What do you think are the best tips for helping you to learn English? Here – in no particular order – are a few of my suggestions:

• Work with a partner

When you’re learning a language, it can be very helpful to have a partner you can work with. You may know things that your friend doesn’t know, and they will know things that you’re unsure of. Don’t think of it as a competition to see who is best, but rather a way to help and support each other. You can help each other with homework, read English texts together and discuss challenging grammar points. So find a language partner, grab a drink and pull up a chair. If you work with your partner every day, you will be surprised to discover how quickly your English improves, and you’ll have fun while it’s happening!

• Learn idioms

Idioms are very commonly used by native English speakers but they can be very hard for language learners to understand. This is because idioms are phrases or expressions that have a figurative or non-literal meaning (the meaning is different from the meaning of the individual words in the phrase.) If you hear someone say that it’s “raining cats and dogs”, please don’t panic, no animals are falling out of the sky – it just means that it’s raining very heavily. Also, please remember that there is no need to “cry over spilt milk” if you make some mistakes in your homework: it isn’t worth getting upset over little things that can be easily remedied. You might think that “pigs might fly” before you can become fluent in English but if you try to learn some idioms, and how to use them accurately, your friends will think that you’re the bee’s knees! (That means they will think you’re great!)

• Practise Conversation

Many language learners find conversation a real challenge, so it’s very important to try and practise this as often as possible. You might be great at understanding an English passage when you read it, you might be good at writing, maybe you even find it easy to listen to and understand spoken English, but until you can have a natural conversation, you will not achieve fluency. There are many ways that you can practise – if anyone in your family speaks English, chat to them every day (maybe while you’re having dinner). You could speak to a friend over a coffee, join an English-speaking club or society, or work on your skills with a one-to-one teacher.

If you are working with a fellow language learner, you will be helping each other, if you’re working with a teacher, they will correct the mistakes that you make. Either way, the more you work on speaking naturally, the better you will become.

Even lower-level learners can benefit from conversation practise – work at your own pace, at your own level, and gradually build up the skills that you need. Give it a try, conversation is never a waste of time!

• Record yourself speaking

Let’s continue with the theme of speaking English. Many people forget the rules of English grammar when they are speaking (native speakers do this too, sometimes!) This is because when we are speaking, we have to think very quickly, so we focus on the content more than on the accuracy of what we are saying. Perhaps you use the wrong verb tense, or omit the “s” on plural nouns, or third person singular present tense verbs, or maybe you get the word order wrong. Whatever your common errors are, one way to help yourself is by recording yourself speaking.

Shut yourself in your room, and record yourself talking about your day, or your plans for the weekend – but do not write out what you want to say first, the idea is for you to sound natural, NOT to be reading from a script! Try to speak for 3 – 5 minutes. When you have finished, listen carefully to the recording and try to notice where you have made mistakes. Make a note of how many mistakes there are, then record yourself again, and see whether you do any better. This is not something that will improve your English overnight, but if you practise on a regular basis, you will gradually notice that you make fewer mistakes and this will, of course, mean that when you are speaking to someone else in English, you make fewer mistakes too. Give it a try – nobody is going to laugh at your recordings (except you!)

So, what do you think? Will you try some of these ideas yourself? Let me know in the comments below, and come back soon for some more of my favourite tips!