513. 5 Great Ways to Practice English (When You're Tired of Everything Else)

Hey everyone, if you are tired of your practice routine, you want to find new ways to practice English and to improve your fluency and listening skills and pronunciation in English, this episode is for you because in this episode I'm going to talk about a few learning strategies that I have used to learn English and I'm now using to learn Spanish, and I've been teaching it to my students for many, many years. and I can tell you that these strategies, they work and they are fun, and it's going to spice up your practice routine and it's definitely going to make it more effective. If you're new to my channel, then hi, my name is Hadar. I'm a non-native speaker of English, so I have been through everything that you are going through right now, even if it was 20 years ago, back when internet was not as popular. I'm just saying. And I want to share with you everything that I know about speaking English with clarity, confidence, and freedom. I'm a speech and pronunciation coach, and I'm also a life coach teaching fluency strategies and mindset. If you want to learn more with me, go to HadarShemesh.com or follow me on social media for daily lessons. All right, let's get started with some of the best practice strategies that I know. The first one is shadowing. If you've been following me for a while, you know that I am a big fan of shadowing. In fact, I have a lot of videos about shadowing, practicing shadowing with you, or teaching you how to do it effectively. I have a playlist ready for you in the description so you can get started with it right away. Shadowing is when you repeat someone at the same time, so it's kind of like you're echoing them, or you use the technique of pausing and repeating. So you are imitating someone, and when you do that, you focus on specific things that you'd like to improve. Usually it's pronunciation, intonation, or just trying to speak with new words or new grammatical structures that you don't usually use. It's fun because it engages you with a scene or a talk or an interview or a monologue that usually is exciting and interesting and gets you to use your voice in a different way, but also it allows you to say things in a way that you wouldn't normally say, using a more expressive intonation or using words that you don't usually use or paying attention to the specific sounds. So shadowing is one of my favorite techniques, and if you are not using it regularly for your practice, you should incorporate it starting today. If you want more resources to practice shadowing effectively, you can find it in the description below. The second effective strategy is transcribing speech to text, but not the way you might know it, that you dictate something and then it turns into a text by AI. No, you need to listen to a speaker without subtitles, without even seeing the video ideally, and just listening to someone speaking in English. And then you need to write down every single thing that you hear. This is excellent for comprehension and for understanding the concept of connected speech and reductions, because the hard part about listening is not recognizing the parts in speech that are reduced and connected. And this exercise is going to help you do just that. Also, this exercise is great for understanding different accents. So let's say you speak with different accents from different countries. You speak to British speakers and Scottish speakers and Irish speakers and American speakers speaking in different dialects in the US. So if you speak with someone where you want to improve your understanding of their specific accent or dialect, This exercise is great for that. So again, you need to listen to an audio of a speaker without seeing the script. You can also watch a video, but ideally just listening. Transcribe everything that you hear and then compare it with a transcript. So whatever audio you're listening to or video, make sure you also have the transcript. Today you have so many AI tools that can help you extract the transcript. Out of every single audio that you have. So you listen, you write down, and then you compare it with the transcript. And then the parts that you didn't get right are the parts that you need to go back and listen to it again, hear it in a different way, now knowing what the text is, and then trying to identify what was the reason that you didn't understand it. Was it a specific sound that you didn't expect? Was it a reduction? Was it connected speech? And then you want to listen to that part again and again until you hear clearly what is being said. That is so incredibly effective because next time you'll hear a similar phrase, your brain will already be able to detect it. Okay? So that is the second strategy, super effective. The third strategy is to speak to yourself. So many of my students tell me that they have put in a lot of time into learning English and to practicing English, but when it's time to speak about different subjects, they feel stuck. They feel like they can't express themselves freely. So there are several reasons for that, but one of the main reasons is that you don't have a lot of opportunities to speak about different things and to be able to build fluency and confidence, you need to speak about different things. The first thing I tell my students to do is to create a 30-day routine where every day they are going to have to speak