How to speak English fluently.

I want to improve my English and I want to speak English more fluently. I’ve seen English language changed lots of people’s lives. I was born in China and English is not my first language, my first language is actually Mandarin and my second language is Japanese bacause I used to addicted to Japanese anime and culture, and my third language is English. So when I first worked in southeast Asia, I couldn’t speak a word of English fluently. I spend lots of time to improve my English level, it finall took me nearly ten years to reach today’s B2 level.

So today I wanna share with you six steps to improve our English fluency. The six things that I did to learn the English language.

Step number one to improve our English fluency, it’s actually very simple, and that’s “DON’T give a damn.” That’s right, don’t give a damn. Speak whenever, wherever, however. It doesn’t matter if we speak with an accent, thousands of Indian workers in american speak with accent, and they talk to tens of millions of people every single month. It doesn’t matter. Forget how people would judge, forget how people would think of you, all this stuff, it doesn’t matter, just speak, as much as we could. If they don’t understand, I say it again, I just keep saying it, cause that’s how we get comfortable. If we’re always thinking about “Oh, I’m not sounding smart” or “They would misunderstand what I’m saying” or “I’ll look stupid”, all this stuff, all this things holds our back learning the language. So, don’t give a damn, speak as much as we could.

Step number two and that is what I always did, I would take a book, any book, but simple book, and I would read it out loud word for word, paragraph by paragragh. I found that is a very good way learning a language, because there’s certain parts where maybe I have diffculty pronouncing certain chunks, I say it again and again, and maybe there’s certain words I don’t understand, I can go to a dictionary. Reading a book out loud, that’s also another thing that I did to learn a new language. If I finished one book, and I might as well pick something that I am interested in, for example, I always interested in travel, in success and motivation, so I pick a book on those topics, and then read it out loud every single day. I’m talking about could be 20 minutes, 30 minutes, it doesn’t matter, but do it every single day. Lots of polyglots did that every day for years, and they’d learned several languages fluently.

Step number stree to improve my English fluency and that is “Learn one new word everyday”. Just take one word that I don’t understand, that I don’t know what it means, every single day I just learn one new word, go to google translate, longman or cambridge dictionary, find out exactly what is means. So every single day pick a new word, that I’ve never heard of before, I never use before and learn it every single day. If we’ve done this every single day, that’s 365 new words that I could add to my vocabulary that I could use. English is such a powerful language, first of all, not just because a lot of people use it, but to understand a culture, to understand philosophies, we need to understand the language. So when I learn the English language or Japanese language even Spanish language now, I also learn about a lot of other things, about the culture, about program skill and game industry informations of course, that’s what I do. So language is not just something that we use to communicate, language is also something that we could train our mind with. So understand that.

Step four, immersion. We have to immerse ourself. So when I was learning the English language, what I did is I would listen to English music every single day, and try to sing along, just to learn it, right? It was very, very difficult, and I was listening to rap music, which is wat too diffcult, I gave that up, hahaha, but I was watching English movies without subtitles, and I would listen and listen. At first, I would’t understand, I would understand maybe 30% of it, right? And then I think, it’s like, that’s what she means, and 40%, 50%. As my English improves, I notice I would understand the movie more and more, right? So we have to immerse ourself, talk in English, listening to English music, watch English movies, do as much as that as we could. Naturally, we’ll pick up the slang, we’ll pick up kinda certain stories or phrases, like that kind of phrases. That’s how I learn English language, then I make it fun. So learning English does’t have to sit down and open a book. No, make it fun. Talk to people who speak English, right? Like interact, connect, read, watch, listen, that’s how we can get good.

Step number five to improve my English fluency and that is to hang out with people who speak English. I know it sound so obvious, but that’s how I do it. I remember in the Philippines, I saw there groups of people, the Chinese workmates only hang out with Chinese workmates, the Philippine workmates hang out with Philippine workmates, and I would do the opposite, I would go and hang out with Philippine people who speak English, I would hang out with people who grew up locally who speak perfect English, and I would just talk and hang out. I go to the mall, and I would try to talk as much as possible, listen, ask questions, to get comnfortable. And one of my friend who is also Chinese even got a local girlfriend who speaks English, so that’s another way to do it. I’m not saying that’s the only way to learn, but if we wanna learn a new language, date someone who speak the language, we’ll be shocked how quickly we pick up the language.

Step number six, that is going to a state of over learning. Let me explain. If we are thinking about learning a language, let’s say you’re A1 level, and you wanna get to B1 level, the fastest way to get B1 level is you actually go for B2 or C1. Let’s take an exercise example, okay? If we wanna have stronger bicep, let’s say I’m only doing a curl, I can only hypothetically lift 15 pounds, that’s much of strength I have. If I wanna make that 15 pounds easy to better lift that up, guess what? Train with 20 pounds, train with 25 pounds, that’s an over preparation, over learning, that’s what I mean, right? Not only learning English language, I was learning how to design, how to draw, how to write a novel, so not only just the English language, day-to-day basis to communicate, but actually at a way higher level, right? That’s a state of over learning, so imagine I could do that, not just to write a simple 150 word essay in English, but to write a diary to express my deepest feeling and thoughts, that’s over learning. If I could do that, when I go back to day-to-day comunication, just like talking, of course is so easy. Would I be nervous? No, I just wrote 2000 word essay in the last week, I’m all ready. And that’s what I mean over learning.

So, those are the six steps to improve my English fluency, I hope this will help us learn a new language easily. By the way, I almost reach A1 level in Spanish, it takes me about 3 months, not so fast, emmm, but it’s okay.:-)