Once you’ve learned the basics of English, it’s very important to keep practicing and looking for ways to improve your verbal skills. This includes your ability to comprehend verbal English – as well as speak it. Unfortunately, if you feel self-conscious, you’ll miss out on many opportunities to practice and gain the type of experience that will help you speak fluently. Aside from using a tape recorder, or conversing over a computer, there are several other ways that you can practice speaking and comprehending verbal English.
Improving verbal comprehension with music
No matter where you live – or what language you speak – there’s bound to be some type of music you enjoy. Search online to find English speaking singers in the genre you enjoy. Listening to music in English will give you a feel for the underlying rhythm of the language, as well as for the colloquial expressions used commonly in conversational English.
If you can’t understand the words in the song at first, you can look up the lyrics on the internet and read along as you listen to the song. As you become more comfortable with the speech patterns, try singing along with the recording. You may also want to look and see if there are any songs that you know in your language that are also recorded in English. Since you’ll already know the words to these songs, you’ll be better able to understand the translations to English.
Using karaoke to improve verbal expression
Karaoke is a fun, easy way to sing along to your favorite musical arrangements. Once you know the words to a song, you can sing them along with the music. This will help you to add some inflection to your speech patterns, as well as adjust the rate you normally speak at. Practicing karaoke songs will also give you a broad introduction to the type of music that is popular in English-speaking cultures.
While this may sound silly, children who are first learning English sing the alphabet for practice. Not only does this help them recognize letters later on, it’s also useful for associating sounds with those letters. Therefore, when you are trying to improve your verbal speech patterns, singing the English alphabet out loud can also be of help to you.
Write poetry and speak it out loud
Writing poetry is an excellent way to improve your written and verbal English language skills. When you speak your poems out loud, you’ll have the additional opportunity to try new sentence pacing, as well as hear the way different sounds fit together. In some cases, you may find that you enjoy writing in poetry enough to enter contests or create a special blog space for them.
Even though you may have many practical purposes for learning English, taking advantage of the fun parts of the language can help you develop your verbal conversation skills as well. For example, listening to English language music is a wonderful, fun way to learn new words and pick up on the creative ways that English words can be assembled. You can also use poetry and other types of rhyming methods in a similar way. The important thing is to verbally sound out the sentences, songs, and poems that you create to improve your proficiency at verbal English.