Spoken English exercises

After having found your motivation to learn English, you can start making a plan that should include a variety of spoken English exercises. It needs to be adjusted to your own personal needs, to the time you can devote, to the deadline you set yourself, etc. A plan does not need to resemble the lessons’ schedules we all remember from school; it will be rather a set of points that will lead you to achieve your goal. A part of your plan might be:

• enrolling on an English course - there are special classes devoted to conversations; take care to choose the ones that are taught by a native speaker, for you will get used to the native pronunciation and intonation;
• speaking English with your friends – it may be a great fun. You know these people, all of you will make some mistakes, so you will not be so stressed and will be able to learn to express yourself more easily. With time, you will lose this “barrier” that keeps you from using English. Plus, together with your friends, you can correct your mistakes. Do not be afraid of them, they are normal in the process of learning, so do not get deterred by them. After all, every human learns on his mistakes. You will make the same mistake twice, but from the third time you will use the correct from;
• speaking English to yourself – yes, it's one of the best and most recommendable free spoken English exercises and it does work!
  
• speaking English with your friends from other countries via Skype or other modern technological helps;
• watching English movies or TV series without over-voice or dubbing – even if you watch them with subtitles, it is better than watching movies with dubbing. For starters, you can hear the original voice, get used to the English way of speaking and even remember some new words. You also train your listening skills in the same time. However, it would be preferable if you would watch the movie without the subtitles. When we have subtitles, we tend to concentrate on them and not on the words spoken. We do not need to try to understand so hard what this or that person said, because we have a ready-made solution to read. But in the normal conversation with somebody on the street, there won’t be any subtitles to helps us. Therefore it is so important to train your listening skills and understanding of the spoken text. The best way to do it is just skip the subtitles while watching something in English. Sure, you will not understand every word, but you do not need to. You just need to understand the overall sense of the utterance from the context;
• listening to the English radio (via Internet) or to the songs, watch English TV channels or English news – the situation is similar to the previous one: you train your listening skills, comprehension skills and learn new vocabulary in the same time. You can even keep a notebook you will fill in with some interesting words you heard
  
• reading an article on the net, a magazine, a newspaper or a book – this way you build up your vocabulary and you see which words are used in everyday language and in what context. For it is important to not only learn the words, but also be able to use them in correct collocations.
• visiting an English-speaking forum – you will learn how the natives use their language and this, in turn, will result in you using the more natural English, used in everyday conversations. You can also meet people you can talk to in English via Skype (see one of the previous points).