Improve your English in 5 minutes!

Learning a language takes time, unfortunately it doesn’t happen over night (wouldn’t that be great, everyone would be bilingual) it takes hard work, focus and motivation, motivation motivation!

This said, I do have a tip for you that will help to improve your English, that only takes about 5minutes everyday and will boost your English vocabulary and grammar.

Everyday read an article in the newspaper!

You can do this firstly by reading an article that is international (there is always something that makes the news in every country) in your ow language (this will enable you to know the story) and then read the article in English. You will notice that articles are almost identical and you can compare a lot of the vocab.  You will also be able to  find lots of grammar patterns that you practice in class!

Watching English television or listening to the radio are also very good ways of improving your English language! You can download podcasts and listen to them over and over again until you are confident you understand the topic. Also this will be relevant vocab that

If you pick up 3 new bits of vocabulary everyday , you will have 15 new words or phrases in a week! Times that by a month and then a year!!!!!

5 minutes a day is nothing, so you can fill that time with productive learning…and you cant go wrong!

Remember the key rule with learning a language; USE IT, OR LOSE IT

Oops I forgot my tongue… my mother tongue that is!

Losing your native accent…..

A lot of our students ask how and when will they lose their accent. Its a good question….the answer from us is always that this is a very very difficult thing to do and is it really necessary!!!!???

Accents are what define us as speakers. There are hundreds of different accents in England alone! We can recognise almost instantly if someone comes from Scotland, Wales, Newcastle, Manchester and so on. Ans when meeting new people from all over the world you can also recognise where people have come from through their accent.

We say there is no point in learning an accent just focus on the language! The majority of students will only communicate with people who are also non-native speakers. The goal for English language learning should be to communicate effectively and to be understood not to lose ones accent!

We understand certain sounds when pronouncing words need to sound the same so that you can be understood. For example Japanese speakers might want to improve their pronunciation of /l/ and /r/, and German speakers could try to differentiate between /ʒ/ and /ʤ/, Spanish speakers could focus on /i:/ and /ɪ/ and so on.

However if you really want to lose your accent you may find the following tips useful;

• Be aware of sound differences: English has got 26 letters in the alphabet, but 44 phenomes (sounds), these sounds are what you need to learn in order to speak with the ‘correct’ accent. You need to know the position of the parts in your mouth for each sound.
• Listen to us natives: listening to a native speaker, easier said than done (especially if they speak fast) but by searching on the internet you can find any examples of English speech.  The radio and TV  are also very good ways of learning English
• Listen to yourself: sometimes recording yourself speak and then playing it back and comparing it to that of a natives is a good way of showing you where the differences are .

2012!

Happy New Year to everyone – although this is slightly late as we are already a month into 2012, how time flies!

Most of our students are now back at school and getting back into the swing of their English lessons. We have a large group of Italians starting this morning who are here for 2 weeks.

NEW  STUFF:

inlingua Cheltenham have now signed up to the up and coming Social network GOOGLE+ – if you are on this please add us on:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/108422616517883051867/posts?hl=en