Here’s how to improve your English with easy steps! Here are the ways I became bilingual, and I’m sure these will work for you, and your pupils in school as well! If you have any questions, please do email me.

From the first steps of learning common words to speaking out loud and testing yourself to meeting up with other learners. Here are your simple steps to success. If you are interested in any of my resources, please visit my shop to find out more.

The first step is vocabulary and grammar

A serious and motivated student can do a lot independently, outside of class time. Here is how to improve your English with daily steps to learn and revise vocabulary. 

Day 1: Take a notebook and write ten news words on the first page, Chinese on the left and English on the right. Learn these by heart, covering the right-hand column and then the left-hand column. Then, continue working on the words until they are perfect, including being able to spell them.

Day 2: Test yourself on the words from day one and learn ten new ones.

Days 3 to 6: Repeat and continue throughout the week.

Day 7: Learn ten new words. Next, revise the words from the previous day. And finally, revise all the words from the week, so on day seven you look at thirty words in total.

Repeat and continue throughout the month.

At the end of the month, learn ten new words, revise the words from the previous day and those from the week, plus revise the ten words from exactly one month ago. This means that you will be looking at forty words every day from now on.

Include short phrases or metaphors in this list, not just single vocabulary words.

Where grammar is an issue, work with phrases or sentences but perhaps do five for that day rather than ten vocabulary words.

Reading is important

Simultaneously read something every day. Reading is essential. Do not read only the same newspaper or online news publication but instead vary your reading sources to include the greatest British and American authors. Nothing will enrich your knowledge of English more than reading great authors.

Immersion

Why not try learning with movies? Even if you don’t understand everything, the subconscious mind will put the pieces together while you watch.

Writing is key to evaluating your skills

If you can, take a private tutor, join a group or a course and study English formally, even if only once a week. Being forced to hand in translations and do written tests is a way to be evaluated and take care of the writing skill.

If there is no budget for a tutor or class, here is an idea. Read and record a passage from a book. Next, play the recording and write it out. Check for spelling mistakes with the original text. Include any words with errors in your daily vocabulary learning notebook. Redo the same passage a week later and see if you make the same errors.

Have fun!

Find a penfriend and exchange news and emails with someone who would like to learn Chinese. They write to you in Chinese, and you reply in English. One can find this type of person using language exchange websites. Shyness is not too much of an issue since you never actually meet them.

Speaking out loud is important

For speaking fluency, work on a speech. You could copy one from the internet or work on reading passages from your coursebook aloud. I like to work with poems and literature for intermediate and advanced levels. Children’s books are often suitable. Read the same passage aloud as many times as you need to until you can do this fluently, without hesitation, and with expression and meaning. That alone is an excellent fluency activity that may be done by a shy man alone in his room! You could also try singing along to some songs via YouTube.

Why not try our games and activities designed for teens and adults.

What’s next?

Now there comes a time to plunge into real conversations in English. You might take a private tutor for conversation. To find one, try putting an ad for a native speaker wanting to learn Chinese in a local shop and meet once a week or more for half an hour in Chinese and half an hour in English. There are also language exchange sites where one may do this online via Skype.

Final Tip

It is much more effective to do 10 minutes per day than 60 minutes once a week. Little and often is the secret to success for language learning.

How to improve your English teaching resources

Further reading

For further reading on how to improve your English, please see this post on how to become bilingual.