Introduction
English Fluency
English is a very old language – around 1,400 years old to be precise. Being Germanic in origin, it’s been changed, influenced, adapted and switched every year since, and it continues to do this even today. To speak a language fluently, means to speak it without difficulty, without thinking and pausing a lot, and being able to easily and frequently understand what is being said to you. English is a difficult language to understand if you’re on the outside looking in, but even people born and raised within an English-speaking country still make mistakes, but the same goes for every country. Every language is hard to learn, but knowing how to learn them, and having the persistence and know-how to get better can actually provide you with better opportunities and better experiences.
Why Language is Important
You might think that language, and the ability to speak to one another in a coherent way is just something that we’ve come up with so that we can understand each other – but there’s more to it than this. Language adds to society. It creates culture and vibrancy. It offers variation and possibility. Of course, the main thing to come from language is our ability to talk, learn, share and debate with one another, and this is arguably the greatest thing humanity has ever created, but like I said there’s more to it than just that.
From an internal point of view, language is just as important. In our own countries, being able to speak fluently can greatly improve your own life. With a wider, more expansive vocabulary to hand you can understand more. You can experience a wider range of feelings and emotions, and you can add to the very society that you live in, just like everyone else has before you, just though speaking fluently. But of course, not everyone speaks fluently. So, the question now is, how can you learn to speak fluently?
The four pillars of English fluency (and arguably any language) are generally recognized as:
1. Listening
2. Speaking
3. Reading
4. Writing
The Seven Steps of Fluency
There’s a good chance that during school you’ll most likely have to learn some language, most likely French. If you enjoy this, you might get the possibility to learn Spanish or German as well, and if you’re really into it, you might just get something a little more further afield. And the way you’ll most likely learn is through the four areas. Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening. Whilst these are the four cornerstones of being able to understand and articulate a language, reading set phrases, and having deliberately scripted conversations isn’t the best way to go about it. In fact, the reason why so many people, particularly English people don’t or can’t speak a second language, let alone their own, is because they’re not taught it in the right way. So, what is the right way to teach people language. The answer is unusually pretty much entirely dependent on you and your persistence. Here’s just a few things that you can do to improve not only your foreign languages, but your English fluency too.
- WATCH MEDIA – It’s no surprise that this is at the top of the list. Media like television and film are bona fide tried and tested incredible ways of improving fluency. In a textbook at school, you’ll read phrases, statements and questions that are practical – almost overly practical. Media doesn’t do this, because media doesn’t allow this. When someone is writing a film, they want the dialogue of the characters to be organic, and reflect what it’s actually like to speak fluently in that language. They want the dialogue to be scripted, but sound natural. Therefore, if you’re to watch a foreign film, or even a film from your country, you can pick up on the language and learn how to speak naturally as opposed to heavily scripted. An example of someone who used this technique was a footballer by the name of Dimitar Berbatov. One of Bulgaria’s best, he learned to speak English before moving to the England through watching the mafia Godfather trilogy. Essentially, what this method boils down to is learn through listening. Dive in at the deep end, and listen to natural conversations to hone your own fluency.
- READ NEWS AND BOOKS – A similar, but different method, is to read books and news of the language you want to become fluent in. It works the same way as watching something, but it allows you to process how the sentences are formed, the spellings of the words, and the context in which they’re used. For some people this might be a better starting point as you’re able to take it at your own pace, as opposed to watching premade media which is already paced. But the best thing to do is to combine both reading media, and watching it. This way, you can fully enhance your ability to both understand, comprehend and potentially speak some of the language.
- VOCAB – What many people do when they’re learning a language, is they keep a small note of words that they may find confusing, or they don’t fully understand the meaning of, or they want to be able to use it in the future and are waiting for the opportunity. This is a good practice to do when learning a language, not only because it shows an aptitude to learn, but also to improve. And all languages have their difficulties. In many languages there are words that sound the same but have different meanings. There can be words that are spelt the same, but pronounced differently. By having a place where vocab can be stored you can figure out what you need to learn, as well as step 4:
- ASK QUESTIONS – Ask questions. There’s nothing wrong it. If you want to learn how to use a word in a specific context, or how to pronounce a particularly challenging word, then there’s plenty of people that you can ask. It’s okay to make mistakes, it’s what makes you human. But it’s how you learn from those mistakes that tells people whether you’re really keen to learn to speak a language fluently. By asking questions you can better prepare yourself for a situation in which be difficult in the future, but the important thing to remember is, is that there is nothing, NOTHING wrong with asking for help.
- LITTLE DETAILS – Once you’ve got a decent grasp of listening and speaking, reading and writing, you can start to work on things that make the language unique. For example, people who speak Spanish often speak very quickly, so it could be a case of learning how to speed up your ability. It could be learning the tone and dialect at which to speak at, and even intonations. Body language and hand gestures, whilst technically not the language themselves, can actually help you to integrate yourself within a certain culture and society, as they can be used in the place of a word. For example, Italians gesticulate with their hands a lot when they speak, so learning what these gesticulations mean, and using them yourself could improve your fluency.
- WEAK SPOTS – A good learner will always be aware of their negatives. This doesn’t just go for language, but for everything. If you want to be fluent in a language, you have to be able to notice, address and improve your weak spots. This could be plurals, it could be tenses, it could just be long words. The point is however, you’ll never be truly fluent if you have weaknesses. You might be great at everything, but if you can’t work out when to use the past tense, and the present tense, then it’s all for nothing, because you won’t be fluent. There’s bound to be mistakes that you make, but as stated, as long as you’re aware of these mistakes and try your best to rectify them, then your fluency in a language can improve.
- PRACTICE – It should go without saying, but practice is the key to fluency. Try and use the language whenever you can. Think in it as often as possible. Watch a film without subtitles and see if you able to understand what’s being said and done as it’s happening. Practice is the key to mastering anything, so use it – or lose it.
It’s an understatement to say that a language is normal. In English, we lack consistency. The plural of ‘mouse’ is ‘mice’, yet the plural of ‘house’ is ‘houses’, and not ‘hice’. In Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, the main Latin derived languages, there are masculine and feminine ways of ending words with ‘a’ or ‘o’,