Top 16 tips to become fluent in English

Hi, I am David, admin of EnglishTipsA2Z. Let me share all of you about top 16 tips to become fluent in English as below.

1. Interact with native speakers as much as possible

One of the most successful strategies for perfecting a language is to live amongst people who speak the language every day.  Immersion, which is the name of this strategy, gives you the opportunity to speak the language and hear the language with people who speak it fluently.  You will hear sentence constructions that you may be getting wrong – small things such as the use of articles – which are easy to miss.  You will be able to match your use of English with those around you – perfecting particularly your accent.

You can interact with native speakers without living within a country that speaks English.  Social media and online culture means you can interact with native speakers over the internet.  You can set up conversations online or take up with a social media pen pal – so you write and speak regularly with a native!

One of the great benefits of interacting with native speakers is hearing the variations in dialect and idiomatic language that makes someone fluent.  More formal learning of language tends to miss these aspects and tutors will preference formalised and standardised English.  If you really want to become fluent in English then you are going to have to introduce some of the idiosyncrasies of the language.


Related post: top 10 free and paid English courses

2. Learn and Study Phrases

Speaking English fluently means being able to express your thoughts, feelings and ideas. Your goal is to speak English in full sentences, so why not learn it in full sentences? You’ll find that English is more useful in your everyday life if you study whole phrases, rather than just vocabulary and verbs. Start by thinking about phrases that you use frequently in your native language, and then learn how to say them in English.

3. Learn the English you need to know (80/20 rule)

We’ve talked about this briefly but this needs its own tip!

Focus on the type of English you need to know – the type of English you are going to use. You can think about this in two ways:

a. When surrounding yourself in English, choose topics that are for you

b. When practicing deliberately, focus on the right type of language

This is how you can become a more effective English language learner. I don’t want you wasting time studying the type of things that aren’t important.

So, let’s say that you need to be able to describe data for your job in English.

If you want to pass the IELTS exam, then focus on this area.

Additionally, look at the following stat from the BBC:

If you learn only 800 of the most frequently-used lemmas in English, you’ll be able to understand 75% of the language as it is spoken in normal life.

Lemmas are word families.

A good place to start is with word-frequency lists. However, you will need to find sentences including these words in order to practice in the right way.

But to make things easier, I recommend learning the language in graded readers (see tip two), listening to conversations in English, and downloading commonly used sentences with audio.

4. Accept That English Is a Weird Language

Sometimes you can find patterns in English grammar, but other times English doesn’t make sense at all. For example, why are “read” (reed) and “read” (red) the same word, but pronounced differently depending on whether you’re speaking in the past or present tense? Or why is “mice” the plural of “mouse”, but “houses” is the plural of “house”?

Unfortunately, there are just as many exceptions as there are rules in English. It’s easy to get stuck on learning how to speak English properly, if you try to find a reason for everything.  Sometimes English is weird and unexplainable, so instead the best thing to do is just memorize the strange exceptions and move on.

5. Get speaking practice (here’s how)

Let’s start talking about how to put it all into practice now.

Deliberate practice is like football training while having conversations is like playing football games. Both are needed for faster progress.

One of the most common questions am I asked is this: how can I get more speaking practice?

There are three ways:

1. get a teacher

2. join a language exchange

3. make friends / join clubs

Hiring a teacher is great if you can afford it. A teacher will give you feedback on your mistakes and help you with your deliberate practice. A teacher is also going to show up to the lesson if you paid them – this is more reliable.

Joining a language exchange is fun. The key is finding the right person for you. But what is a language exchange?

This is where you meet with someone who knows the language you want to learn and wants to learn the language you know. If you are learning English and you’re from Russia, then find an English-speaker who wants to learn Russian. You spend half the time speaking in English and half the time speaking in Russian.

And finally, make friends and join clubs. When I lived in Spain, my wife and I made friends with a group of Spaniards. They wanted to learn English and learned a lot from our conversations. They practiced their English because we were friends.

Find people in your city or online to practice with.

6. Don’t Study Grammar Too Much

The key to learning a language is finding a balance between studying and practicing. Speaking English fluently isn’t the same as knowing perfect English grammar – even native English-speakers make grammar mistakes! Fluency is about being able to communicate. That’s why sometimes it’s important to put the grammar textbook away, so you can go out and practice those writing, reading, listening and speaking skills in the real world.

7. Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes

Sometimes it can be difficult to put all those rules and words together into a simple sentence. Don’t let the fear of saying something wrong stop you from speaking at all. Even if you think you’re making a mistake, keep speaking anyway. Most of the time, people will understand what you’re trying to say, even if you make a mistake. Plus, the more you speak, the easier it gets, and the more quickly the right words will come to mind.

8.Learn English every day (2 ways)

Now that you have your goal, it’s time to create a strategy.

This starts with the commitment of doing something in English every day. Why every day?

Because of the following reasons:

· it’s what you need to do if you want to learn English fast

· it gets you into the habit of doing something in English

· repetition and sleep is powerful

Look:

You can’t expect to improve quickly if you only attend language classes twice per week. The world has changed too. We can now access unlimited resources to aid us with our learning. There are incredible apps that make this all easy for us.

Daily practice is a fantastic habit.

Split your time up into the two types of learning (tip 3 and 4) so that even on days when you don’t feel like doing something, you still do it.

