Improve Your English: From Upper Intermediate To Advanced With 5 Tips

[Music] hey guys today we're going to be talking about how to make yourself fluent in english and how you can make yourself sound american so i'll be sharing with you a few tips that really worked for me that improved my english to an advanced level and actually to a fluent level and allowed me just to move to new york study there in law school and completely change my life so if you're interested stay tuned please don't forget to follow me on instagram and on facebook and do not forget to like and subscribe to this youtube channel i'll be very happy to see you come back [Music] [Applause] [Music] so let me first introduce myself my name is red mila and i was born and raised in ukraine where i lived basically my entire life at 22 i decided to apply to american universities and got accepted and actually got amazing funding so i couldn't lose this amazing opportunity so i went there um i moved my life to new york and basically stayed there for two years those two years were incredible so whenever people hear me speak english with this american accent they all think that i got this amazing level of english just because i lived in new york which is a valid thought don't get me wrong but it's actually not really true because even before i went and studied in new york i had an amazing level of english i was basically speaking like i'm speaking right now actually as a proof i'm going to leave a link in the description where you can check out the video where i'm speaking english basically just i'm just as i'm speaking english right now so there is no such big of a difference like my english was almost as good as it is right now even before i went and studied in new york i decided to create a video where i was gonna share how i made my english so fluent even before i went and studied in new york so if you're interested to hear what really worked for me stay tuned because we're about to begin so first thing i started to do in order to get my english accent to an american one was shadowing so what does shadowing mean it means that you're watching a tv show and you're repeating after certain characters so you're repeating exactly what they're saying and you're trying to mimic their accent you try to do it exactly as they are saying for example i was watching my favorite tv show friends as you can see right here i also watched it in my native language so that's why it was much easier for me to understand everything they were saying so i was watching it in english with english subtitles and at some point i would just pause and repeat whatever a certain character would say it helped me not only to improve my accent but also to memorize certain phrases to understand new words how they're used in a sentence how people are communicating and just tuned my hearing into listening and understanding american accent so it was so useful it's so much better than just listening because you're repeating it yourself what i recommend doing is to for example you're watching a tv show one episode you just pick your favorite character on that episode and then you just repeat everything that that certain character is saying this actually might be quite fun i needed a plan a plan to get over my man what's the opposite of man jam i hope this makes sense i would just be repeating after a certain character as many times as i need to to memorize what a character is saying and until i hear that my english language my accent is improving so check it out and let me know that worked for you second thing that i was doing to improve my english i was reading a lot of english books so if you think that you'll be able to improve your english without ever reading an english book you're very wrong because at certain point you really need to upgrade the level of english that you see in your every day so for example if you're right now upper intermediate i would just pick a book that is slightly above your level slightly more complex than you're used to so once i see the word that i don't understand and i write its translation right above the word i'm already like 50 have memorized it what i learned that whenever i'm reading a book and i don't understand a few words i will definitely encounter them a few times again in the same book and then by the end of the book i would have less and less translated words because i would already translate them at the beginning of the book i know a lot of people are saying that when you're reading a book and you don't understand a few words you should just skip them and just keep reading but i have to admit it never really worked for me because if i don't translate that word it's never gonna stick in my memory like i know that the idea behind this advice is to try to grasp the meaning behind the sentence so not to translate every work literally but to try to understand what it all means together which is an amazing advice and it might really work for you but i have to say that that i wasn't a big fan of it if i am not translating a word in a sentence i'm just never gonna memorize it i will not know how to use it and i have no idea in what context can or i cannot use it so do not be embarrassed to just stop for a second translate a few words and go back to reading a book just always have a pen when you're reading have a translator on your phone or maybe on your laptop and write it down the third advice is how do you approach a translation of your words first of all have a notebook have a notebook where you would be writing down english words and the translation of them in your own native language try them all down in one notebook it's much better than having them ever in different books or somewhere online because then you just forget about them if they are in your own notebook and you took those 10 seconds to write that word down it's gonna be right in front of you and then whenever i would have written down maybe two three pages i would go over those words and try to quiz myself on them