How to Improve Your Speaking skills at home

                 How to Improve Your Speaking in English

Do You Speak In English

Tell me if you struggle with these.4 specific problems while speaking in English. I will show you my method,

The way English is taught in schools is a joke. I'm saying this in the nicest way possible, but it is a joke. You would end up getting advice like that, go read a novel, go read English newspapers, go watch news anchors, whatnot. Right. I tried doing this stuff when I was in school and it did not work out for me.

In fact, till the 9th standard, I was horrible at my English because I was following traditional ways of learning languages and it did not work out for me. So in my case, I was a state-level Athletic, so I used to miss school many a time. So the structure just was not working for me. So I had to devise my method of learning English. Please Read this Article end I am hopeful that you would be able to pick some of the key strategies and points that I'm telling you and incorporate that into your speaking style. I will discuss four specific problems that you might face and how you can overcome that. So the first key problem that you will face in terms of speaking in English is that you would say that the words are not coming into my mind, therefore I am not able to speak fluently. So you need to identify that problem as a vocabulary problem. Now, whether you are a beginner, whether you are an intermediate user or if you are an advanced English speaker, you can always work on and improve upon your vocabulary. So this tip is relevant for everyone. Now the way English is taught in schools, they do what consultants usually call, boiling the ocean. So schools try to teach you everything about English. So imagine a circumstance or a scenario where you are just trying to pick up a language and think about grammar rules, sentence structuring, and building vocabulary. It is just mind-boggling and it will confuse you and your learning speed will be slow. I am not saying that you will not learn anything, but your learning speed will get hampered very, very quickly.

So what you need to do is that you need to follow something called as 80-20 rule. Now, this is again a rule that is followed

Extensively and religiously by management consultants. And the rule simply says that 80 per cent of the results can be generated by 20 per cent of the efforts. So you need to be smart in terms of building your vocabulary first. So what do I mean by being smart in terms of building your vocabulary?

 

If your teachers have told you this. they would say, go buy an English dictionary and start memorizing words from alphabet A and go order wise. So were such tips are given to you? The short answer is yes, these were given to me also that, if you want to improve your English speaking skills and if you are looking to build your vocabulary, go and mug up the dictionary. It is madness. There are 172 thousand words in English. If you try to learn the dictionary, it is extremely inefficient and it will take you years to accomplish anything in terms of developing a good vocabulary. So what is it that you should rather be doing? So you should develop your conversational style of vocabulary.

So in English, there are approximately three to five thousand words. Out of 172 thousand words,

There are good three to five thousand words that are frequently used. So these would be called conversational words and multi-use words. So you should go and pick it up and you can get a very easy list on the Internet. Just go and Google the most frequently used words in English and you will get a lexicon of five thousand words. Those are the words that you need to pick up. Now, you can be an absolute beginner that you do not know anything in English and you can be an intermediate user. You must first pick up these five thousand

words so that you can start speaking English, and understanding English first, because the more and more you would hear these common words, you will get extremely good at using them, contextualizing them and speaking fluently.

So the first step is that you need to build your vocabulary.

Yes, but you don't need to go and learn the entire dictionary.

All you simply need to do is that you need to pick up multi-use words. So multi-use words would be something like beautiful.

So beautiful can be used in multiple contexts. It can be said that this flower is beautiful or it can be said that this car is beautiful or it can be said that this painting is beautiful. So you need to pick up these multi-use words first and get good clarity around them. If you pick single-use words like oregano. So it might have very limited applicability when you're just starting to build your vocabulary. So very important point for you to consider that those words are not coming to your

Mind because you have not developed your vocabulary in the Right manner. So you must pick multi-use words to get

Good at it, and then get on to more advanced levels by picking more complicated stuff as you progress. Don't try to do both things together. A very easy way to build vocabulary

And this is something that when I learn these five thousand vocabulary words I record those words on my mobile, and I listen to them on my phone. So that is how I'm trying to build my vocabulary in English because I was weak in English. If you are weak in English, then your first step should be to build your vocabulary. Now, once you've built your vocabulary, you will run into problems.

