How can you improve and practice your English?

To help you in this process, I bring you four easy-to-use techniques to help you study at home and at your own pace, such as speaking, listening, reading and writing.

If you learned English through courses, it' s not enough. After learning the grammar and you want to see a significant improvement in your English, you should also do some practice exercises as a review, as well as revise the resources and exercises you have learned in class. In this blog we will look at five techniques from which you can choose the ones that catch your attention or if you have time available you can practice all of them or the ones that fit your schedule and it doesn't matter the order, neither if you have a basic or intermediate level. Look for definitions of the words, not the translation.

In Spanish as in English, words have different uses depending on the context in which they are used, also in English there are some words whose meaning depends on the tone of voice we use. If we read a text we can understand the meaning thanks to the context in the reading, doing this we will improve our four skills, in reading we will understand it through the context, we will be able to write it using a context and apply it in every situation when we speak.

1.        Conversations in English, podcasts.

That's right, if you have little practice you can use podcasts to enter the hate, also listen to conversations in English from videos on the internet, the good thing about this is that you can change the reproduction speed to listen slower voice modulation or pronunciation, but the best thing is that we can look for content of the topic that interests us even if we have a low level in English, although we may feel frustration when we don't understand everything we hear, there is no problem even if what you hear is not clear, the important thing is to do it, or better still you can practice listening to music which is also useful, when you improve your skills when you listen again to our first podcasts or conversations we will notice a significant improvement.

2.       Repeat aloud or shadowing technique.

What we should do here is to read a book novel that we like and read it out loud or use an audio book on video and repeat the text out loud, we can also do it with karaoke music that we like and sing it even if we sound out of tune. Or use the shadowing technique which consists of using a video or film with subtitles, if available, and select a character and repeat their dialogue out loud and imitate their facial expressions and tone of voice, doing this will allow you to improve your reading, listening and speaking!

3. Use Frashcard

This has always been used when learning a new language to improve memory and reinforce vocabulary, which consists of choosing a set of words and write them on a card the word in your native language to the target language and its meaning and a sentence using it, I recommend using an image so you can associate the word, its meaning and use, This way we will practice Reading and improve our vocabulary, to make this easy I recommend you to do it digitally which is using a website or app, you can use the quizlet website where you can find vocabulary lessons or use the Anki app, where you can also find flashcard sets or create your own set to study.

4. Write

Doing so allows you to reinforce your vocabulary and writing, also to improve your conversations you can write about topics you like, your best moments you have lived or what you have learnt, once you have done this if you want to improve even more you can record yourself, you can make a podcast about what you have written or you can make a video blog which is just as effective to improve your skills.

To finish, I recommend you to make a routine, whether you have chosen one of these techniques or not, and add them to your diary so that you can dedicate as much time to them as you can and enjoy a fun learning experience.