Improve your English faster with these tips.

The main idea is to replace German with English to the fullest extent possible in your daily life. This is by far the fastest and most effective path to learning. Of course, this will not always  be easy. Remember: you cannot run a marathon without running through the pain. Or as they say in the gym: No pain, no gain 🙂

Speaking

1. Find a tandem partner. This is a native speaker of English who needs help learning German – the two of your practice and learn together. For example, first you speak in English for 30 minutes, then in your language. Or vice-versa. If you can’t find someone to meet face-to-face then use the Tandem app or similar and meet online.

2. Join an English language cafe and attend regularly. This is simply a group of people who meet up to socialize in English, usually in a pub or bar just like you would do with your friends. There will always be some native speakers – try and sit close to one of them! I think every major city in the world has at least one English language cafe these days. Just google ‘English language cafe NAME OF YOUR CITY’.

3. Socialize in English.  This is so incredibly easy these days. There are lots of native speakers and international folk in cities like Vienna who love to hang out and speak in English. The websites meetup.com and InterNations are the best for this. There is something for all tastes! After work drinks, dining, hiking, groups for mothers and kids, women’s groups, reading groups, cocktails, dancing, discussion groups etc etc.

4. When you go shopping in a big city like Vienna or go out for lunch or dinner or drinks most people who work in the shops, bars and restaurants speak English. Pretend you don’t speak German for the day and speak to all these people in English instead!

5. Does your girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, wife, husband, significant other, lover, child speak English? If so, why not try English Fridays? One day a week where you speak English all day and only English 🙂

Listening

1. These days everyone with a smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC can listen to radio from all over the world. Download an app called Tune In (or similar) and find radio stations from the UK and the USA.

2. From now on listen to music exclusively in English (at least until you have passed the exam). You can stay with the genre or genres you like, but now in English. The easier it is to hear the lyrics well, the better. Here are a few good options: Adele, Amy Winehouse, Sting, U2, Coldplay. Songs from Disney films like Frozen and Vaiana (Moana) are also great. Maybe you could even learn a song or two? Especially if you play guitar or piano. Oh and here’s a great song from the 80s to help motivate you to keep going even when it gets hard: “When the Going Gets Tough The Tough Get Going” by Billy Ocean.

3. Listen to podcasts.

Watching

1. You MUST watch the news. Yes, I know it’s often depressing and/or boring but it’s essential to help improve your understanding and to help learn vocabulary. Here in Austria everyone has access to BBC World and CNN. If you don’t have a TV, no problem, you can download the Joyn app and stream those channels there. Watch BBC World at either 6pm, 9pm or 10pm to make sure the news presenters will be British native speakers. They usually have one or two American guests as well.

Watching the news for just 15 minutes a day will make a huge difference to your listening skills. The news is an excellent resource because

a) the visuals will help you understand

b) keywords, especially country names e.g. Ukraine, Gaza, Trump will tell you immediately what the story is. When you already know the background, it’s easier to understand the latest news on the same topic.

c) news presenters are professionals who speak standard English and look directly at the camera when speaking.

(You may not know this but all humans automatically read lips when listening to someone they can see. That’s why speaking to someone in person is easier than speaking to someone on the phone).

d) if you have already seen same news stories in German before you watch in English, then you will find it easier to understand the English.

2. Watching TV

When I say TV I’m including all the streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, YouTube etc. Basically anything you can watch on a screen.

TV series are great for language learning – much better than films in fact! But you could also watch documentaries, films, cookery shows, anything really but just in English!

With a series you should pick one you like from a genre that you normally happily watch in your own language but now watch it in English. (Or you might prefer to rewatch something you have already seen in your own language). Personally though I would recommend choosing a series with lots of action as they are usually easier to understand and you can still enjoy them even if you don’t understand all the dialogue.

Depending on your level you might need to have the subtitles on in German for a number of episodes but at some point you will need to switch to subtitles in English. That may mean you miss a lot for a while – no pain,  no gain, remember? Keep going, I promise you this will get better. Remember you can also use the pause button and look something up in the dictionary on your phone or rewind and play the scene again, maybe even more than once.

For the first few episodes you’ll probably find this very challenging, possibly frustrating, maybe boring but over time it’ll get easier because you’ll get used to how the individual characters speak and the typical words and phrases that they repeatedly use. You have probably never noticed this but characters in TV series tend to frequently use the same words and phrases throughout the show. Which is good, because repetition is the key to learning. And of course, a TV series lasts a LOT longer than a film, so you have much more time to get used to the characters and how they speak 🙂

Films are great as well of course but again choose films that are easier – action films for example. James Bond films are great, every James Bond film is basically the same! It’s a formula, and one you probably already know. And they are fun even if you don’t understand all the dialogue. The Harry Potter films are the same, also Lord of the Rings, Marvel films. Who cares if you miss something? It’s all just silly nonsense anyway! 🙂

Reading

1. Change the language on your smartphone, on your tablet, PC, laptop, Playstation, Facebook, Google, etc. etc. Yes, this will drive you absolutely bat shit crazy at times but I promise you if you stick with it, you will learn fast!

