Yow Kia

I am not an English-educated person. You should know this if you have read the article “About Me”. To be a great speaker is my goal and I’m striving to achieve this goal. A speaker needs to speak. To speak, we need words to bring across what we intend to convey to audience. To make the audience understand what we want to say, we need to tune into the same channel as the audience. In other words, we need to speak in the language that can be easily understood by others.

To possess impeccable English Grammar, elegant Spoken English and masterly Listening Skill would definitely be great assets for me to achieve my dream to be a great speaker. As you can see from my articles, I still cannot write error-free English or if you happened to listen to MY VOICE, you would probably feel that some of my pronunciations are not clear. There are always rooms for improvement. I have to admit my weaknesses at the first place and think of ways to improve them.

Here, I would like to share with you the activities that I’ve taken recently to assist me to write and speak better English.

Activity #1: Learn English Grammar from Basic
Assuming that you just picked up English Language, how do you start? You have to start from the fundamental, don’t you? I’m glad that my friend – Adrian, who is an English Tuition Teacher, gave me an English Grammar Book. It is a grammar book for primary school level. I didn’t feel insulted as I truly understand that I need to start from basic to unlearn some of my grammar misconception. Guess what, as an English Teacher, Adrian still use this book as his reference.
=> Whatever you feel that you have gone wrong, always go back to the BASIC!

Activity #2: Improve my pronunciation through Online Dictionary
What do you do if you are not sure about the pronunciation of certain words? For me, I check through dictionary. There are a few online dictionaries that I use often
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
http://dict.cn/en/search/ (this dictionary comes with Chinese meaning)
These two dictionaries come with audio pronunciation.
=> If you are not sure of certain thing, go to check it out!

Activity #3: Improve my pronunciation through Tongue Twister
Sometimes, I feel that I know how to pronounce a certain word, but it’s difficult for me to say it out clearly. I have read an article saying that Tongue Twister is helpful in improving our pronunciation. So, I would give it a try.
Websites for Tongue Twisters:
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/download/audio/twist/twist.shtml
http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/en.htm
=> Try any method that you find that it’s useful for you to achieve your goals!

Activity #4: Widen my vocabulary through One-Day-One-New-Word activity
I used to be very ambitious. I wanted to learn 10 new words per day, but I could only sustain for not more than one week. Then, I tried to halve the number of new words. Still, I couldn’t persist… One reason was because, I needed to put in a lot of time to check the meaning of the words and try to memorize them within one day. Too much effort spent until the process was an atrocious process rather than an enjoyable one. Now, I only learn one new word per day, and I’m truly enjoying the process! Most of the time I could remember the word that I’ve learnt and I felt very satisfied!
=> If you feel that you can’t achieve a big goal or task, divide it into small little pieces and achieve it little by little!

Activity #5: Improve my listening skill through listening to native speakers
With the advent of internet, people around the world can get the latest information very promptly. I love internet a lot! It has made our life easier to access to any material if you know how to utilize the resource well. TED has made a very good contribution to the world for broadcasting the presentations by great people around the world online. I visit this website http://www.ted.com very often to listen to great speakers. The video presentations can be downloaded and I’m now building a “great speaker’s videos” BANK for myself.
=> Make good use of the rich resources from internet.

Activity #6: Blogging using English
I started this blog http://iamkia.com this year in May. I’m cultivating my passion in writing Good English. I have seen tremendous improvement through these months. If you don’t trust me, go ahead to view my articles in May and you could tell the difference easily. Yup, I’m improving…
=> Cultivating passion in the area that you intend to improve and you will see tremendous improvement.

Activity #7: Read Out LOUD method
Everyday, I will try to read out loud at least 5-8 pages of a book. The book that I’m reading out loud now is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. You may think that I need to spend longer time in completing this book. Yup, you are right! But, I can achieve two goals in reading out loud the book. One is to improve my pronunciation and another one is of course, to absorb the content of the book. If you are into reading books, choose one book for reading out loud, choose another one for normal reading.
=> Staying focus is important. But sometimes, we still can think of ways to kill two birds with one stone.

If you are serious in improving your English, I would suggest you to start your own daily activities. Share with us your activities and try to implement some of the activities mentioned above that suit you.