How To Improve Your English

This article focuses on how to improve your English. The suggestion that I am giving here is an amalgamation of my experiences in struggling to learn the English language.

Although English language was my first language and Chinese was my second language back in school, I came from a family that spoke Mandarin and everyone else in the family was educated in the Chinese language.

I was admitted to primary one knowing only the alphabet plus a few simple English words. That was all. I did not even understand what the teacher was telling the class. Thus, for those who are masters of the English language, you will notice the imperfection in the use of my grammar. Excuse me! I am still learning.

3 Stages of Learning the English Language

There are 3 stages for learning a language: listening, reading and writing. Unless you already have a reasonable mastery of the language, you will have to progress in that order. 

Well, how about speaking? I agree that speaking is also a very important aspect of improving your English but it comes uniquely under another category. I have assumed here that whoever is reading this article is capable of speaking English. In the context of Singapore, we all have listened and spoken in English except that the English that we have listened to and have spoken in are less than desirable.

Most of us who are non-native English speakers would have an inferiority complex thinking that native English speakers are so much better than us in their command of the English language but that is not necessarily true.

For the native English speakers, their use of the grammar and their vocabulary are much better than us because they grew up listening to English all the time and the English spoken by the people in their environment are almost perfect, perhaps with the exception of the Hillbillies in America. I believe that is so after all my standard of English is not high enough to tell of their mistakes. However, upon closer interaction with many native English speakers, you will soon learn that many of them cannot read nor write in English.

For those who can write, their spellings are terrible because while we learned English mainly through reading, they learned English mainly through listening. Many Americans do not even know that their spellings are different from those of the British. In the movie, “My Fair Lady”, Professor Higgins exclaimed, “Why can’t English learn to speak (English). There are even places where English completely disappears. Why, in America they haven’t used it (English) for years!”

What I am trying to point out here is that native English speakers learned the English language primarily by listening to spoken English just like we Chinese learn the Chinese language by listening to spoken Mandarin and Chinese dialects. In a similar way, some Chinese do not know how to read nor write in Chinese. 

One main reason why learning English is an uphill task for us who are non-native English speakers, it is because we did not learn English by listening in our childhood years. Most of us grew up listening to badly spoken English. In our Singapore context, we called that “Broken English” and it has even degenerated to what we called today, “Singlish” in present times. On the contrary, those who grew up in an environment, particularly from families whose parents speak good English, their English are the best among us, Singaporeans. Since most of us, Singaporeans, have a bad start, there is no point crying over spilt milk but to learn it the hard way.

Step 1: How To Improve Your English by Listening

You first begin by choosing a book which you find the standard of English you are comfortable with and preferably one that you are fairly interested in reading. However, do not find a book where the standard of English is way below your standard say, “Three Little Pigs”, where you will achieve nothing.

I would suggest that you choose a classic literature text because they are in the public domain, which means that their copyrights have expired. You can easily get the written text and audio recording of these books from the internet for free. 

Furthermore, traditional teaching of English in schools are taught using these books. 

To find free audio recording of these books, you can search for them on this website Librivox. Otherwise, you can always buy them from Amazon. 

When you have gotten your audio book, listen to the audio book a chapter at a time and try to understand the audio recording. After listening, try to write down what are the things you remember and understand from what you have listened to and notice the gaps that are missing from the story because you did not fully understand them through mere listening. 

For the first time, you probably do not fully get what the audio book is saying unless your English proficiency is already high. If you like to and if you have the time to spare, you may listen to it again a few more times. However, I suggest that you move on to the next stage of reading the text itself after listening to the audio once. 

You might ask, “Could I just skip the listening stage and just begin with reading?” 

Sure! I recommended listening first because it is the easiest and least time-consuming. I have improved my English unknowingly by merely listening to sermons preached by my pastors and my favourite preachers for the last 30 over years. I could only listen to these sermons because they are not available in written text. Listening to these sermons has worked for me because they are spoken in a local accent that are easily understood. Although the accent is local but grammatically the English is proper. I would also like to add that the use of vocabulary is also good.

In the case of audio books, they are not recorded in a mode of reading and they are also read with a foreign accent, mainly the British accent. These are also the reasons why audio books are less comprehensible to me and thus more challenging.

Step 2: How To Improve Your English By Reading

After listening to the audio book, read the book on the chapter you have listened to. Take note of what are the parts that you already have grasped and those parts that you have not quite gotten yet by mere listening. Give special attention to those portions which you could not figure out at the listening stage.

These portions were difficult to understand perhaps there were too many words that you do not understand or the audio was telling too many things that are foreign to your personal experience, say some foreign culture or habits, long tedious descriptions, too many names of different characters, etc. 

This is very similar to those times back in school where you could not understand what your teachers were teaching in class because there were too many things that you needed to study and examine slowly at your own pace by reading on your own.

If it was a subject that you were good at, you could follow the lessons in class very well because you already had the right foundation and aptitude, and you also knew all the necessary key concepts and terminologies associated with the subject.

 

As for subjects that you were not too proficient in, it was a struggle and many a times, you were completely lost in class while your teachers were teaching.

