Ways to Improve English Language - Part2

In last post on ways to improve English language, importance of studying with another person and how to work on new words was discussed. When you find some one to study with you, you can learn the language quickly and also you train your ears to hear mistakes in spoken English. Some more tips to improve English writing.

 

Set Aside Time and Place
If you can set aside a particular time and place for work, you will make much surer progress. Study requires concentrated attention. If you are out of the habit of study, you may find that your attention is easily diverted. There is no advantage in facing a book while your wits wander the seven seas. Indeed, this is harmful; it is forming a slack mental habit. Concentration can be cultivated. Practiced students attend easily for several hours. Keep to the task, but do not, at first, attempt too much at one time.

Read and Rewrite
When the text no longer holds your attention, turn to a magazine or a book and do some research work. Identify applications of the principles you have studied. Your materials for study are everywhere about you. Read and analyze. Read and retell or rewrite from memory in your own words. Contrast your work with the original. See where and how you have failed or succeeded.

Provide each time for a review study by making a list of the numbered headings in boldface type that you complete. Before you take up advanced work at your next study period, make a rapid oral review of these points and honestly satisfy yourself that you understand the general propositions. Carry about with you an awareness of these propositions; consciously apply them in your use of language; and look for illustrations of them in the things you read and in the talk you hear.

Avoiding Self-Consciousness
When you first turn attention to your English, you may find difficulty in avoiding excessive self-consciousness. Try slowing your rate of speech, allowing yourself time for thought; but do not allow yourself to form a new bad habit of speaking so slowly that you seem to be groping for words.

One of the best possible ways to prevent embarrassing self-consciousness is to be frank about what you are doing. Children hate to make themselves ridiculous, and are quite as sensitive as grown people, possibly more so. Say candidly to your associates, "I'm trying to improve my English. Tell me if you hear me make mistakes." Unless they are exceptionally well intentioned and helpful, they will not do it; but, at any rate, you can then correct yourself before them, go back and change your pronoun, mend your verb, substitute a better word, without any cause for distress. Get rid of self-consciousness by frankness. People of all degrees of education are interested in good speech.

Influence of Good Reading

Any reading of worth while books will increase your fund of words and familiarize you, particularly if you read aloud, with the sound of cultured English; but the informal essay and the modern drama are especially helpful to the person who wishes to improve his conversational English.

Many of us lack frequent opportunities to hear good conversation. In the personal essay, the most brilliant, the most thoughtful, the most charming and cultured men and women talk to us informally and intimately about their likes and dislikes, their interests and thoughts and hopes.

Those dramas that avoid dialect and present groups of educated persons give their readers an opportunity to observe the conversational art at its best, free from stiffness or self-consciousness, unpretentious, and yet varied, rich, and gracious.

Since grammar is the basis of correct speech, the first books you will want to study are those that will help you to understand the principles governing our language. A person can read the books in a short time; but, if he is anxious to improve his English, he should study them thoughtfully. If he will keep in mind the goal toward which he is working, he will find the task easier and more interesting than he had anticipated. And the results will be gratifying.

People sometimes fear that older students may be offended if they are offered books written for school-room use. That is nonsense. Grown people interested in learning do not want books that are so simple as to be inadequate, and they would naturally be impatient with the lack of discrimination that offered them such books; but intelligent adults are ready to use the best book at hand for their purpose, regardless of its origin.

Determine your own rate of progress by the degree of familiarity of the matter presented. It is easy to follow the authors in their exposition, because they develop each idea logically, and bring much skill to the presentation of the essential facts you want to know. Get a good book on English grammar, which is logical, direct, and thorough, and when once you have mastered it, you will know the essential grammatical backgrounds of English speech.

Ways to Improve English Language - Part1

"How can I improve my English?" is a common question asked by people interested in learning the English language for business or personal communications. There are various ways to improve your English. In last two posts, I had mentioned about how to use dictionary effectively to improve English and how to build your vocabulary fast. Following are some more tips that can help you to develop English language skills.


