Need to learn English, but terrified by boring grammar lessons and not ready for long exhausting hours of doing homework? This feeling is familiar to everyone, who dives into the world of a foreign language. It immediately associates with school, handbooks, and exams. Modern techniques of learning a language prove that this process can be turned into a fun adventure. Proven, those innovative ways foster better words and rules memorizing. We are ready to share a few tricks on how to make your everyday English struggle enjoyable and diverse.
Exercise Spelling Check by Playing Scrabble
Games create certain emotions, which contributes to memorizing new materials. No coincidence, that this is the most common method of learning used for kids. Games teach thinking logically and apply a non-standard approach. Our brain perceives such activities as a rest, as a result, students are less stressed, open to communicate, and have less fear of making mistakes. Smartphones allow us to play games like the word sudoku. This is a great way to take a break from the main activity and spend this time to good use. Board games are a perfect fit for long winter evenings with friends or family. Well-known Scrabble checks how good you are at spelling the words, but this is just one of many options. Before going games shopping consider these variants:
- This is a challenging card game. Its essence is in expanding the word with the cards in your possession. Your task is to get rid of all cards.
- This game requires creativity. The task behind it is to create a word and then double it with each next row. It gets complicated by time limits.
- Big Boggle. This portable game offers various letter combinations at each round. A player should find as many four-letter words as possible.
- WordSpiel Card Game. The rules say to create a word and the last letter should be the first for the next player. Try to challenge your opponent!
- In this game, you have only 7 minutes to compose as many words as you can by following certain paths.
Don’t Sing in Broken English
American or British songs understanding turns into a real quest. Sometimes you hear just a set of weird sounds, and when trying to sing along the language becomes very broken. No wonder why. Song lyrics are crawling with shortens, slang, dialects. If you are curious what your favorite song is about, just check out the full lyrics on the internet and translate them. Urban Dictionary will help you to decode all the alien words and sounds. Once you have a clear meaning, work on your pronunciation and language speed by putting certain parts of the song on repeat. Now you are ready to impress the karaoke audience by singing the best hits in English.
Reconsider The YouTube Subscription List
Have you noticed how many hours per day you stick to YouTube? This pointless time spending may be turned into a full-fledged English language course. Youtube vloggers offer many English learning channels, but if it is hard to be concentrated on the rules, simply subscribe to the channels corresponding to personal interests. Most blog trendsetters are American, so naturally, they speak pure English and this is a great way to receive first-class content along with learning English from the native speakers absolutely for free.
Turn on a TV
It’s clear that Youtube substituted TV in many ways. It even becomes trendy to refuse TV watching. In certain circles, it is considered shameful. But still, TV takes a heart-centric position in almost every home and lets this secret stay with us but people still turn it on regularly just to have a background. Instead of local channels, choose international channels to improve your English. News is a good option to get a feel of formal language. Even if you don’t understand each word, you will be surprised by your progress in a month or two. Listening in the background is a perfect solution for passive learners. Minimum efforts, but the listening comprehension skills will streamline. This trick will be useful for those who are planning to pass the exam but is short on preparation time.
New Place – New Language Experience
Traveling is the most common hobby and motivator for learning English. Landing a new place is the right time to practice your language in a real-life situation, especially when there is no choice like only to speak English. Dealing with the custom security at the airport, check-in at the hotel, order at the restaurant may bring you out of the comfort zone, but you will be surprised how many English words will pop up in your mind in these stressful situations. Every learner has a solid passive vocabulary and in the right minute our brain will pick it up from our long-term memory.
For people, who are more oriented on language learning, but at the same time would like to explore new cultures and scenes, there are plenty of language schools. Malta and Cyprus are especially famous for such services. It may be costly, but enrolling in the language environment even for two weeks will be equal to learning English at home for two years. As a bonus, you get new friends, nice beaches, hot sun, and amazing cuisine.
Pen Friends of The Digital Era
Before the internet age, it was quite popular to join the pen friends clubs. A person could choose a partner, who also learns a language, but lives in another country, and exchange the letters by regular mail. Back in 90-es, it took months to receive an answer, today it is just a matter of a few seconds. Pen friends became digitalized and everyone can download a special app to find one. Tandem, Bilingua, MyLanguageExchange to name a few apps for the smartphone, which offer access to a community of language fans. Finding a conversation partner may be a good solution for people who don’t have an opportunity to practice English.
Netflix as an English Tutor
Movie streaming services like Netflix, HBO, Hulu provide subscriptions to English movies and series. World premiers are available now with a few clicks on a smartphone. All these services have subtitles for you to enjoy the movie in the original, but at the same time making sure you get everything. Apparently, it allows learning some slang expressions, idioms and better understands the context of using them.
Just turn around to find exciting possibilities to improve your language, while resting. Having so many sources available left no room for excuses why your English is still far from perfect.
