More from The Linguist Forum on English.
| Re: How can I improve my spoken skills? I’m a failure! Posted: Feb 3, 2005 8:39 AM |
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| Asad, I have learned many languages so I will ask you to believe what I have to say. Learning languages is 70% attitude. Stop thinking you are a failure. You write very well. You have the ability to express yourself clearly and effectively in English. You can easily learn to speak well. You will never speak perfectly. Perfection should not be your goal. I am not perfect in any of the nine languages that I speak, but I can communicate. Whenever I communicate in another language I am satisfied. But I constantly try to improve. For you to improve your oral skills you need to do the following. 1) Listen a lot. I mean more than one hour a day, just about every day. Search our content on The Linguist. Find items that interest you and download them.Transfer them to your MP3 player and take it with you wherever you go. Just listen and listen. Do this for three months at least. 2) Imitate. Listen a few minutes to content where you like the voice and the way the person speaks. Now read the same text out loud trying to imitate the way the person spoke. Do this over and over. 3) Record yourself. After you have practiced reading content that you found on The Linguist, record yourself and compare. Listen for the difference. Then work to get closer to the native speaker. You could even send us an MP3 file of yourself and we could help you identify the problems areas. 4) Work in individual sounds. Go to the PRONOUNCE page at The Linguist and work on the individual sounds that cause you problems. You can also work on sentences there. Remember that you need not achieve perfection, but you can gradually improve considerably. 5) Speak. Join a conversation at The Linguist. Check out the SPEAK section for the next discussion session that you can join. We look forward to hearing from you. Steve | |||||
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