10 Top Tips For Improving Your Spoken English And Your Memory

10 Top Tips For Improving Your Spoken English And Your Memory

Nardyello Co

Smart Brains Spotlight 

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The topic for today is “10 Top Tips For Improving Your Spoken English And Your Memory“.

Learning should be for life. Every moment of every day we are being presented with new and important lessons.

Here we will present you one handpicked new and important lesson every day from smart brains and experts around the world.

Today we learned about 10 Top Tips For Improving Your Spoken English And Your Memory. Let Nardyello Co shares with you his top 10 tips help to improve your spoken English, memory speed, attention, and flexibility.

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Marilyn RC

 
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10 Top Tips For Improving Your Spoken English And Your Memory – Nardyello Co

10 TOP TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR SPOKEN ENGLISH AND YOUR MEMORY

Nardyello Co

How can I become fluent in English?

10 TOP TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR SPOKEN ENGLISH

Thank you, “Youtube – NextEducation – Free Lessons & Tutorials“.

Answer by Nardyello Co. All credit goes to Nardyello Co, Thank you!

10 TOP TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR SPOKEN ENGLISH AND YOUR MEMORY

6.8/10

Learning a language has a lot to do with your mental ability to process, store and retrieve information and your lifestyle will affect your ability to learn something. Do you drink at least 1 liter of water daily? Do you sleep well? Do you eat vegetables and fruit regularly (2x a day or more)? Do you practice physical exercises at least twice a week?

Those questions are important to answer because they are related to the environment your brain is in. If you aren’t an active person, your brain activity will suffer as there will be less oxygen being delivered to it and less neural stimulation. If you sleep very little, if you don’t eat proper food, if you don’t drink enough water, all that will add up and cause your brain to perform under its full capacity.

Also, I suggest playing some brain games to improve speed, attention, flexibility, etc of your brain. Information retention is very important when learning the more than 8000 different pronunciation sounds of the English language and also the meaning of all the words. If today you find yourself constantly forgetting the meaning or how to pronounce some words, your memory might need to be worked on. Games from Lumosity, Brain Wars and other apps will help with that.

Now, some study techniques you can use:

1. Flashcards – are a great way to work your information retention. They help strengthen neural connections as they constantly remind you of a particular word/sentence that is on the card. You can use Anki or Memrise to help you. I used them to learn some Japanese. They are very effective.

2. Reading Out Loud – is a great way for you to improve pronunciation and sound recognition. Turn on a song or some other audio with a native person speaking, get the lyrics/transcript and read silently with only your eyes. Once you notice that you can follow silently, start again and now try to speak it along with the person on the audio. You will get lost, scramble some words, but soon you’ll be able to follow along while reading.

Our brain likes to copy the sound of people’s voices when we try to speak over them. Your brain will automatically try to fix your pronunciation to match the audio. This is a technique called “shadowing” or “voice-over”. You will be receiving stimuli from your eyes, ears (audio and your voice) and your body will try to replicate the sounds. This is phenomenal to improve pronunciation.

3. Speed Reading/Listening – Download an app like Smart Audiobook Player which allows you to increase the speed of the audio. Start listening to something at normal speed. After you’re able to follow along, increase the speed to 1.2x. After that, increase to 1.4, then 1.6x. Remember to increase the speed and repeat what you already read.

Your brain will start processing information faster without trying to translate. If you see yourself getting lost because you want to translate, block that thought and continue without understanding everything. It’s okay to not understand 100%. When you increase the speed, you want to understand about 70% and more and more as you repeat.

When you get used to the audio at a fast speed, put it at normal speed again. It will feel like the audio is now very slow.

Conversation speed is usually around 160 to 180 words per minute, that is, about 3 words per second. If you practice at 220 words per minute, normal conversation speed will be easy to understand.

4. Movies – It is important to enjoy your journey and many people love movies. If you like movies, but still can’t understand them, select a movie you have seen many times before -a movie you love- and watch it in English without subtitles. You already know the story, so you won’t feel lost. You will understand a lot of the movie.

5. Practice EVERY DAY – there are 168 hours in a week. If you only practice for 1 or 2 hours a week, you will advance very slowly and you will forget a lot of things because you don’t use that information constantly. Practice as much as possible; morning, afternoon and night. Listen to English all the time. Live in English. Most people will never speak fluently because they don’t dedicate enough time to it. Can an athlete win a marathon by practicing only 2 hours a week?

Live the language. Make it a part of your life. Change your phone to English, your social sites to English, access websites in English. Make friends who speak English. Play games in English.

