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.
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.
