Name: Improve Your English by Reading (Even if you HATE reading!)
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T09:43:24.000Z
Duration: 11 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

Modal verbs - A2

I don't like reading, but you have to read for a couple reasons.

To-infinitive

One, maybe you're studying in a university or college or at school and you're going to have to read something.

Or maybe you actually like reading and you're trying to improve your English.

So, reading tips from Ronnie, someone who doesn't read, but I can still give you tips because I've read stuff.

So, the first and most important thing about improving your reading is-hello-might sound a bit silly for me to tell you, but read something interesting.

As I told you, I don't really like books.

They're kind of like, oh, and people say, oh, come on, Ronnie, you just haven't read a good book.

It's like, I've read a good book, I still find them extremely boring.

So, when I was living in Japan, when I was studying Portuguese, when I was studying Spanish, I would grab some band's lyrics.

And I would read them, and like, oh my god, look at me, I'm learning another language by listening to music, something that I love to do.

Fashion magazines, gamer magazines, I don't care.

Read whatever you want, just make sure you like it.

You're actually improving your reading, maybe some other things, and you're learning English.

Make sure whatever you're reading, you actually enjoy.

There's this crazy thing nowadays called the internet, and you can get millions and thousands and billions of online articles for free that you are going to read.

And it's not a book, there's no commitment, you read it, 10 minutes, learn some new vocabulary.

Rule number one, choose something interesting.

As soon as you put something up and it's boring, your attention goes away.

Libraries are my kryptonite, you might say.

Reading a grammar book and reading an English book, it's not going to help you speak because speaking is a completely different side of the brain.

But if you begin to read short things like articles out loud, you can really try to focus on improving your pronunciation.

But if there's no one to correct you, that could be a problem.

Read something, record it, listen back, like, ooh, that sounds a little strange.

Pretend you're making a speech and you have to read the article.

So, as he gently laid down, pretend you're actually going to have to make a speech to someone and practice your pronunciation.

Get it crystal clear, as people like to say.

So, reading not only improves your vocabulary, but it'll improve your pronunciation.

So, the cool thing or the terrible thing about reading is depending on the level and the kind of book or article you're reading, you're going to come across some vocabulary that you're not going to know.

The context means the other words around it.

So, if you're reading something and you don't know one of the words, that's okay.

Just look at the other words around it and go, oh, do you know what?

I think this means that Kyle's mom's a bad person because of the words around the sentence.

Another really fun thing in English grammar vocabulary are things called prefixes or singular a prefix.

A prefix are words that, at the beginning of it, has a word, let's say, bio, so biology, biosphere, biography.

Anything in English that has a prefix of bio means earth or living, so biology is the study of living things.

If you can get some nice prefixes under your belt, it's going to help you improve your vocabulary.

So, when you come across a new word like aqua, aqueduct, aqua, aqua means water, and then you can kind of grab a dictionary, go on your phone or whatever you're using as a dictionary these days and look at the word.

The problem is if you're reading something that has a lot of unknown words, unfortunately you're just going to probably lose concentration and give up.

So, again, you want to find something that is interesting, here, and also something that suits your level.

Okay, another cool, amazing thing about reading books and getting vocabulary is you can learn slang.

Now, I kind of like slang a lot, it's kind of my thing that I like to teach you, and I've got loads of slang lessons up here on the wonderful internet, here.

But reading books, you can learn not only slang, but a lot of...

Jargon means language or words specifically that are made or matched with a certain field.

So, for example, if you are a computer programmer, the jargon or the words that you know are going to be completely different from the words that I know.

So, you guys, even though English may not be your first language, you guys are going to know all these crazy words, and I'm going to be like, I don't know what that word means because it's not in my field.

I don't care what your job is, it doesn't matter.

Each job has specific jargon associated with them.

So, think of your job and what words are very specific to what you do.

As an English teacher, I got all of them, but that doesn't mean I know all of the words, ever.