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Hello I'm Emma from mmmEnglish!
In this video, we're going to talk about four things
that you can do every day to improve your English.
I think we can all agree that learning English
or learning any language takes time
and effort and dedication.
But the most successful language learners, they find
a way for their language to become
a part of their daily life. It just becomes a habit
like brushing your teeth.
If you want to improve, your English practice should
become a daily habit.
To help you with this I'm going to share four things
that you can and you should be doing every day
to improve your English and yes, I am suggesting
that you do all four things every day but they're not
huge tasks
and we're going to talk about how you can make them
a bit of fun too
so come check it out!
Before I share these four things
that you should be doing every day,
I want to thank our friends Lingoda
who've partnered with us to bring you today's lesson.
In particular, I want to share how the Lingoda Language
Sprint offers you daily English lessons plus
up to a hundred percent refund on your lesson fees.
Lingoda is an online language school.
You take classes with qualified native speaking
teachers, class sizes are small
and all of the learning materials are provided. Plus
Lingoda are now Cambridge certified so you'll get free
access to the Cambridge online language test as well.
And in exciting news, the next Language Sprints
are starting soon.
The Super Sprint is the biggest challenge,
thirty classes a month for three months.
When I decide to do something, I like to go hard
and that is exactly what the Super Sprint
demands of you.
English classes every day for ninety days
but here's the thing,
if you complete every one of those classes,
Lingoda will give you your money back,
a hundred percent of your class fees refunded
or you can use the credits for even more
English classes. Now if that feels impossible for you,
then you can choose to do the Regular Sprint,
fifteen classes a month for three months.
If you complete all of those classes, you'll get a
fifty percent refund. So are you up to the challenge?
You can register for the Sprint promotion right now
but registrations close on the 24th of March.
The link is in the description below and if you use
this code JOIN1, you'll get ten euros off your deposit.
So the very first thing on my list is pronunciation.
Yes you should be practising your pronunciation
every day.
And it's not to try and get rid of your accent
but to make it clear enough that others
can comfortably understand you when you speak.
I can't tell you the number of advanced English students
I've had
who've had amazing grammar and vocabulary skills
but so much trouble communicating
because their accent makes it quite challenging
for others to understand them.
So of course, all of this affects smooth, positive,
comfortable conversation.
And depending on where you learned English,
your teacher may not have focused on pronunciation.
It may not have been the priority at the time.
You see, if you learned English at school,
your teacher's main aim was probably to get you
high marks in your exam. Pronunciation was
probably not their focus at that time
but in the real world when you're using English to speak
with other people, your pronunciation, your fluency
when you speak, it's so incredibly important.
Get into the habit of learning and using the correct
pronunciation today because it's going to save you
lots of headaches and confusion down the track.
Plus, practising your pronunciation every day
consistently, it's gonna help you to make noticeable
improvements in a short space of time.
So how can you start doing this?
I recommend that you learn the IPA,
the international phonetic alphabet.
If you've never heard of it before
or you don't know a lot about it,
then watch this lesson up here.
But learning the IPA will allow you to correctly
pronounce every single English word
using
the
correct
English
sounds.
Another great way to practise your pronunciation
is with my imitation lessons
so in these lessons, I help you to copy me
and shadow me as I speak.
They're really awesome, quick ten minute videos
that you can practise with regularly so add them
to a playlist and keep coming back to them
and practise with them often.
After you've practised a lesson for a few times
make a recording of yourself
and compare it to my voice.
Try to identify some of the mistakes that you're making
with your pronunciation.
I've added a link to my imitation lessons
in the description and I'll add one at the
end of this video as well that you can check out.
You can also simply read out loud to improve
your pronunciation.
Doing this every day will help your mouth muscles
to get working and creating English sounds
and get more comfortable doing it.
It's as simple as that
and it doesn't need to take you long
just five or ten minutes a day is plenty.
Just make sure you're doing it consistently.
You could even do it by singing English songs.
Create one opportunity to absorb English every day.
To absorb is to take in information
so you're like a sponge soaking things up, taking in
new ideas, new words,
new ways of expressing yourself
and you can do this in lots of different ways,
so many ways.
Listening to a podcast or an audiobook,
you could watch an English movie
or any video on Youtube.
Read a book or a blog post, In fact,
you probably want to mix this up during the week, right?
To keep things interesting.
A podcast on Monday. Read a book on Tuesday.
Whatever floats your boat.
Now again, this doesn't have to be a huge
time-consuming task but it's worth spending some time
searching for the right type of content.
It must be stuff that is interesting for you.
If you're into football or you love makeup tutorials
or romance novels or soap operas.
If you love the idea of sailing around the world,
I've been watching a YouTube channel called
Sailing La Vagabonde and they vlog about their life
sailing around the world on a yacht.
In fact, if you're interested,
I've added the link in the description below.
But the point is, find something that interests you
and excites you because
you need to look forward to doing it every single day.
It shouldn't feel like you're doing English practice.
So I have two little recommendations here.
Firstly, you need to find the time that you're going to
do it and declare it. That is your daily time
to absorb English so it could be on the bus
on your way to work or while you're eating breakfast.
I've always found that attaching an activity to the task
helps you to make it part of your routine.
And while you're doing it, just keep a notebook handy
so that you can write down expressions or new words
which you can look up and check later on.
Simple as that!
Writing every day has some amazing benefits.
But before I talk about that I want to make it clear,
I'm not talking about writing an essay, okay?
I'm just talking about writing a few thoughts or a few
ideas down. It only has to take a few minutes
and nobody ever has to see it.
It's just for you. So there's a few reasons why writing
every day is an excellent habit to get into.
It helps your vocabulary to stick.