Now you are reading at your own pace to comprehend these portions instead of keeping up with the pace of the audio recording. Generally, reading is done at your own comfortable pace rather than trying hard to keep up with the pace of the speaker. It is also important for us to read those words for ourselves and notice how the words are spelt, plus the punctuation marks that are not mentioned.

Having first gone through the listening stage, we also get to hear for ourselves how the words are pronounced unlike reading where we do not know the exact pronunciation of the words that we are unsure of. When you have both listened to the audio and read the book, you would have gone through a process that many native English speakers have not even gone through in learning the English language, i.e. READ!

Step 3: How To Improve Your English By Writing

This is the secret of many masters for deep learning in all fields: WRITE!

The effort required here is great but the reward is tremendous.

So if you have the patience and perseverance to carry out this step, write out the passage you have read. And I emphasise write, not type. And I would like to emphasise here, take your time to write slowly and properly, not scribbling. Be conscious and aware of what you are writing, asking yourself whether you understand what you are writing. In writing, you will notice many things that you have missed just by both listening and reading. When we read, we tend to get lazy and wants to push on ahead and finish the text without even knowing, much less understanding, what are written in the text. Writing also slow us down to think deeply instead of wanting to rush ahead before we could understand what we have not yet understood.

Ask yourself what tense did they use and why have they used that tense instead of another. Ask yourself similar questions on the use of grammar, say the use of preposition. If you cannot figure them out on their own, find someone who is proficient with the English language to help you.

If you cannot find someone good enough to help you, help yourself by using Google and an online dictionary. It would also be good if you buy a book on grammar for reference.

Take time to check the dictionary of those words that you do not understand. You can even go a step further by checking the thesaurus and ask yourself and others what are the subtle difference of those words given in the thesaurus. What impact would it make if you have replace the original word given in the text with another word from the thesaurus. There is an online Visual Thesaurus that give you a visual display of how a list of different words are related in the form of a web.

After you have finished writing the whole chapter, listen to the audio again. You will notice that you can understand the audio recording this time because you have understood the chapter thoroughly not only by reading but also by writing.

Also take note that how easy it seems this time that you could just casually understand everything that is in the audio as compared to the first time that you were listening to the audio. That is because you have paused, slowed down and studied word for word from the written text and examine the meaning of each word and the whole passage. This will also enable you to improve your English just by listening in future too because you have overcome those obstacles that you initially had and you have also built some strong foundations that you lacked previously.

Continue with another chapter until you have finished the whole book and then move on to another book. I believe that you would have improved your English very much just by going through these steps just by completing one chapter. By the time you have finished one book, the standard of your English would have improved tremendously as compared to what it used to be.

Usually, people in general would have improved their English just by reading a book at a normal pace without pausing to examine all the minute details, the meaning of every new words and even the use of grammar. This is achieved merely by subconsciously acquiring the use of the style of the language and encountering a set of new words that were used repetitively in the book and the meaning were guessed from the context of the passages. A greater and deeper examination and analysis of the text as I have suggested above would definitely improve your standard of English very much more than just by reading alone. People who have improved their English by reading do so by reading many books accumulated over a long period of time.

To Speak Better, You Have To Write

In public speaking, most people struggle both with the content of their speech as well as in the English language. A good number of people joined Toastmasters not only in the hope of mastering public speaking but also improving their English.

To improve the proficiency of a language you are learning, you have to keep writing.  Seek help for correcting the grammar of your writing. Ask for suggestion for what better words to use, better ways to structure the sentences,  better overall organisation of the whole writing. Find a good language tutor and pay him/her if possible. Do this until your written English becomes natural to you. If you cannot write properly, you cannot speak properly. If you cannot write well, you cannot speak well. It will take time and perhaps a very long time. You have to be patient. Rome is not built in one day. 

Start a blog and write on things that interest you, inspire you, intrigue you. That is a way for you to keep writing enjoyably. Don’t be too shy to publish your blog on the internet just because you are afraid of people reading your articles that are written in less than perfect English. Just do it for your own enjoyment and for the sake of improving your English. Do not worry too much about people reading your writing because your blog will not be found easily on the internet. In fact, it will probably not be found by anyone. If your blog can be found by many people, then you would have struck a gold mine. It is time for you to start monetising your blog and earn some good money and build a passive income. Wouldn’t that be rewarding?

If you are reading this article to improve your English, I believe you are among the many people who are struggling with the English language. I also believe that whatever you write, be it a script for public speaking, a course assignment or a report at work, you will find them full of grammatical mistakes and the style of the language unappealing. I too had that problem and is still on my journey of improving my English too. The usual remark I had from my teachers for my English essays back in school was, “Very Poor! Read more!”

However, looking back and comparing what I am writing in the present with my school works in the past as a student, I noticed a great difference. Reading my school works really makes me feel very embarrassed with my writing as a student. I know that I have not arrived and I still have a long way to go. What have caused me to improve in my writing was actually one of the things I hated doing most in my former job – writing reports and testimonials for students. These testimonials are to be submitted to institutes of higher learning bearing my school principal’s signature, school letterhead and school stamp. They have to be written with a decent standard of English and of course I had to go round pleading my colleagues who are English language teachers to help vet my writing. After decades of writing, it has helped me improve on my English tremendously although it is far from perfect, but I have come a long way and you can too if you put in the hard work.