Studying With Another

Find some one to study with you if you can. It is not always true that he travels the fastest who travels alone. If some member of your family or some friend with interests similar to yours will join you in this journey, it will be more rapid and more interesting for you to learn English speaking as well as writing.

Train Your Ears to Hear the Errors
The main difficulty in self-education in English does not lie in learning that certain forms are incorrect, but in training your ear to hear these errors when you make them yourself. The mote in a neighbor's eye is really easier to see than the beam in our own, even when we have every intent to be generous with other people and exacting with ourselves.

If you undertake the study with some one else, you can help each other to hear slips of speech, and your mutual awareness of this criticism will be most useful. You can be critics for each other, to keep watch against the old habits you are discarding; also, each of you can play the audience while the other, without self-consciousness or embarrassment, uses the new speech forms, the new words and phrases that he is acquiring.

Work on New Words
Have you both been overworking some poor word until it is so weary that it no longer carries any meaning? Has everything, from the morning sunshine and the noon sandwich to the symphony concert, been "great" or "slick" or "fine"? Let your dictionary furnish a set of substitutes, fresh and strong, and make a game of demanding one each time a new word appears.

Call the play spirit to your aid wherever you can. Devise scores and contests. Set fines and arrange rewards. Words are good fun, as many persons first discovered when they began to work cross word puzzles; but the fitting of words into thought intricacies is much more interesting and absorbing, once it is begun, than writing them up and down in small white squares.

Use Dictionary
When in doubt, consult the dictionary is the best rule to follow. You can find more information on using a dictionary at use dictionary effectively to improve English.


Objectives While Learning English Speaking and Writing
The initial objectives while learning English are the correct and effective use of language for conversation and friendly letter writing, the enlargement and enrichment of your vocabulary, and a wider understanding and appreciation of the spoken and written language of other people. These three objectives are not separable. Each of them overlaps the others; you will attain them, not one at a time, but together. You may seem to make very little progress at first. Do not let this discourage you. If you persist, your quickened attention to speech and your gradually accumulating knowledge of correct principles will soon bring about an evident improvement.

How to Build Your Vocabulary Fast

Communication is the essence of business. You need a good vocabulary for effective verbal or written communications. So, how to build a better vocabulary fast? Following are some of the tips that will help you to build your vocabulary.

• Keep a special note book for vocabulary study. Write in it the words that you mean to look up in the dictionary, leaving enough space for your own abstract of the definition. Let words occupy one side of the page, definitions the other; so that in studying you can put a sheet of paper over either side of the page, requiring yourself to supply definitions for words, or words for definitions. Mark the pronunciation of each new word.

• Be on the alert for new words wherever you hear them spoken. Wide reading with attention to words is probably the best way to extend a vocabulary. When you come upon a new word in your actual study, look it up at once since the content of what you are studying may depend upon the definition. But if you are reading for pleasure or general interest, and unfamiliarity with the word does not interfere with your understanding of the content, jot down the word and look it up later along with the other words you have listed. If you desire to enrich your vocabulary do not neglect this; but, while you are reading, beware of anything that retards your reading rate.

• As soon as you lay aside a book or an article, look up the words from it that you have listed as unfamiliar. Then return to the book to see how they were used, and whether that usage sheds added light on the definition. Decide to which of your vocabularies the word shall belong. You have three: the words you use in conversation; the words you use in formal speech and in writing; and the words you recognize when you hear them or see them written. You can increase all three by acquiring new words, and by transferring words from the more formal to the less formal vocabulary.

• The day after you have made a list of new words, glance over it again. Two days later, look at the definition column and see if you can supply the words. About a week later, review both columns a third time and the words will, after that, probably all remain in your permanent recognition vocabulary. An occasional review at long intervals will recapture any that have escaped you.