2.Read the news. If you watch the news and read the news, it will make it much easier to understand both the listening and the reading. You will have double input. Remember: repetition is the key to learning.

Pick a story and follow it. Some news stories are over and done in a day, but most last several days, often weeks, and some last months and months or even years and years (think Ukraine or Israel-Palestine). This means that there is some new item of news about the story in the newspapers (and on TV) every day for days or weeks or months or years at a time. So pick one of these stories and follow it every day. Every day there will be a summary of the story so far. On the first day you will have to look up many new words but as the story runs and runs and these words are constantly repeated as they summarize again and again you will naturally remember the new vocabulary. Ta da! Easy learning!

3. If you do have a little money to spend, and if you prefer having a hard copy (printed on paper) maybe try Spotlight. There’s a Business English version as well. When I first started learning German I signed up for a one-year subscription to the German version and read every issue cover to cover and found it a big help. Total cost? Only 60EUR.

4. Books, novels, short stories, comic books, graphic novels. Keep it simple, read short stories or slim novels to start with. Read something very formulaic. Crime Fiction is a great example. Ghost stories are another example. The Fantasy genre is another example with many repetitive tropes that appear in book after book and story after story (wizards, castles, dwarves, magic, swords, rings, dragons, unicorns, giants, goblins, elves etc. etc.).

5. Use a dictionary. You don’t need to buy one, use The Free Dictionary app on your phone and read the explanations in English. Or use the translator app of your choice if you still can’t understand and need to translate. You must look words up, but don’t look up everything. At the beginning, focus on nouns and verbs. These are the most important words for understanding overall meaning.

Writing

Writing skills will be more or less important depending on which exam you are doing and what you think you will do with the language in the future. So think about your needs and focus on those.

1. Add English to the keyboard on your smartphone, tablet, laptop and PC so that you can easily toggle between languages. (You can also add the dictation function so that you can speak and your phone etc. writes). Now you can write texts, messages and emails to your friends and colleagues in English and the spell checker will help you! Be sure to use correct spelling, correct grammar and correct punctuation even in messages – don’t be lazy!

2. If, like me, you use a to-do list, write it in English. Same for your shopping list.

3. Keep a list of handy phrases that you know you will use over and over again to hand. Then you can just do copy-paste when you need them. Of course you should try and memorize them as well!

4. Your writing skills will improve the more you READ!! Your brain has a natural internal human photocopier function that works in the background without you even being aware of it. So read, read and read!

Additional Tips

1. Do you use Dropbox or similar? If, like me, you have lots of folders with lots of documents then rename all the folders in English. Maybe the documents also where possible. This might drive you a bit crazy at times when you forget what is what but you will learn eventually.

2. From now on when you need to count, count in English. Maybe, like me, you also do your home accounting using Excel sheets. So now change everything in your Excel sheets into English. All mine are in Turkish these days.

3. Do you know the top 100 verbs in English? By top 100 I mean the 100 most common verbs. You can look find them here on my blog or on Google. You should learn them with the V1/V2/V3 format that you know from learning the irregular verbs, e.g. break/broke/broken and with an example sentence for each. Make your own flashcards with the verb and V1/V2/V3 on one side and an example sentence on the other. No German. (Making the flash cards yourself will help you learn them). Oh and for the regular verbs make sure you learn the correct pronunciations of the -ed endings. Search ‘-ed endings’ here on my blog if you don’t know what I mean. Now try and memorise all 100 including the sentences.

4. Choose 100 simple objects that we all have at home, at work, at school, at college, at university, in the car. Can you say where they are and what they are for?

For example:

“It’s a stapler, it’s on the bottom shelf in my bedroom next to my desk and it’s for stapling pieces of paper together.“

5. Can you describe your daily routine in detail in English from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep at the end of the day? As you move through your day, can you name everything that you see and interact with in English? Everything in your bedroom, everything in your bathroom, everything in the kitchen, everything in your car, on the street, on the metro, train, bus, tram, everything at work, at school, in the restaurant, the bar, the pub, the shop etc.? Can you also describe all the things that you can do in all of those places?

6. Can you describe how to get from your home to your place of work or your place of study in English? Can you describe how to get from Vienna to Salzburg? From Vienna to Paris?

7. Can you describe processes? For example, how to make a cup of coffee. How to make your bed. How to take your bicycle out from wherever you keep it. How to get your car out of the garage and onto the road. How to take your child to kindergarten or school.

8. One final but very important tip: learn how to memorise and use your dead time.

Dead time is all those moments you have during the day when you are not actively engaged in something that requires your attention. For example: on the toilet, in the shower, walking anywhere, waiting anywhere for anything, using public transport, driving. Many people say they don’t have time to study. But that’s because those people think studying means sitting at a desk with a book. But you can study all day long just in your head (although it works better when you say things out loud). And in fact, that’s what super high achievers do and that’s one thing that marks the difference between people who succeed academically and people who don’t. Try some of the techniques you can find with this simple google search: how to memorise and/or become a master of memory by learning the techniques you can find here: master of memory especially the peg system and the Dominic System, both of which I use all the time, every day. And yes, EVERYONE can get better at memorising, even you!