How to Learn English | 5 Expert Tips

Eat Sleep Dreamers welcome.

Today I'm going to show you how to learn English with five expert tips.

They are easy to do, they are super useful and they come from my ten years of teaching

experience.

So if you're ready, let's do this.

Tip number one, learn how to use the most common one hundred English words.

The Oxford English Corpus released the one hundred most commonly used words in English

and they make up a huge amount of all written English.

Now this is important!

This is the top one hundred words for written English.

The list for spoken English is a bit different.

Now I've put both those lists in the description below so you can have a look.

Just learning these one hundred words won't mean you can speak English perfectly.

But if you learn how they are used and how to use them you'll have a great foundation.

Take the word 'would' for example.

Now there are many uses of would for example as a polite request so 'Would you open the

window, please?'

or as a past habit 'When we visited my Grandmother we would walk along the river.'

So there are many different uses now if you know how to use the word would you've got

a wonderful chance of being able to use it obviously and to understand it when you see

it.

And as it is one of the most common words in the English language I think it's worth

making the time or putting in the effort to learn how to use it.

My second tip, learn English through the things that you love.

If you love fashion watch English language fashion vloggers and read fashion articles.

If you love yoga watch online yoga classes or even better, if you can, go to an English

language yoga class where you live.

If you love football listen to a podcast, an English language football podcast from

iTunes.

Read an English language newspaper and the match reports from that.

Try and find the game in English with English subtitles maybe.

There are so many opportunities now online for you to think of your passion, think of

your interests and then learn English through that.

It's the best way to learn because you'll be motivated and you'll learn the topic vocabulary

that is related to what you love and what you want to talk about.

Tip number three is related to tip number two, learn English through music.

What music do you like?

Maybe it's rock, pop, dance music, hip hop, whatever the music that you love, it doesn't

matter as long as it has words you can learn English.

Songs are an amazing resource for language.

I did a song recently for you guys with Ed Sheeran's 'Shape of You' and we looked at

some interesting vocabulary and we looked at some interesting grammar structures and

I think this is the perfect way to learn English because you'll see vocabulary that you might

not see in a text book.

You'll see grammar structures that maybe are a little bit different from the ones that

you've seen before and what it is is authentic language.

This is language that isn't made for a text book, it's real every day English that people

really use.

And let's be honest it's super fun.

You can dance and you can learn at the same time.

Perfect!

Tip number four, make learning a habit.

If you wanted to build muscles how would you do it?

Would you go to the gym for the first day, lift up all the weights you can and then for

the rest of the week not go?

Well you could do that but it wouldn't work.

If you wanted to lose weight would you go for a three hour run on Monday and then nothing

for the rest of the week?

No, that wouldn't work would it?

So why when we are learning English do we try and learn for two hours or three hours

on an evening when we've been working and then do nothing for the rest of the week?

It doesn't make sense!

To see results you need to make learning a habit.

Now the best way to make learning a habit is to make it sustainable.

Now what do I mean by sustainable?

Well sustainable is where you are able to continue to do something.

I think the best way to do that is not to learn for three hours on a Tuesday night after

work when you are tired and nothing for the rest of the week.

I think the best way is to do short amounts every day or as often as you can.

Here's what I'd suggest.

Try for one week to give ten minutes every day, just ten minutes.

Try and do it at the same time every day because that will help keep it a habit.

The best time for me I think would be when you are going to work.

So you are on the bus, on the train, use that time to learn.

Or maybe in your lunch break or any break, take ten minutes of that time and study English.

Pick a YouTube video, ok, could be one of mine could be anyone else's or find an interesting

blog article on your phone and use that to learn English.

Set yourself the goal of doing it every day for one week and at the end of the week have

a look and see how you've done.

Making your learning short frequent occurrences is the best way to make learning a habit.

Ten minutes every day, it's all I'm asking.

My final tip, use the voice recorder function on your mobile phone.

This is an amazing tool to improve your speaking and your pronunciation.

How can you use it?

Ok, one idea.

You could listen to your favourite TV show, let's say Sherlock and you could listen for

a short sentence that Sherlock says and then record into the voice recorder your imitation.

So you can listen to how he says the phrase or the sentence and then you record exactly

the same sentence into the voice recorder as you would say it.

So this is an imitation, you are trying to sound like the original.

Afterwards you can listen back and compare the two sounds.

If you have an English speaking friend then maybe you could ask them or a teacher, you

could ask them to compare the sounds too.

Another way to use it could be to write a story, ok, write on a piece of paper and then

record yourself saying the story.

Then you could listen back and then think ok maybe I need to improve that pronunciation

there or maybe I was speaking very slowly so next time I need to speed up.

So you can listen to it and then record it again and see if there's any improvement,

you could compare the two recordings, see if you have improved.

Again if you have an English speaking friend or teacher or someone you know they could

listen to it and give you advice, ideas, tips and some help.

Another idea and this is one I used when I was in Hong Kong and obviously I can't speak

Cantonese but what I used to do was ask my Cantonese speaking friends to record phrases

in to my voice recorder so that I could listen to it and practise.

This was a fantastic way of trying to imitate their intonation.

Ok, let's practise some Cantonese.

Now I could take that to a Cantonese speaking friend and ask them if it was any good.

Maybe it's completely terrible, I don't know.

I think I was trying to say 'Where is the swimming pool'.

Anyway, these voice recorders are an amazing tool to help you improve your English.

Eat Sleep Dreamers what learning tips have I forgotten to mention today?

What do you do to improve your English?

Tell me in the comments below and that will mean that you are going to share it with all

the other Eat Sleep Dreamers because I think as a community I'd love us to share our learning

ideas and then maybe someone will read your idea and they'll think brilliant that's exactly

how I want to learn English.

So as they say sharing is caring.

And if you know anyone that is trying to learn English and would find this video useful please

share it with them.

Guys check out my Instagram account it has so many cool things going on right now.

Also check out my Facebook page.

Thank you so much for joining me today, you know what time it is, it's time to take your

English to the next level.

This is Tom saying goodbye.