• Decide that certain new words are fitted to your daily use. Keep them in mind by any set of devices that appeals to you until you are wholly familiar with them. Try new words by way of experiment in deliberately framed sentences about your everyday affairs. Soon they will slip into your unconscious speech and you will build your vocabulary fast. This is the goal for all speech - that words shall shape themselves with your thoughts without your needing to seek them. 

It is not an advantage to be a slow reader; it is a serious handicap. If you know that you read very slowly, it is worth your while to make a definite effort for rapidity. The length of time that moving picture captions are left on the screen must shock any competent reader who considers it as an indication of an average reading rate. It is not a matter for pride that one reads slowly and thoroughly; any literate person can do so. To read thoroughly, and rapidly, is the mark of the cultured person.

Two cautions are necessary. Do not use new words before you are sure of their pronunciation and meaning; do not use pretentious, high-sounding words where simple ones can do the work. It is as foolish to limit the words of ordinary conversation to a few overworked hundreds as it would be for a cabinetmaker to refuse all tools but saw and hammer; but remember that words are tools they are to be used for the work they accomplish and not for themselves. The workman who uses them successfully must have both skill and discrimination.

Grammar Video - Adjective and Adverbs

Good videos from the author of - The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation. There are total 68 videos covering most of the essential English grammar topics.

Adjectives and Adverbs - Part 1

Adjectives and Adverbs - Part2

Use A Dictionary to Improve Your English.

Every one should own a dictionary. From the start, you will need to own a satisfactory dictionary. The dictionary is our most useful single book. The preface to one of the early English dictionaries said that it was "gathered for the benefit and help of ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskillful persons"; but today the more skilful a person is in the use of words, the more surely he keeps a good dictionary where he can consult it readily. There are several dictionaries available in market like Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, New Oxford American Dictionary, and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.

If you feel that you cannot afford an unabridged dictionary, buy as good an abridgment as you can afford, and supplement it by the frequent use of complete dictionaries in the public library. Later you may want a book of synonyms, a thesaurus will seem almost indispensable when you realize the fascination of seeking an exact word or phrase, but an adequate dictionary is the immediate necessity.

Use The Dictionary Effectively To Improve Your English.
Spend some time carefully exploring your dictionary and discovering everything you can about it. Do you understand the abbreviations used and the key to pronunciations? Are you sure you can use it competently and quickly? If there is anything about its use that you do not understand after a careful examination, ask the reference librarian at your library to explain it to you.

You will need to use a dictionary to find the correct pronunciation and the exact meaning of each new word that your increased interest in words brings to your attention. Let it help you to verify the spelling and the pronunciation of words you wish to use in your writing and speaking but about which you are somewhat uncertain. Find in it new words for the old ones you have not been using properly or have been overworking. With its aid you can determine parts of speech and word inflections. It indicates whether a word belongs to accepted usage or to slang or to dialect. Adopt the excellent rule: when in doubt, consult the dictionary.

Why English Grammar is Important?

Grammar has become a bugbear because we have tried to learn it while we were too young either to grasp its logical principles or to appreciate the truth that it is the quickest, and, on the whole, the easiest way out of all speech troubles. So, Why English Grammar is Important?

English grammar is not an arbitrary code of laws imposed by some autocrat of language. It is the outcome of age-old experience in the use of words for the communication of thought. We do not say "he speaks" and "they speak" because a grammarian once decided without reason that verb forms should sometimes be inflected; that is, should change. We vary the verb because logical thought demands that, having begun with the singular or plural subject, we should develop our idea about it with the corresponding singular or plural predicate. Once we have grasped this relationship, we know how to deal with the agreement of all subjects and their predicates.

Grammar is essentially a subject for mature minds. It is to be understood rather than memorized; and its difficulties, which loom so large in childhood before the power of reasoning develops, vanish almost entirely as soon as one approaches them with the ability to understand them. Grammar is the logic of speech.

