Here are ideas for everyone, based on a lot of experience teaching. Each section begins with easiest topics and ends with the most advanced topics. This is especially relevant for grammar and writing; for pronunciation and vocab, there's probably good tips for everyone.
- Pronunciation:
- Grammar
- Getting started:
- Articles
- Irregular plurals
- Continuous vs simple
- MISSING: conjunctions and relative pronouns
- Now you're talking:
- Drill the past participles.
- Perfect aspect
- Present perfect continuous
- MISSING: Modals
- Decent
- After this, see the Writing section
- Getting started:
- Vocab:
- Fluency
- Writing
Supplementary
For everything above, you could search expressions in Youglish. E.g. take piece of a grammar structure ("had been going") and search on Youglish to see how real people are using it. Don't only listen, but repeat what they say, this will enforce pronunciation and creation of natural expression.
Read and watch actively! Don't think only "I understand this information". Think "why did these people say what they said the way the did?"
Practice vocabulary and grammar. Make cards, write sentences down. Look for opportunities to use what you've learned in your daily life.
To learn how to pronounce words like "bromite," research the magic "E"
Connected speech is how we join words together.
- Here's a decent overview. I agree with the author's recommendations
- Here's a handy video about linking words. That's a bit dry, but it covers a good amount of ground in a short time. It looks like it's connected to a whole mini-course on English learning (I haven't seen it, so I won't vouch for it).
American accent comes from the fact that all Americans generally position their mouths in the same way. Practicing how to pronounce words could pay big dividends.
This video 30 minutes long and pretty detailed, but it's probably a good investment of time for deep listening and producing natural English rhythms.
Practice inserting articles into a text. Unfortunately there aren't so many texts that exist that intentionally leave out all articles.
If you are a programmer, it'd probably be easy to write a program that strips all instances of the following words from a text: a, an, the.
Good luck!
A classic mistake from is saying things like many "manys" or my two "childs/childrens"
So it'd be good to review this list of irregular plurals This is a perfect job for Anki, by the way.
Form
<subject> + Verb-to-be + <verb-ing>
I + am + runningThe continuous is for actions happening close to the event. The simple is for actions far from the event. This is true for present and past:
Present
"Cows eat grass"─this is a remote truth, not related to "now"
"Cows are eating grass"─this is a specific truth, related to now.
Past
"The cow ate grass" ─ a finished event, removed from other events "The cow was eating grass" ─ a non-finished event, so we are speaking from "inside" another past moment.
Exercises:
The past participles (sometimes called verb-3) are the verb forms that appear in perfect constructions, after "have/has/had":
I have seen He had become We wouldn't have known
And in passive constructions, as a kind of adjective:
He is seen by many as a leader. Da Vinci kept working, driven by a ceaseless curiosity.
Even though I know you "know" the Past participles, sometimes you're not using them where they should be:
I haven't knew it before
All of the grammar below uses the past participles. So, when you're practicing why not use this list of irregular ones?
The perfect provides background information to other events.
He hasn't seen that movie, so he won't get the reference.
Here,"not seeing the movie" provides background information about "won't get the reference."
The present perfect("have/has been") provides background information about the present; the past perfect("had been") provides background info about a past event; the future perfect("will have been")... well what do you think?
- Try to practice deciding whether to use one or the other here
- Study these signal words, and make your own sentences using each one(rotate between I/ she/they and Negative/questions) signal words
So, the continuous is for ongoing, and the perfect is for linking. In that case, the perfect continuous must be to link an ongoing event to a later event
Exercises:
At this point, you'll need to understand at a conceptual level the idea of clauses. However, you don't need to get too technical with it. If you want to, check out the clause section in writing advice
Conditionals describe sequences of events. The first conditional describes sequences of real events. The two tenses used in the construction reflect the 1-2 sequence of its meaning.
- If I get tired, I'll take a nap.
"If" comes before "then," "tired" comes before "nap", and the present tense comes before the future tense. See how all these things work together?
The second conditional describes sequences of unlikely,unreal events. Here the construction is exactly the same as the first conditional, but everything moves to the past tense ("would" is the past of "will).
If the alien got tired, it would take a nap.
For describing how one past event relates to another past event.
I hadn't logged in so I didn't see your message
(linking how "not logging in" relates to "not seeing")
Or you can try the continuous version:
I had been working all day, so I was tired
Exercises:
For describing the consequence of past hypothetical. Requires knowledge of past perfect.
If that had happened, it would have been bad.
From here, you can also describe past probabilities and advice:
I should've known, I could have been smart if I had studied
Exercises:
Understanding the clauses is the key to understanding embedded questions, one of your most frequent errors.
"I want to know how are you doing?" → I want to know how you are doing
"I want to know" is the main clause, so the grammar of "how are you doing" is subordinate to it. It won't have question syntax.
