Wednesday, May 23, 2007
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Senior Member
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: karachi & hyderabad
Posts: 522
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How to learn English
Motivation for learning English
What is necessary to learn English well? You have to change your life a little — do crazy things like talking to yourself in English or spending your evening reading a dictionary. In order to do these things, and do them regularly, you have to enjoy doing them. If you are like most learners and don't feel like doing these things, you will have to work on your motivation.
Improving your motivation for learning English: We share our psychological tricks that helped us enjoy learning English and that you can use to boost your motivation and make a difference in your English
Getting a good English dictionary
You need a good English dictionary. An English dictionary is the most important thing that you will need when learning English. Successful English learners use their dictionaries all the time — that's how they learn to use new words.
How to buy a good English dictionary?
It has to be an English-English dictionary.
It must give phonetic transcriptions (pronunciations) for every word.
It must give example sentences for every word.
It should be a software dictionary.
Example sentences: more important than definitions: If you want to improve your speaking/writing ability, read the example sentences in your dictionary. They show you how to use a word and they program your brain with correct English.
Learn English without mistakes
You can damage your English by writing and speaking. Your grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation can get worse because of practice. When you speak or write and you make mistakes, you teach yourself bad habits. These bad habits may be difficult to eliminate. The solution is simple: Avoid mistakes! Try to say or write only correct English sentences.
How can you avoid making mistakes?
Study pronunciation (all the English sounds and at least basic English words) before you open your mouth.
Get lots of English sentences into your head (by reading and listening) before you open your mouth or write in English. To avoid mistakes, you need to follow good examples.
When you speak or write, be careful, slow, and use simple language.
Learning English pronunciation
Why should you study English pronunciation? Because pronunciation is the biggest thing that people notice about your English. You should study it even if you think you can already communicate in English.
How to learn English pronunciation? You will need to:
Learn to pronounce every English sound correctly. The sounds of English and the International Phonetic Alphabet are shown in our table. You can listen to recorded examples of each sound.
Understand phonetic transcription — the system for writing the pronunciation of English words. Phonetic transcription is usually written in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Learn the pronunciation of every English word that you use. You can find phonetic transcriptions of words in good English dictionaries. It might be a good idea to use PerfectPronunciation — Antimoon's English pronunciation software which teaches you the pronunciation of the most frequently used English words with phonetic transcriptions and audio recordings.
Input - getting English into your head
What is input and why you need it? Input is a short word for "English sentences that you read or listen to". When you read and listen to English sentences, parts of the sentences stay in your memory, which lets you build similar sentences yourself. Input — not speaking, writing or grammar tests — is what you need to use English grammar and vocabulary like a native speaker.
You shouldn't learn English by grammar rules because grammar rules are difficult to memorize and because building sentences by using grammar rules is very slow. You can't use English fluently if you have to think about grammar rules.
Why your input should be fun: Thrilling, enjoyable and/or funny content is the key to your progress.
Reading is easier than listening: You can get input in only two ways: reading and listening, and reading is easier than listening, because: (1) You can see the spelling of all the words, so you can look them up in a dictionary, and (2) When reading, you can always stop to think and look things up. With listening, this is not always possible.
The power of reading — two cases: These two stories of people who learned English well by reading show what can happen to your English if you get lots of input.
Great output skills without output practice? Richard Boydell's example shows that to learn good output skills, you may not need output practice at all.
You can get English input in many different ways:
Reading in English gives you easy input (easier than listening). When reading, pay attention to new words, phrases, and grammar patterns.
Why you need to start reading on your own
How to read English texts if you want to improve your English
What to read
Watching movies in English gives you spoken English input and helps you learn informal English vocabulary. You will often have problems understanding movies; we present a few techniques to help you with that.
Adventure games are computer games where you control a character who talks to other characters. They give you lots of spoken English input and are fun to play.
Besides, good dictionaries give you input in the form of example sentences. By reading the sentences, you can learn how to use a word.
http://www.antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm
Thank you
Faryal Shah,
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