If English is the language in which you think and write and speak, you have many advantages over the person who is studying it as a foreign language. For this reason, reading, if by reading we mean the casual attention that one usually gives to a novel, is not an effective way to improve speech habits. A student could read the books in a very short time, if he gave them only that type of attention. I think it is altogether unlikely that he would alter or improve his speech as a result of that reading.

Importance of English Grammar.
Grammar is not to be avoided because of a poor memory. It is an invaluable aid in that difficulty. Without knowledge of grammar, you would have to memorize every possible combination of words to be sure that you were correct. With it, you have only to understand a somewhat limited number of logical propositions and to apply them to particular cases whenever you need to do so. 

If a traffic code designated at random a hundred streets as one-way streets, and demanded that motorists memorize them all, endless confusion would ensue; but miles of streets may easily be so designated by some such simple proposition as that odd numbered streets are one- way for south-moving traffic, even numbered streets are one-way for north-moving traffic. Generalized propositions are invaluable memory aids. To learn, for example, that the past participle never stands alone as a verb, disposes at once of "I done," "she seen," "they swum," and numerous other speech stumbling-blocks.

As children we learned to speak correctly or incorrectly by a process of imitation, repeated until it settled into habit. Throughout our lives, imitation continues to be a factor in forming our speech habits; but, fortunately, as we grow older we gain ability to acquire standards of criticism and to match our speech to those standards. Adult speech can be consciously correct. Grammar is the indispensable foundation for that correctness which explains why English grammar is important for writing any communication or for speech. No first aid method, no short cut to correctness, can possibly serve as a substitute for the knowledge of the fundamentals of English grammar.

Advantages of Correct English

IF you are asking, "Can I improve my English?" or "Can I learn to speak and write in English correctly?" the honest answer is, "Certainly you can, but you must be willing to make the necessary effort."

Stop and ask yourself just why it is you wish to improve your English. To begin with, first judgments of men and women, superficial if you like, but enormously important are necessarily formed almost entirely from their personal appearance and their casual speech; and the discriminating will judge much more quickly by the standard of speech than by the standard of appearance. You have often heard comments such as these: "She looked like a lady, but did you hear her talk?" "He is impossible; he says, 'I seen' and 'we was.'" Or, perhaps, it was a favorable opinion: "He must have excellent backgrounds; he speaks perfect English."

Opportunities for friendships and for advantageous contacts often rest on such instantaneous verdicts as these. In business the casual good impression is so important that slovenly, slang-ridden speech may erect a permanent barrier between an ambitious worker and success. Communication is the essence of business. Exact, concise, effective speech is a necessary tool for much of the world's important work.

Indifference and carelessness keep many persons under the heavy handicap of incorrect, clumsy speech. It is well to admit that their trouble is caused by indifference and carelessness rather than by a lack of opportunity to learn or by a want of ability. The essential rules of correct speech are available everywhere and are scarcely more numerous than are the traffic regulations of a large city. Anyone can learn to speak correctly who can learn to use a typewriter or to play a complicated game or to drive an automobile. But he must desire to learn the one as keenly as he desires to learn the other, and he must in the beginning give to each performance the same kind of concentrated attention. That is, he must rid himself of those twin impediments, indifference and carelessness.

Personal values richer than either the social or the economic ones may lie in the sure knowledge that we have mastered our mother tongue. A man's whole personality may be impaired because of an uneasy sense that his crude speech reveals him as an uneducated person. Self-confidence is necessary for self-respect, and a feeling of inferiority is more than merely uncomfortable; it is unsafe.

Also, speech and thought are closely related. If we lack a command of language, we are in danger of being incoherent, not only to others, but also to ourselves. Learning to use words effectively, framing exact, intelligible sentences, will improve our thinking and make it clearer and more precise. The study of English quickens, too, our appreciation of its use by others. The pleasure we obtain from great literature, a pleasure always at hand and durable to the end of our lives, can be fully enjoyed only when we have trained our minds to recognize and to understand the vividness and exactness and beauty of fine English.