How to Improve Your Listening and Vocabulary in English

Hey there! What's up? How are you doing? Are you ready to get fluent in English? Awesome!

Let's begin. I have a question from a Go Natural English community member, Kassai. Kassai asks

a great general question. "How do I improve my English vocabulary and listening?" So,

I have a tip for you. Actually, I have many tips about improving your vocabulary and listening

in English. However, I can't get to all of them right now. I'm going to give you one

small tip to get started. If you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to visit

my website, gonaturalenglish.com where you can learn about the premium GNE course ... and

if you visit, I'll offer you a free eBook. All you have to do is enter your name and

email and I'll send it immediately to you - no strings attached. So, now let's talk

about Kassai's question about how to improve your vocabulary and your listening. So, of

course, many teachers, including myself, say you need to listen to more English. You need

to read more English. This is a natural way to build your vocabulary and to be able to

understand more words, but that takes a lot of time, so, I think the real question here

-- what I want to focus on is how can we do this better and faster? What I'd like to do

is discuss the idea of how you can apply a little effort to get a lot of results. If

that sounds interesting, keep listening. What I recommend is to think about exactly what

you want to know, what you want to be able to do in English. For example, are you studying

medicine? Do you want to use English in your career as a doctor, or a medical translator?

Do you love to travel? Do you want to be able to make your travel plans in English? And

then speak with people from around the world using English as a common language, or do

you like to do research online in English? Or, maybe you have a significant other -- a

boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife who speaks English. Or his or her family speaks

English, and so for personal reasons you might want to learn English. There are so many reasons

why you might want to learn English. I don't know your personal reasons but I would love

to know, so if you leave a comment and tell me why you're learning English, I would love

to find out. But now, I want you to think about your reason why you want to know English

... how to speak English fluently, and exactly what do you want to say to whom? So, we're

going to narrow down your English world for a moment. Instead of trying to learn all of

the English there ever was and all of the tens of thousands of words there are in the

English dictionary. Many words that are commonly used, that aren't even in the dictionary like

new words, like slang words that are used just casually. We're going to narrow down

our focus because it's difficult to see your progress if you're looking at 50,000 words.

Why don't we narrow down the words that you want to learn to 500? Five hundred new words

... that's a nice little chunk of vocabulary that you could easily learn in a few months.

So, I want you to figure out what it is you want to be able to do in English, to whom

do you want to speak, and what kind of vocabulary goes with that? That's a great way to start

attacking that vocabulary. What I mean by "attack" is to study it, learn it, recognize

it, listen to it, repeat it, and that's how you'll see faster progress --- better progress

with your English skills. With your vocabulary and with your listening because when we focus,

and we set goals, smart goals, involving a number and a specific set of words, that's

when you're going to see your fluency improve. So, if you found this tip helpful, and I hope

you did, come visit Go Natural English to learn more about how to learn English naturally,

and I'll see you again real soon, I hope. Alright! Bye for now.