You can learn English for many years, watch movies in the original language and memorize new phrases, but still not speak it fluently. It's all about bad habits that only slow down your progress. How to overcome them?
Passive language learning
You can learn new words, constantly solve tasks in a textbook and even read books in English, but your knowledge does not improve from this. It's all about passive language learning, and meanwhile, every knowledge you learn needs to be worked out. For example, you have learned the rules of the road, you know everything about the structure of the car, but at the same time you never get behind the wheel - it is difficult to work out your driving skills this way.
Therefore, it is important to practice your English! Read texts aloud, write essays, record your speech on a dictaphone, retell what you watched or read. It is better if you can practice English together with an interlocutor, but if you don't have one, you can study on your own.
Fear of speaking English
Those who learn English are often embarrassed to talk to interlocutors, they are afraid that they will make mistakes, and they will be laughed at for their accent. Because of this, instead of talking to native speakers or exchanging a couple of phrases with an interesting person, people are silent and only listen.
You need to overcome shyness and remove this barrier, and your English will only improve after that! The main thing in a conversation is that you are understood. All people make mistakes, even when speaking their native language, and an accent is not so scary: with practice, you can remove it.
If there are no native speakers in your environment, you can practice through the Slowly, Tandem apps, where people send voice messages to each other. When watching a video, movie, or TV show, repeat out loud the phrases that the characters said — this will improve your pronunciation.
Rare lessons
Many people learn English only when inspiration comes to them, and this can be once a month or six months. All the knowledge learned during this period soon evaporates, because there are no regular classes. In order to master a foreign language, discipline and consistency are important.
You don't have to spend several hours a day on lessons, half an hour of classes is enough, and on one day you can do listening, on another you can solve tests, and on the third you can read the text and translate it. After lessons, it is important to consolidate the material - you can do this, for example, with the help of spaced repetition: with the help of learned words or phrases in 10 minutes, then an hour, a day, a week.
If you lack the motivation to study on your own, you can contact a tutor who will definitely inspire you to study for your money.
Classes on multiple platforms
You wanted to learn English and, in a burst of inspiration, subscribed to many publics, resources and channels for learning the language. As a result, you are literally bombarded with a huge flow of information with different methods, which, of course, complicates your studies.
Choose one textbook or course to study: it should be convenient for you and meet your requirements. After that, make a schedule for yourself: Monday – listen to the lesson, Tuesday – learn 5 words, Wednesday – translate a page of text, etc.
To consolidate your knowledge, choose a few additional sources that will help you practice your language: for example, it can be a YouTube channel or an interesting book. By reading and listening to English speech, you can learn new words and understand the context in which they are used. It is better to understand and learn how to build sentences with a hundred words than to know three hundred, but at the same time not know how to apply them.
Don't work on weaknesses
For example, you still can't make out by ear what the interlocutor is talking about, or you can't build interrogative sentences. But you are too lazy to do this, because you realize that it will take a lot of time. Of course, this is a mistake! You need to fill in the gaps. Yes, it will take a couple of days or even months, but you will be able to move forward qualitatively.
If you know what difficulties you have in learning a language, try to minimize them. Don't understand English? Do listening. Is it difficult to form sentences? Write essays. If you can't figure out what you need to improve, you can take a test to identify "holes" in your knowledge and focus on the results.
