Hi everyone, welcome back to English with
Max. In this video I'm going to give you some advice on how you can improve your
English speaking skills all by yourself. I get lots of messages from people
asking me how they can improve their speaking, because they don't have anyone
to talk with in English. Well, don't worry, because there are several things you can
do. In this video I'll talk about four easy and free ways you can practise
speaking alone, and of course you can use these techniques to practise any
language. Before I go on, remember that you can also follow me on social media,
and if you would like to watch this with English subtitles, you just
need to turn on captions. Now obviously the best way to improve
your speaking is to talk with another person, preferably a native speaker. But
as everybody knows, it's not always easy to find a native speaker to talk to.
That's why it's good to know other ways to practise your speaking. I also want to
say that there are other more difficult exercises you can do that I'm not going
to talk about much in this video. For example, you can choose a topic and then
record yourself talking about it for one or two minutes. Then you listen to
yourself and you basically do a self-evaluation. If you have the
motivation to do that type of thing and you can do it on a regular basis, that's
wonderful. Honestly, hats off to you, you have my respect. Those types of exercises
are very effective, but they tend to be quite difficult. And let's be honest, not
many people, no matter how interested they are in the language, find the
motivation or the energy to do that. I know that might sound a bit pessimistic,
but I think I'm a realist. So today I'm going to explain four easy ways
you can work on your English by yourself. Now when I say "easy",
I don't mean that they don't require any effort. We're still learning a language
here, we're not just sitting down and watching reality TV. You still need to
work a little bit, but I don't think that these exercises are very difficult. The first exercise is simply reading aloud. What does that mean? It just means taking
an English text and reading it out loud. It might be a book, a magazine or
something online, like a news article or a text from a website for learning
English, such as BBC Learning English. Just to show you, this is me
reading aloud in English. (reading) That worked well enough for flavour, but there were many older
people who couldn't manage the walk into town or haul heavy buckets home. No one
had much strength left for such chores. This is me reading aloud in Spanish. (reading) Sobre la mesa quedó
una caja de bombones mucho menos inocente de lo que su
apariencia insinuaba. La abrí con una mano, mientras con la otra
me secaba las últimas lágrimas. I know this might sound really basic and you might be thinking:
"How is that going to help me?" Well, one of the difficulties when you learn a new
language is getting used to moving your mouth in different ways. A foreign
language will feel different in your mouth, and the more you
practise saying words and sentences aloud, the more natural and
comfortable it will become. Speaking a foreign language can also feel quite
unnatural if you haven't done it in a long time. I remember about two years ago
I had to give a speech in German, and although I was reading the speech,
it was quite difficult because I had barely spoken German in about eight years.
My mouth just wasn't used to saying German words anymore, so it felt quite strange.
There are two things that are important to remember if you do this exercise.
Firstly, you really have to SAY the words. Don't whisper them. This is an
example of what you should NOT do. (whispering) Similarly, you shouldn't just vocalise the words
inside your head while you move your lips. Something like this. (moving lips) That is not the same.
I've often done it myself. I've often imagined saying something in
a foreign language, or I practised it inside my head, but then when I actually
said it, it didn't sound how I had imagined it. Let me know if you can
relate to that. Let me know in the comments if you've had a similar
experience. The problem is that if you're just whispering the words or saying them
inside your head, you're just imagining how you sound, but you don't actually
know how you sound. And you're not exercising all of the muscles in the
mouth and the throat that you need for speech. Secondly, when you do this
exercise, you shouldn't choose texts that are too difficult for you. For example, if
you have an intermediate level, don't try read The Economist. This isn't a
vocabulary exercise. It's best if you already know all or most of the words in
the text, and you already know how to pronounce them. Particularly if you're
practising English. If it's a language like German or Spanish that has very
regular spelling, it's not so important. But if it's English, choose a text that's
easy for you to read so that you're not constantly stopping and stumbling over
words. Even most books are a bit difficult. Unless you have a very advanced
level, I recommend that you choose articles in English textbooks or
on websites that are for language learning, for example BBC learning
English or LingQ. I've already spoken about LingQ in this video here. Basically
you need to choose texts that are appropriate for your level. The second exercise I want
to recommend is talking to yourself. If there's no one to speak
to in English, then speak to yourself. "Hello Max, how are you today?" "I'm very
well. How are you?" "Not too bad, thanks." No. I don't actually mean like that. That would
be fake and strange. But there are many other things that you can say to
yourself on a daily basis. And maybe you already do it in your own language.
So just take some of the things that you think normally, and say them aloud in
English. For example, in the morning you might say to yourself:
"I'm going to brush my teeth. Ooh, it's getting late. I'd better hurry up." We as humans have some very deep
and interesting thoughts sometimes. At lunchtime you might say:
"What am I going to have for lunch?" "I think I'll have pasta. Even though
I had it yesterday. And the day before that. How do people go gluten-free?" It's just little things like that. Obviously it's a little easier if you
live by yourself. It can be a little strange and embarrassing saying these
things when there are other people in the vicinity, but if they love you,
then they should support you. The third exercise is imitation (or mimicking).
This is when you listen to a piece of audio and you pause it every few seconds to
repeat what the speaker said. This is particularly good for pronunciation
practice. I don't think I need to talk about it very much, because I think it's
quite self-explanatory, but in any case, here is an example of me doing this. (demonstrating imitation) The fourth exercise is very similar to the
last one, but it's a little more difficult. This exercise is called shadowing.
When I was studying interpreting, we were repeatedly told to practise
shadowing. So how does shadowing work? Shadowing is when you listen to a
language (it's much easier if you use earphones or headphones) and you repeat
exactly what the person is saying without pausing the audio. So if you do
it well, you will be saying exactly what the speaker is saying, but with a slight
delay. Normally about a second. This is me demonstrating shadowing. (demonstrating shadowing) Like I said, it's normally easier
if you use headphones, but I showed it to you this way
so that you could also hear the original audio. Just like for the reading
aloud exercise, it's important that you don't choose material that's too
difficult for you. For example, if you have an intermediate level, don't use
podcasts or TV shows that are aimed at native speakers. If you do that, you'll
just get lost and frustrated and we don't want that. In this video I talk
about websites where you can get free audio for beginner and intermediate
levels. I'll put the link in the description. I think the benefits of shadowing
are pretty obvious. It's good for pronunciation, intonation,
sentence structure and speed. Those are the four exercises, guys. The last thing I want to say
is that you will only notice the benefits of these if you do them on a
regular basis. That doesn't mean that you have to do all of them every single day,
but I recommend doing one or two of them (whichever ones you prefer) for a few
minutes at least every second day. If you can do more than that, that's great.
The more you can do the better. But even just doing a tiny bit on
a regular basis will help you. You can put reminders in
your phone in case you forget. I hope you found this useful. Let me know
in the comments if you've tried any of these exercises, or let me know
what you do to practise your speaking. See you next time! Frank fell down... Frank fell down. (burps) Burped. ... mouth and the throat... th th th. ... well enough... shit. That was a good example. ... strength left for...
