quarta-feira, 15 de abril de 2020

How to improve your English reading and other skills



Reading is only the action of seeing graphical signals or emmit their correspondent sounds; on this occasion, it can be hard for someones to understand what they read in a loud voice. I assume that the appropriate expression for that would be “written comprehension”, which means to see graphical signals, which it’s commonly done in silence. In essence, it’s more effective to achieve a well-written comprehension, or in other words:  to understand what they mean.
Although to read in a loud voice is a great practice to exercise your speaking muscles and to improve your pronunciation, mainly while you use the Shadowing technic.
In a nutshell, reading is not the same as written comprehension, but it can happen simultaneously.
I think that all skills related to a language – no matter if it’s one’s mother tongue or a foreign language –  are essential, including grammar that is the base to speak good English.
I assume that the most crucial skill is the listening; my piece of advice is to practice it for 40% of the study time, 30%  for speaking, 20% for reading, 10% for writing, and always look up a grammar when necessary or once in a while to enhance your theoretical knowledge. Of course, that division is not something scientifically proved, and it's only a personal opinion, supported by my experience as a French and an English learner.
Image result for book with an american flag on the cover
To improve your level in all skills, you should practice all of them. How do I practice those skills? The answer is in the question: practice them.
The best ways to begin to listen to a foreign language are songs, podcasts/áudio-books with transcripts. There are a lot of TED Talks (www.ted.com/talks) with transcripts.
To speak is to have an English partner. It’s hard to get one for free, in the main if you would like a native one.
I believe that language groups on social media don’t work; you lose a lot of your time because the majority of members chat by writing. If you invite someone to talk in private, they rarely accept, and when he agrees, it won't last for a long time. There are some sites where you can take language classes or even only talk, such as Italki (www.italki.com), Lingoda (www.lingoda.com), Cambly (www.cambly.com), Verbling (www.verbling.com), and some others.
I have experience only on Italki. I have been taking classes with tutors, on account of prices, I pay around US$ 10 for an hour class. Some are good, some are bad, including some are very bad. I can't understand why they're teaching, apparently because of money. In general, I recommend using Italki; you'll find some excellent tutors.
To read is the graded or child books. Then, when you consider you are on a reasonable level, you can read newspapers and magazines ( there are many of them online, and some parts of them are for free). For this item, you can decide if you want to read or to comprehend, it’s up to you.
 In the beginning, you won’t understand anything; almost of words will be unknown to you. No problem, don’t translate them, don’t look up all of them in a dictionary, establish a number of words per page to look up their meanings in an English/English dictionary.
Try as much as possible not to use your mother tongue. If you use an online dictionary, write the pronunciation of the word; and try to learn the IPA (International Phonetics Alphabet), which is a kind of weird symbols you’ll find between slashes. When you learn them, they will help you to know a new word pronunciation, and they should be beneficial.
To write, you should start writing short sentences of all types (affirmatives, interrogatives, and negatives). As time goes by, write longer phrases until you get to long texts, and after that, try to learn different genres of documents (letters, essays, and others).                                                                                               April 15th, 2020.




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