Best practices for learning English are not always easy to find, so here’s an excerpt of my ebook 21 Ways to Jumpstart Your English Skills to help you as you learn.

Don’t think. Just talk.

Think:

One of the reasons we learn language so quickly as children is that we don’t self-monitor when we are young. We’re not as self-conscious at age three as we are at age twenty-three.

Have you ever listened to a pre-school aged child talk? They have a lot to say! They have very little self-awareness when it comes to grammar or pronunciation. They just do their best to fully describe whatever they’re thinking.

My four-year-old niece Ayla is one of the most verbal people I know. She can tell you stories about bunnies and dragons and princesses in castles until you’re both exhausted. She lets her imagination lead her – not her vocabulary. If she ever hits a dead-end in conversation, she’ll plow right on through with words that she makes up herself. Her goal is communication. Not perfection.

What can we learn from Ayla? A lot. Give yourself permission to let language fly out of your mouth without slowing it down. Take down your filter and see what comes out.

Give yourself permission at times to let language fly out of your mouth without slowing it down by filtering everything you say.

Who cares if you make mistakes?

The important thing is to get your brain used to taking risks with language, and learning from your mistakes.

Act:

Set a timer for 30 seconds.

Have a friend choose a random topic for you to speak about.

Then start the timer and start talking!

Force yourself to continue talking for the entire 30 seconds, even if you feel like you might be running out of things to say. Just talk. Don’t think. When you’re finished, have your friend do the same exercise.

Then in the next round, you can increase your time to 60 seconds.

Keep increasing the time each round. After a while, you will find that you might be more comfortable letting language flow from your mouth.

Get the rest of the book:

To continue to learning some of the best practices for learning English, get my ebook to “jumpstart” your English skills.