Number two is that I make too many mistakes. That will, of course, happen because you're moving from the vocabulary stage to the sentence construction stage and here you're likely to make a lot of mistakes because you are not familiar with the grammar rules and sentence structure. Now your school will tell you that go and mug up Wren and Martin. That's one of the best grammar books out there.  And it is correct that it's a very good grammar book. But if you try to memorize Wren and Martin again, it will take years and you will get bogged down. So not a very efficient strategy in terms of learning things fast. So here what you need to remember is that to move towards spoken English, you don't need to have perfect grammar. It's completely OK to make mistakes when you're speaking and starting. And if you are a non-native speaker, it's completely, completely OK to make mistakes. You don't need to become the next Shashi Tharoor, it's completely OK to make mistakes. So what do you do? You simply pick up a grammar book where

The concepts are explained in a very easy to understand manner and pick up hundred simple grammar rules that make up the English language. So these would be things like what is the subject-verb agreement? What is a preposition? What is an adverb or adjective? So you need to pick up this basic level of details by going through a simple book. Now, in case you want me to recommend some grammar books here, just drop a comment and I will put my answer in the description box. So the important point of this section is that it is natural and OK to make mistakes when you're transitioning from that vocabulary building stage to the sentence construction stage, it is perfectly fine. Number two, you don't need to be perfect in terms of your grammar when you're speaking things, it's completely OK to make a few mistakes. Third and finally, to improve quickly, just go and study 100, 150 grammar rules.

That's it. That's it. That's all the grammar that you need to know in English to start speaking in English. And this can be built fairly quickly. So once you build your vocabulary and you

Understand sentence construction, and you move on to the intermediate level. Now, here is where people get mostly stuck.

So pay attention to this section. Here your problem would be that I know English, but I'm very hesitant to speak in English. So this is called as exposure or confidence-building stage. What you need to do is that you need to create interesting learning exercises for yourself. For example, there is a technique that I call picture visualization. So, for example, once my basic vocabulary is built and I know a little bit of sentence construction, I will start analyzing some pictures.

 

English Is a Very Fun Language

So here is a picture for you to take a look at and I will start commenting on it. So I see that this is a funny picture of the Mona Lisa. Mona Lisa is one of the most celebrated paintings in the world. It is kept in the Louvre museum. And I will do a forty-five-second speaking exercise on this. So I will say that Mona Lisa is one of the world's most famous paintings. It is kept in the Louvre Museum in France. It is painted by one of the most celebrated painters in the world. Now, this picture depicts a very funny side of the Mona Lisa. So she is looking at a fly and trying to kill her. So probably we associate Mona Lisa with the seriousness and the beauty that it depicts. But this picture is very funny and very interesting to me. So this is the type of impromptu speaking exercise that I would do and I would encourage you to do it, this will help you build confidence. Similarly, you can pick up 10 picture exercises that you can start doing and start blurting things out. So this will help you consolidate the vocabulary that you would have initially built and align that with the sentence structuring that you would have built subsequently. Similarly, you can start watching English movies with subtitles or listening to English commentary or speaking in front of a mirror. So all these exposure exercises will help you consolidate all the learning that you have undertaken in steps one and two. Now comes the final stage, which differentiates intermediate users from advanced users. You might have met very intelligent people. They would say that I know all the grammar rules, I have a very good vocabulary, but I do not feel confident enough. So the best way to overcome this weakness is that you should go and speak with people in English. If you go and speak with native English

Speakers, nothing like it. That will give you a lot of confidence.

It will give you a lot of insights in terms of how English conversations take place. This is what amplified my skill when I went to INSEAD, where I met people from over seventy-five nationalities. I understood the intricacies of speaking with people from different nationalities, and how they structure their conversation. Would they like me to speak slower or faster?

Thank you so much.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. So in summary, developing your language skills be it English or Spanish, it's a very logical, thought out process and you must follow that process to develop your skill set effectively. Otherwise, learning a language can be such a massive task that you will get bogged down. And that is what happens with the majority.