Fabien Snauwaert - How to Learn English: A Guide to Speaking English Like a Native Speaker

HOW TO LEARN ENGLISH

FABIEN SNAUWAERT

A GUIDE TO SPEAKING ENGLISH LIKE A NATIVE SPEAKER

HOW-TO-LEARN-ENGLISH.COM

How To Learn English

Copyright 2010 Fabien Snauwaert
All rights reserved.

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How to use this book

First of all, congratulations are in order! By reading this book, you are already committing yourself to reading and learning English. This is an important first step!

Practice is the key to learning any foreign language. If you do not practice often enough, you lose what you have previously learned and making progress will seem to take forever. The goal of this book is to give you many different ways to practice your English effortlessly, while having the most fun and making the most of your time.

When you are done using this book, you will understand and speak English as fluently as a native speaker.

This book is not meant to be just read and put back on a shelf. It is meant to be used as a reference you return to again and again. It takes you from rather basic drills, as you may have been doing at school for years, to advanced levels, such as listening to an audio book, with no text to help you; or, thinking in English and making conversation with native speakers as smoothly as you would in your mother-tongue.

As such, this book must be used as a tool. Come back to it often and re-read the parts you are currently working on, as well as the parts you have worked on before and should still be practicing. Applying the techniques in this book does not require much effort and should be a lot of fun from the start.

For your English practice to pay off, you need to apply the following principles:

Have fun practicing your English. If you are not having fun, you are not learning and you may end up quitting. English is all about communication and good communication has to be enjoyable.

One easy way to do that, a concept used throughout this book, is to have your English practice revolve around your passions; ensuring that you both have fun and learn interesting things, while still practicing your English.

Practice daily. This is much easier if you respect the first principle. People are often afraid of the time and effort it takes to learn a new skill. They are afraid they will not have enough time for other activities anymore; they are also afraid that all the time they put in will have been spent in vain, if they fail to learn the new skill.

Learning English does not take a lot of time; but it requires regular periods of time. Twenty minutes a day can be enough to make some major progress. The brain adapts quickly, provided it feels it is doing something important. One way to reinforce that feeling is through steady practice.

You do it for you. It is critical for you to know why you are learning English.

Answering for school, for my diploma or for work is not enough. You need to know what you want to get out of it. How do you want to benefit from speaking English? Knowing why will make it all the more easier when you are in doubt, facing new issues, or spending more time on your English.

You need to come up with your own personal reason for learning English. What does it enable you to do, specifically, that you cannot do otherwise? Be as specific as possible. The American Dream is still very much alive. Be honest with yourself: examine why you want to speak this language. Speaking English properly opens up many opportunities. Define what it is that you want.

First, be aware that, by respecting the previous three principles, you are never wasting your time never, ever. If you are enjoying yourself by practicing and pursuing a personal goal, how could you be?!

Still and this is all very natural people want to learn quickly. I think this in order to enjoy the momentum coming from their high motivation before it vanishes, and because they fear they will give things up if it takes too long.

One way to learn efficiently is to keep yourself on your toes in order to avoid both boredom and frustration.

If the task is too difficult, you will grow bored and may even resent the language

If you feel things are too easy, you may grow bored and perhaps even disinterested.

This means you need to maintain balance in your practice. As soon as something becomes too easy, move on. As soon as something seems awfully hard slow down, and break the task into smaller pieces.

When you have learned something new and it is starting to become easy, it is okay for you to enjoy your new skills and keep doing the same thing for a while. This will only reinforce your new skills. However, you need to be aware of how things are evolving: are you feeling bored at some point? If so, move on to something more challenging. Speaking perfect English is further down the road so why wait? Usually, in practice this will mean moving on from one chapter to the next.

On the other end of the spectrum, when something gets too difficult, you need to slow down and think about it. You do not always need to go back to something easier. Maybe you just need to break down the problem into smaller pieces. What does that mean? It means (and this is your responsibility, as a learner) that you may need to locate what is causing you trouble. What is the difficulty, exactly? Grammar? Vocabulary? Pronunciation? Identify your stumbling block and break it into pieces. Any problem can be solved if broken down into smaller, simpler chunks. You then need to handle each piece of the puzzle separately. When they all make sense, try it again; it should then be much easier.

Practice at least 20 minutes per day. If you are having fun it will be very easy to increase to an hour or more each day, without noticing.

The goal is not for you to count how many hours you spend learning English. The goal is to make practicing English part of your daily routine... something as natural to you as drinking water, chatting with a friend or eatinga life-long habit.

As much as possible, and more so than any other language-learning method available, this book helps you make English part of your normal life. You will be able to add more and more English to your day without having to sacrifice something you like for it. By the end of this book, you will be doing a lot of activities you already enjoy doing, except that you will be doing them in English, instead of your native language.

A final word on practice: if you do not feel you are practicing enough, do not let it get you down. We all have tight schedules. Just do the best you can. Do remember one thing though: it is more interesting to practice twenty minutes per day, five days a week, than it is to practice two hours per week over the weekend. You need to feel that English is part of your routine; not something you only do once in a while. It actually takes much less effort to practice this way and you will progress much faster.

Who am I to tell you how to learn English properly?

Well, I started learning English at school like most people. One thing to mention is that I am French and that I did not study to become an English teacher. French people actually have one of the worst reputations regarding foreign languages: we hardly practice any spoken English in class. We are very proud of our French culture, which is okay in itself but prevents us from opening up to foreign languages, especially English. We do not dare speak English with foreigners, even when we know what to say, simply because we are so self-conscious of our thick French accent. So, lets just say that being French awards no extra perks in learning English. Moreover, I dont have any English-speaking relatives so I have had to learn the hard way.