about a different topic up to 3 minutes. So you think about a topic, or maybe you give yourself a question to answer, and it could be something related to your day-to-day life, your work, your hobbies, your family, your beliefs, your opinions about things. And then you quickly prepare for it, and you want to talk about it for about 3 minutes, and that's it. You do that every single day. So all it takes is about 5 minutes a day, and that alone is going to really enhance your fluency. It's a lot of fun, and it requires you to think outside the box, that it requires you to use words that you don't usually use. Don't be timid by it. Don't be like, oh, I don't know if I can talk about all these things. Challenge yourself, push yourself to find the words that you probably know but never use through talking about different topics. By the way, I recently released an episode on how to practice impromptu speech. I gave you a few strategies and frameworks on how to talk about any topic without preparing, so you can go back and watch that episode and use it in your daily speaking practice. One more thing you can do when it comes to speaking to yourself is just to walk around and then talk about the things that you see, the things that you think, the things that you need to do. So it's almost like you are taking your thoughts and you turn— you're turning them into words in English. That helps you improve your vocabulary, your fluency, but also it forces you to think in English, so it improves the immediacy of your speech. Another strategy that you can kind of like use to level up things that you're already doing is to simply read out loud whatever it is that you're reading. So probably a lot of you are reading books or reading articles, or maybe you're reading emails at work, anyway in your day-to-day life. And even though it's really good for improving your passive knowledge of English, just reading English is not going to improve your fluency and your speaking abilities. But if you take the time that you need to read a book or read an email and you turn it into active speaking practice, for example, reading it out loud, the time that you spend reading will be leveraged or improved or elevated into a good speaking practice. So here's how this works. Let's say you want to read a book. Say to yourself that the first page you're reading, you're going to read out loud. And when you read it out loud, you are going to pay close attention to the music of your voice. You're going to pay close attention to how you pronounce the R sound. So think of one thing related to spoken English that you might want to improve that you can focus on while reading. That way you are getting used to speaking out loud, even if it's just reading, using your voice to communicate, and focusing on one thing that you want to improve. That way You are able to do one thing, which is to read, get that information, and you also elevate it and turn it into a really good speaking practice. Lastly, if you want to improve your vocabulary, here is my favorite method for learning vocabulary. In short, the idea is to practice words that you know but you don't regularly use. This is your passive vocabulary, words that you know but you don't use regularly. You can understand them, when someone else says them, but you are less likely to use those words yourself. So you want to take those words and practice them through repetition. What does that mean? To take one word that you want to start using more regularly, and by the way, you can, you know, find what that word is while reading a text out loud or while answering the daily questions or while shadowing someone else. So you can collect these words while practicing using all the other 4 strategies. And then when you have a list of words that you want to start using more regularly, take one word, say it out loud 30 times using the correct pronunciation, and then look at 4, 5, 6 different example sentences. You can use ChatGPT for it or any AI assistant, writing assistant, and then you wanna create about 5 sentences of your own using that word. Even though it's a lot for a single word, it is a lot more effective than just memorizing this word through an app and expecting yourself to remember it the next day because it's not how it works. So this method is super effective, and if you want to learn more about how to improve your vocabulary using this method, make sure you check out all the different resources that I share with you below this video. Alright, that is it. Now I have a question for you. What is your favorite practice strategy that you would like to share with us so we can all learn and elevate our English practice experience? Now, if you want to really elevate your English practice routine, you should definitely check out Beyond, my English practice community. The focus of this community is to practice consistently, get access to a ton of speaking practice, practice and the best guidance and coaches in town. Okay, it's a super effective English practice membership where you can build consistent habits and get access to effective practice and a lot of speaking opportunities. So definitely check it out. Go to hadarshemesh.com/beyond. I'm also going to link to it in the description below. Have a beautiful, beautiful rest of the week. I wish you a healthy and effective practice, and I cannot wait to read more of your recommendations in the comments below. Talk to you soon. Bye!