Have you ever wondered how you can naturally boost your English language proficiency? If you’re just learning the English language, you may seek hacks that may help you significantly improve your fluency. After all, hacks exist for almost anything, from how to lose excess fat or shed 30 pounds within 3 days to passing IELTS with flying colors, etc.
However, although you can study English with apps, you’ll still need some helpful hacks to enhance your prowess in the English language.
This article highlights 5 productive hacks that’ll accelerate your English language learning skills.
The 5 Hacks for Boosting Your English Language Skills
Here’s our selection of top tips to develop your English language proficiency:
1. Read tabloids printed in English.
Most English language teachers say the best way to boost fluency and build vocabulary is via reading. But what should you read, you may ask? Novels? Motivational books?
Not really; you should read tabloids printed in the English language instead. However, don’t go for intense journalism that’s notorious for covering multiple complex economic and political topics. You may find it a bit too much or taxing for your mind.
Instead, read simple newspapers that only cover general news stories. These papers use easy-to-understand English language to pass information to their teeming readers.
You should start with short stories or articles and only proceed to longer ones as you progress.
2. Keep an English language vocabulary journal.
Keeping an English language vocabulary journal near you is another excellent way to improve your fluency. When you read, underscore every unfamiliar vocab with a color pen. You can do this anywhere — on a bus, tram, etc., especially on your way to and from work.
Before turning in for the night, jot down every vocabulary you’ve underscored that day in a notebook. Then translate each of them.
Find out how each vocabulary is used in the sentence and where you got it. As you return to and translate unknown words every day, their meanings get anchored firmly in your mind.
3. Listen to English radio stations.
Don Williams once sang the lovely country song “Listen to The Radio.” That’s excellent advice from a sage, especially when enhancing your English language-speaking skills.
You’ll find tens of thousands of vlogs and podcasts in different languages. Your focus, of course, is on podcasts and vlogs run in the English language. But the best medium to learn the English language is the radio.
You don’t have any business with channels that play pop music and all that stuff. Rather, focus on the channels that run numerous talk shows, news bulletins, and fast-paced radio ads that cram lots of information into 60 seconds.
If you can understand the rapid-fire ads that those radio channels churn out every few minutes per day, your proficiency in the English language is pretty good.
4. Have 10 live or interactive conversations per day.
Improving your English language skills significantly is practically impossible without one-on-one conversations with native speakers. This, perhaps, is the most helpful and powerful language-learning hack on our list.
Challenge yourself to converse with at least 10 different English-speaking individuals per day. How long the conversations last doesn’t matter, as well as with whom or about what.
Take advantage of every opportunity to speak in English. Strike up conversations with a retail assistant, the local baker, those promoting charities at your street corner, the lady checking boarding tickets on the metro, your barber, etc.
Conversing with strangers or acquaintances will build your confidence. Moreover, with this hack, speaking English spontaneously will soon become second nature, and your mistakes will get less each day.
5. Change your environment.
Nearly everyone has a bucket list, i.e., a list of activities you want to engage in. If you live in a non-English-speaking country, you should consider changing locations to an English-speaking area such as the United Kingdom or the United States of America.
Still, living in some locations may not open you to opportunities to converse extensively in the English language. That means you may need to switch up your environment.
One of the activities you should consider is going out on Premier League day, i.e., if you live in England. This is where you can indulge yourself in rapid-fire conversations with as many English speakers as you can manage.
Conclusion
These 5 helpful hacks are almost 100% guaranteed to boost your English language proficiency. But that’s only if you put them to excellent use.
Therefore, step out there, and make some funny mistakes but learn from them all. Before long, your fluency in the English language will grow tremendously. Keep putting in the work, and you’ll soon find yourself speaking the English language like a true native.