“You cannot understand that which you are not a part of.”

6. Have a Diary – this is a great way for you to practice your sentence composition ability and also force you to use the past and future tenses. I usually have my students write 3x a week in their diaries and bring it to class. In the beginning, they tend to make many mistakes. As they progress, though, they fix all the mistakes and this gives them more confidence. This will also force students to work their creative side. Speaking is part structure and part creativity. Part of what you say has to do with your personality (how you say it). No two people will speak a language 100% alike. Who they are influences how they speak.

7. Make Friends Who Speak English – this is easy to understand why. In the end, you want to learn to speak English, so you have to speak it. Make friends and dare to speak even if you make mistakes. This is very very important. Your brain will create stronger memories based on these experiences. I’m sure you remember about good events in your life a lot better than you remember all the grammar rules of English.
Register at iTalki.com, lang-8.com or any other community site. There are many. Contact people. Get their Skype, do a Hangout talk with them, send emails, meet with them. Do what you can to speak it.

8. Don’t Worry About Making Mistakes – this is probably one of the biggest reasons some people don’t speak English well. Being afraid of making mistakes will stop you from trying and experiencing new things. Not only that, your brain will block out information if you feel nervous, shy, worried, etc and you will feel like you don’t know anything. This is a normal reaction, because when you are afraid, all your brain thinks about is “How can I escape!?” and, therefore, you will have that sensation of “blanking out”.

Relax, try and learn. Mistakes are a part of learning. Embrace them. Imagine if a baby decided to never walk after he fell when he first tried. Nobody would ever walk. We all make mistakes.

It is important to note that with every mistake you do, you are one step closer to learning. If you never make mistakes, you’ll never learn.

9. Teach Others – teaching is a great way to learn. You will actually learn more grammar by teaching it. You’ll learn to create new examples and find new ways of explaining things. I learned more after I started teaching, and I’m a native American. I can honestly tell you I didn’t know 10% of all the grammar rules that exist. I spoke correctly because of habit, not because I knew grammar. Now I know and am able to teach it, because I started teaching it.

10. Read Books – this is to refine your English. Reading books is the most amazing way to improve your language, even your native language. A person who doesn’t read, most likely also doesn’t know much about the world and/or has trouble expressing the world around him and the world in him. Read books aloud and you will notice your speech improve with each book you read. You will gain a richer vocabulary. You will sound smarter. You will have a lot to talk about. You will open your mind to new ideas and new thinking.

“He who knows how to read and reads not, has no advantage over he who knows not how to read.”

Books are shortcuts to life. Use them to improve your English and improve yourself.

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A few apps I suggest my students download to help them learn:

• Anki (flashcard app and desktop software)
• Memrise (flashcard app and website)
• Musixmatch (or an app that gets song lyrics automatically)
• Smart Audiobook Reader (or app that allows you to increase the speed of the audio)
• English Radio (with subtitles/transcripts)
• Brain Wars (to improve brain functions)
• Lumosity (to improve brain functions)
• Quora (for reading)
• Duolingo (study and have fun)
• Feedly (or other RSS aggregator; for reading)

I hope these tips help you in some way.

Reference: Nardyello Co. “How can I become fluent in English?”  originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Other useful tips for improving your spoken English and your memory

Watching TV

Watching TV only gives you the chance to hear something correctly first time. This is better for high level students. It can be great practice for speaking to native English speakers so you don’t have to ask them to repeat themselves!

Thank you, Langports – Langports English Language School in Australia

Find activities to practice your English

Here you can find activities to practice your listening, reading, writing and speaking skills. Improving your skills will help you use English more effectively and do well in your studies, get ahead at work and communicate in English in your free time.

Thank you, British Council – Practise and improve your English language skills from beginner to advanced level.

Find an English language exchange partner

Don’t confine your practice to locals or native speakers – you can practice with people from any language background, including your own. Make it a rule that you’ll spend at least some time chatting in English. Correct each other and practice explaining new words or discussing what you don’t understand.

Thank you, The University of New South Wales – a Powerhouse of Cutting-Edge Research & Teaching in the Asia-Pacific.

Change your phone settings

We all use our phones and other devices (such as laptops or computers) multiple times a day.

Virginia advises students to change the default language settings on their devices and apps to English.

“It forces you to think in English all the time.” “It will help you to improve more quickly,” explains Virginia.

Thank you, Australian Broadcasting Corporation – Australia’s leading source of information and entertainment.

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