important concern for many English learners at this stage. It is not difficult to learn English well, but the most crucial thing is to master the right way to learn English. The following 6 methods may not be suitable for everyone, but we hope they will make your English learning journey easier and more effective.
1、Have a Word of the Day.
For most people, the workload of trying to remember every word they encounter is too great. Even if you remember the new word in the moment, it is amazing how quickly it can be forgotten without the context of use.
A better way to solve this problem is to pick out a few words and use them every day. The average adult needs to use a new word 150 times to master it, and focusing on one or more words per day can help build vocabulary.
There are two ways to do this: 1) Make a list of words and rotate one to focus on each day; 2) Select new words that are not intended to appear in conversation and use them several times.
2. Speak the language as much as you can (especially with native speakers).
There is no doubt that the best way to speak a foreign language well is to “talk about it”. After all, reading and grammar can only help you so far. It’s easy to fall into the dead end of “don’t want to speak because you can’t; don’t want to speak because you can’t”.
Do your best to communicate with native speakers. Five minutes with a native speaker is much more rewarding than with a Chinese teacher who has studied English for four years. You should spend 80% of your study time talking to people who speak better.
3. Listen to foreign language radio or TV, even as background noise.
An important part of oral language learning is learning intonation and rhythm. For example, in a sentence, placing the stress on different words will convey different meanings. The difference between a beginner and an expert is the ability to speak English with a Chinese flavor.
The remedy to that is to listen to the language as much as possible.
Focus your listening on the rhythm of the words and look for variations in pronunciation and intonation in different environments. How does the language change when the speaker is agitated, angry, or accusingly rhetorical? Even using the conversation as a background can influence you in a subtle way.
4. Look up words you don’t know in a monolingual dictionary.
Getting the meaning of English words right through Chinese can sometimes be unreliable, as truly straightforward, 100% accurate translations are almost non-existent. Some words for physical objects, such as milk or table, may be relatively straightforward, but it is much harder to translate a concept.
By consulting a monolingual dictionary, you can make sure that the word you choose is the one you want to express.
5、When you make a mistake, immediately try to correct yourself.
When you make a mistake, immediately try to correct yourself. When you mistype a word, you should delete the whole word and retype the correct word.
The same is true for learning a language. If you say something wrong and you catch your mistake, immediately repeat the correct sentence several times. This reprograms your brain to avoid the same mistakes and reinforces the correct grammar.
6、Carry around a notebook and write down new words you learn.
When you hear a new word, immediately record it in a notebook (if you can’t spell it, you have to dare to ask someone).
After a few weeks, whenever something like “I remember talking about this recently, but I can’t remember how to spell it” happens, you can open the notebook and look at it. The important thing is to have a record of all the words you have learned.
This can be a lot of work for beginners, since most of the words are new. However, once you get past the beginning stage, the learning process slows down. What is easy for beginners to learn will suddenly become much more difficult after that.
When entering the advanced stage, recording new words can also help you get rid of the frustration of having a bottleneck in your learning.