Similarly, reported speech embeds the secondary(reported clause) in its own tense. The result is that, if the main clause is past tense, the sub-clause will be made "paster."
"He said 'I have seen that movie'"→ "he said he had seen that movie"
- exercise about embedded questions
- exercise about reported speech
Let's face it: prepositions are a huge pain in the ass to master. Very often there's no logic, or there may be more than one correct answer. In my opionion by far the best thing to do is make Anki cards that have whole Russian sentences on one side, that you must translate in English.
Only mark the card "good" if you can translate the entire sentence, with the proper preposition. After a while, it'll become automatic to produce the perfect sentence, which will enforce good vocabulary patterns.
Here's a great list to make cards from:
Vocab is a huge topic, but one way you could improve, and sound natural, is by learning some more advanced phrasal verbs. With flash cards, it wouldn't be too hard to learn these.
Fluency is a hard term to describe, but it generally means speaking with out unnatural pauses and halts. It's also a hard concept to improve, but there are ways.
Sometimes, there are long pauses in your speech. Thinking before you speak is a good practice, one I myself never learned, but if you think too long your speaker will think you're paralyzed or stuck. On a zoom call, they might think connect's failed (this has happened). Simply announcing you're thinking reduces the discomfort of the silence:
- "Hold on, let me(lemme) think it through."
- "That's a good question, lemme work it in my head."
- "Off the top of my head, I'd say"
Also if you forget somethign, say "wait let me circle back," or "Oops, I missed something."
Next time you see some complicated diagram of a VPC, try to explain it outloud. Actually, you can use this method for any picture.
Perhaps this sounds ridiculous, but so-called "photo-elicitation" is not a technique I invented. In fact it's a known technique in various fields of research(including) ESL), useful for practice speaking spontaneously and for describing things only with the vocabulary you already have.
Besides just watching, try to repeat after the characters, mimicking their words and intonations. Good shows with lots of wordplay or non-standard speech include:
- Arrested Development
- The Sopranos
- The Wire
- Curb your enthusiasm
Ok, so that's also a list of shows that I like. Really listen to any dense, conversation heavy podcast. I don't know what you like, so you'll have to find that yourself.
Two books I can highly recommend are Trees, Maps, and Theorems and Style: Clarity and Grace. Some of these ideas are from there.
This topic is a little theoretical, but learning should pay huge dividend. Once you can figure out the difference between subordinate and main clauses, there's no limit to the level of sentences you can create.
Basically, a clause is a subject verb pair.
These sentences have one clause:
I am writing a report. (subject: "I"; verb: "report) Move the chair. (subject: "you"; verb: "move")
And these have two clauses:
I am writing a report and my friend is talking on the phone.(Subj: -I, -friend; verbs: -write, -talk) I am writing a report about how we learn clauses. (Subj: I , we ; verbs: write; learn)
However these two sentences have clauses in different ways. One sentence can be broken into two complete sentence, the other cannot. Which one can't be broken down?
"how we learn clauses" can't be it's own clause. So, it's what we call a subclause. Remove "and" and the first sentence functions perfectly fine as two. These are called independent clauses.
As you can see, I could theoretically break these sentences down into YAML-like objects.
clause: "I am writing a report"
main or sub: main
subject: I
verb: write
auxiliary: am
clause: "how we learn clauses"
main or sub: sub
type: "relative"
dependency: I am writing
subject: we"
verb: "learn"
object: "clauses"
I could go on, but I want to keep my reports relatively short.
Once you have figured out how to identify clauses, you will be able to always navigate to the core items of a sentence.
This engvid video taught me the concept, I hope it will help you:
Once you've learned them. It'll help your writing. Follow this simple guideline: put the main point in the main clause.
First do these two courses. They'll have the added benefit of teaching you a little grammar.
After that, you can look at this guide for reference anytime:
After you can identify what main and sub-clauses are, learning how to use logical connectors will give your sentences a tighter feel. Your arguments will also feel more forceful and logically arranged.
There are four major functions of logical connectors:
- add supporting information
- add contrasting information
- add resulting information
- add conditionals
Here's an example paragraph full of connectors. Which function does each one serve?
Unless it rains tomorrow, I think the Bears are going to win, because they play much better than the Packers. However, they always practice indoors, so if it rains, they Packers have a chance. Even though I want the Packers to win, I like the bears too, so, no matter whether my team wins or not, I'm going to enjoy the game.
Check your answers and see a lot more examples here
- Practice writing with modifiers.
- Think about sub and main clause. In technical writing, put the most important info in the main clause.
- Revise paragraphs. Try to think about what the paragraph's main point is. Put that at the beginning. After doing that, look to see if following sentences can be removed.