just to review them and see if i remember and if i understand them so here's one more thing that i was doing which really expanded my vocabulary was to translate the word and find its synonyms i will just show you what i did so let's just take a random word for example like let's just take achievement um let's see okay i'm translating it into russian russian is my native language um okay so i see that it's translated into this word but i see that there are plenty of different synonyms that i would also be able to use that's the difference between your upper intermediate and your advanced level of english right after that you need to understand how to use this word in a context if you do not know how to use the word in a sentence in which context you can use it this word is always going to stay in your passive vocabulary so that's why i would always go into this website lingy and they're not sponsoring me by the way um and let's just put any word like for example achievement and all right here we see a bunch of sentences with the word achievement and it's translated into my native language so it really helps me understand a one in what context the sport is being used and how it's better to use it so highly highly recommend not only to translate the word write down the translation write down the synonyms and check in which context you can use this word okay next thing that i was doing is to write a diary so whatever i was doing during the day or just the way i was feeling and was dreaming about i would just be writing down in the diary so this would also really help me to structure my thoughts and start thinking in english i would look at the notebook with translated words that i prepared myself and maybe just go through it and see if i can use any words from there so then i can use it actively in my journal or i would go into the dictionary and try to pick a few words that i'm really lacking in order to explain how i'm feeling it also really helped me to finally start thinking in english and looking for words that are somewhere in my brain that i definitely have translated before but maybe have not used yet so i started writing my diary i started keeping my journal and the planner everything in english so then i would just get into a habit of writing things in english and for visual learners it's a really good tip because once you're writing a few things down you're gonna memorize it and then you're gonna write the same thing over and over again because you're gonna keep repeating what you have been doing during the day or your plans for the next week so it's really really useful if you have not done it yet i definitely recommend you start writing a diary and the last thing that significantly helped me improve my level of english was communication with native speakers so i'm a very outgoing person and i would always try to find any english speakers that i could find in order for me to practice english so i would be just like looking through forums and maybe facebook or um some different websites where i could find a person who would be willing to talk to me in english so i remember a first friend who i was talking to over skype so the first few months was really hard for me to understand him because he had a very thick south accent and i wasn't really used to it so it felt to me like he was swallowing half of the sounds and i was really trying to understand what he was saying um but eventually i started understanding everything that he was trying to say i started um distinguishing every word that he was saying i was able to incorporate a few things that he was saying when i was speaking myself he would be correcting me sometimes so the communication with the native speaker is a huge huge advantage if you can't find a friend you can talk to over skype maybe even a teacher from the united states will be able to just speak to you in english that's a completely complete completely different level of english language sometimes if i didn't have a chance to speak to a native speaker i would just be speaking to myself honestly i would be speaking i would be imagining that i was giving a speech at some concert or i would be imagining that i was talking to a new acquaintance now and he just asked me where i'm from and what are my big aspirations in life and i would just give him this big speech about myself all in my head you can also write it all in your diary but i was just imagining as i was speaking to someone at some point and i noticed that i was improving on my american accent i was improving on the way i was speaking i was improving my vocabulary really broadening my vocabulary because i was reading so many english books um i was improving my writing because i was keeping a journal and i was improving my speaking english because i was trying to speak to as many native speakers as i could and if not then i would be just speaking to myself and trying to improve it with every sentence that i was saying so if i would notice that i had made a mistake i would just say it all over again okay guys these were the most important five tips that i used when i was improving my english where i made the jump from upper intermediate to advanced and fluent and this is what basically prepared me before i went to study in the united states i really believe that these tips can significantly improve your english level if you just put effort into it and do your best please let me know in the comments below what tips do you find useful when you're studying english what personally works for you i'm very curious what works for everyone around the world i would be very happy to share the experiences and also if you like this video please don't forget to like it share and subscribe i would really appreciate it so thank you so much for staying with me until the end and i'll see you very soon

Channel: SelfStartUSA with Radmila

Views: 698,326

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Id: GlJs3Nc2hOE

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020