Do this: commit to daily English learning. Think about when you can expose yourself to English while doing other things and when you can practice English in a more deliberate way.

9. Learn from Everyone

You don’t have to only learn English from textbooks and teachers – anyone who speaks English can help you practice. Imagine how you would feel if someone asked you, in your native language, how to pronounce something? Would you be angry? No! You’d probably be happy to help, just like most English-speakers are happy to help you. If you know any English-speakers, whether it’s a friend or co-worker, take advantage of the opportunity to practice and learn from them.

10. Take face-to-face lessons

This last point, that you will face a variety of English use depending on where you visit or live, is maybe also an argument for taking lessons.  If you visit England you will find that English changes depending on where you visit – not in a major way but enough to cause confusion – a bread roll can be called a bap, a cob, a roll, a bun, for instance.  More likely, if you learn in the US, you will find huge differences in vocabulary.  Sidewalk is pavement; pants are trousers, a trunk is a boot, a diner is a café – and many more variations.

Therefore, even if you are living in an English-speaking country, speaking to natives every day, you might find formal lessons beneficial.  A professional tutor will be able to gauge your level of language – whether it is intermediate upper or advanced lower – or some other such rating.  They can then test you and listen to you speak and assess the areas that need attention.  They will then be able to put remedial lessons in place that will address your specific needs.

11. Take online lessons

It might be unrealistic to expect that you can move to the country that speaks English and then seek professional tuition from a native speaker.  Instead, you might want to take advantage of formal lessons online.  Applications such as Skype mean that you can speak to anyone anywhere in the world.  You can speak face to face with video conferencing and your tutor will be able to share their screen, so you can see teaching resources as they use them.  This is still learning from a native speaker, with all the advantages of accent and remedial grammar work, but without having to move countries to access it.

12. Stop Being a Student

The right attitude can make the difference between failure and success. Stop thinking of yourself as someone who is learning English, and start thinking of yourself as someone who speaks English. It’s a small change, but it will make you feel more confident and help you to use the English you already know more effectively.

This also means you need to start thinking in English. If you want to say the word “apple” in English, for example, right now you probably think of the word in your native language first, and then try to think of the correct word in English. Instead, try imagining a picture of an apple, and then just think the English word “apple”. Real fluency happens when you stop mentally translating conversations.

13. How to become fluent by watching YouTube videos

Another way to use the internet to access native speakers and attempt to immerse yourself in the language is through online videos.  There are many teachers online who have recorded videos to help you learn English.  These video span basic to advanced and can help you to perfect your English.
Alternatively, you can just watch videos on topics that you enjoy that are spoken in English or watch TV shows or films.  These videos will give you the opportunity to bathe yourself in the language, whilst enjoying what you are watching.  It is often much easier to learn when you are having fun – well, at least you will stay committed to the learning if you are enjoying yourself.

14. Read lots of newspapers and other quality texts

Another way to perfect your English is to read lots.  Learning any language, even the one you have spoken since a child, is improved by the act of reading and seeing language used again and again.  You can read newspapers in English.  If you are going to use the British press then you should maybe use the quality newspapers rather than the “red-tops” or tabloid papers.  Tabloid papers have a low reading age – somewhere close to single digits – therefore, you are unlikely to stretch your English language skills by reading these papers.

It might be better to commit to reading novels in English – remember you can always seek support from a translation service if you struggle with the vocabulary or sentence construction.  The more language you are exposed to and the more often this happens, the better your English will become.  You could always mix this strategy with speaking with native English speakers by joining a book club.

15. Download an app

There are language learning apps available for download, which can help you to learn English wherever you are and whenever you want.  There are many you can choose from and a lot of them are free.  Some of these free apps include: Duolingo, HelloTalk, Mindsnacks, Busuu, Babbel, Memrise, Leaf and Lingua.ly.

Duolingo is an excellent app for learning, as it makes the whole process into a game.  This is good for someone looking to perfect their English because the sense of progress in the app will be that much greater.  The app breaks language learning down into subjects and into aspects of grammar.  The main approach is say and repeat – but this is excellent for pronunciation in particular – which is usually the last aspect of English fluency to be mastered.  What is also clever is that the app will increase the sophistication of the questions asked depending on how good you are at language.

Busuu breaks up language learning into competency levels – and it stops at upper intermediate – so a step before advanced.  However, there are quizzes that help test your proficiency and help you drill and perfect your language.

Memrise deserves a mention because it cleverly places key words and phrases into sentences with similar sounding words from your native language.  This added association helps you to recognise patterns in language and plays on the strengths of the memory at recognising the familiar.  The best things is that you can skip all the way to advanced, which means you can perfect English rather than just learn the basics.  Plus – the number of languages supported is impressive – with more than 150 languages offered.

16. Use a translator

Another app option is to download a translator that will help support you in your adventurous use of the English language.  One of the best things about an app like Google Translate is that the app will speak the words out loud for you.  This is an imaginative way to learn language – and one that supports independent learning.  You can throw yourself into complex situations and you will have a solution if your English is not strong enough to cope.  Setting yourself high goals will push your learning forward – and a translator will give you the confidence to commit to higher level English.  Don’t think it is just for people that cannot understand anything – you can adapt the use of these tools to your needs.