How to Improve Your English Speaking Skills

We can improve our English speaking skills by speaking more. But if not surrounded by English speakers, the next best thing is to step up our listening and reading while waiting for more opportunities to speak.

0:00 - Understanding English, but not being able to speak it: a common issue.
1:29 - In order to speak English well, you have to understand English very well.
3:13 - Our output ability is always going to be less than our ability to receive the language.
4: 23 - You need to constantly challenge yourself to difficult input in English or any other language.
4:46 - Making mistakes is the only way you will improve and go on to make fewer mistakes.
6:00 - Improving your English pronunciation.
7:07 - Improving your English comprehension skills.
8:07 - You need to speak A LOT!
9:02 - Why English learners are lucky.

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#english #learnenglish #learnlanguages

[Thelinguist]

More people learn English than any other language, and most want to speak well, or at least speak better. The path to speaking better often starts with understanding better.

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[IKEMENOsakaman]

Usually, it's very difficult for a native speaker of any language to explain to non-native speakers how to improve the speaking skills of that language. But Steve Kaufmann, knowing all the difficulties of learning a language, can explain it simply and clearly just like this!

[ahmedsaleh]

He is very smart. He knows that part of his audience want to learn English, so he gives them more specific advice. Keep up the good work Mr Steve. I learned a lot from you 🙏🏽

[geizerpape.]

Right now I am practicing my english speaking skills, it's like you can read my mind. Thank you.

[detodfz]

I agree with all of what you said in the video, very important points! 👍🏻
To people who are still struggling with speaking I'd like to add 2 things from my personal experience:
1. If you're having trouble and you tell your self "you CAN'T speak" even if both your vocab and your input are great, it may be just psychological. It's very crucial not only to work on your language skills, but social skills also. Some ppl are much more likely to shy away and only listen instead of actively engaging in a convo. That is a huge obstacle if you really wanna learn a language. Btw English helped me to get rid of social anxiety so you can do it too 👊🏻
2. You have to LIKE speaking in your TL :) Shadowing (or even just sort of shadowing in my brain) and reading books (or random stuff) out loud had a HUGE impact on my speaking skills! I believe the key thing is that you have to like the sounds and the melody of the language so much that your brain would wanna imitate them. I'm now struggling with German cos of that - I haven't found speakers I wanna sound like yet, so my brain doesn't want to "learn to imitate" the language just yet 😅

[thainarosario]

I found your channel searching "how learning english by yourself?" in youtube, I'm from Brazil and I didn't have confidence in speak because here, the most people care of the perfect pronunciation, with no accents like a native person language and I was afraid of this way of learning/speaking but whatching your videos I'm free of this afraids because learning a new language in adult age is a challenge but I'm ready for this!! Thank you for share this teachings for us around the world.

[lecirdaluz]

I agree with this gentleman completely. I was born in Brazil and I learned English when I was about 15 years old. I found out that I do have this talent for foreign languages because within six months I could converse with any English-speaking person with no problems at all. Now I have lived in the United States for over 50 years. I consider myself fluent in English however it never ceases to amaze me how many new words I learn every time that I watch British movies and/or Australian, Canadian movies. I always make it a point to look up new words in the dictionary and place it in my “favorite.” Now I’m learning French and I find it easier to speak to them because I get to choose the words however I do learn a lot more when I listen to the French talking back to me. So the suggestions given by this gentleman is most definitely great.

[kusy]

I like this camera angle. You can see 10x more book titles than the "usual" angle. Speedy recovery on your thumb, Steve.

[nerdpessoal]

Excellent explanation about the same situation that happened to me during my learning of Italian. I started with learning as many words as possible, watching a lot of Italian TV, repetitive shows, talking a lot with native speakers, lots of reading, and I've had the same difficulties with the speaking. But now I finally got my Italian language B1 certification.

[DLusby]

Hi, Steve. This matches my own experiences as a learner, of course. :)

I also found myself thinking of the years when I was an ESL teacher in Japan and South Korea. The advanced students who could speak very well always had really good comprehension ability.

[amirieducation]

Thank you so much for your advice Mr. Steve

[chokrihamouda]

Thanks for this video. It's true that we need too much input before starting to speak but I think that we need more than that to become fluent. We need opportunities to practice our speaking. Authentic opportunities, not artificial ones, such as speaking in classrooms.

[lucianodomingues]

Stupendous lesson Steve, thanks a lot.

[diogoantonio]

Thanks so much master for the tips !!!!

[lucasrba]

You are right. Constantly I see people saying that language acquisition do not work for them because even when they understand well, they still cannot speak the language, but I think I never saw one person that really could comprehend the language. For instance, they not always can follow a normal podcast or a movie without subtitles. If you don't understand the other person you will always have that bad feeling of being lost.

[Tutume]

It's very pleasant to listen to you Steve and love the way you explain complex things. Thank you!

[sohersaker]

thanks a lot for this helpful information

[nguyennambinh]

Thank you very much for your advice on how much input we put in language learning.

[joseafelix]

This is great stuff! Very useful ☺️. Keep going

[valeriacalderon]

All I can say is thank you so much for this video, it's really helpful to watch this, it gives me more motivation to learn english :)