I'm a native Chinese speaker who has been in the US for 6 years, and currently learning German and Japanese. In my humble opinion, the most important practice is to put yourself into an immersive environment. Do as many things as you can in the language you are learning: be it reading news, watching RU-vid, or playing games. Surely, it's the easiest for English learners with the sheer amount of resource on the Internet, but the same applies to most other languages as well. (Unless you're learning some Oceanic islander's language...) When you are advanced enough to an extent that you can express abstract thoughts, start to think in the language you're learning as much as you can. Essentially start talking to yourself in that language all the time. It's the best way to practice your expressive skills, because you don't even need a partner, and you can do it anywhere at any time. Be aware that this does not necessarily improve your oral skills, as you need to speak aloud in order to acclimate your mouth to speaking a foreign language. I consider myself not too bad at speaking with a natural accent in all languages that I've learned, but I do find a lot of people having trouble with their accents. In fact, it seems to me that many language learners are almost ignoring pronunciations. A key point is to understand how native speakers shape their mouth and tongue to make a specific sound you're having trouble with. Accent, tone and articulation come next. These help with the flow of your speech and makes you sound more natural. One fun fact about myself: I actually speak English with a mixture of Californian and British accent, because I live in California, but I watch tons of motorsport related videos where the commentators and journalists are pretty much all British. Hope these help :)
@@pbice Well I'm not in Japan, but I can keep myself watching Japanese TV shows, anime, vloggers and youtubers. I read books in Japanese, and even online articles including wikipedia entries in Japanese. It's a matter of will.
大家好！我是越南人。我正在学习汉语。I really love Chinese and choose it as the third language to learn. However, I meet some difficulties during learning this language and really hope that some Chinese people can help me with correcting my Chinese writing. Really hope some Chinese will notice my comment. 谢谢你！
My first language is Tibetan, English as second language, I learnt chinese as my third language by watching hundreds of chinese tv serial. One funny thing happened. Once I talked with a Taiwanese tourist he said I was talking like a ancient people "古代话" :-) Now I know why this is. Right now I am in India and can catch up with India Language. Due to Korean Entertainment influence in our society I am also started to learn Korean too... I fountd Korean alphabet is very much similar (90%) with Tibetan and pronunciation very very easy.
I like the way you share your experience and they are useful tips. For me, I learn it through communicate with my friends who speak fluent english if i want to talk well. Vocabulary wise, no choice , i learn through reading newspaper everyday. It is hard to start because i cant understand all the meanings of words. Youre right. I go through the whole paper and the i have a smart guess of the word's meaning. Then i will find and copy all the words that i cant understand and translate them to mother thumb language. Writing wise, i learn through by getting right the grammar and use simple sentences.
I can only partially agree with your advice on how to improve the Listening in that: watching English drama can be extremely beneficial in terms of allowing you to get to know their language usage, their culture, and their way of thinking,etc. The precondition is that you choose the right one to listen to, one covers a wide range of normal scenes of life, e.g. "Friends".
也许可以变通一下，看新闻发评论应该可以代替看书和写博客。唯一的就是口语怎么办？ maybe we can do a little changes, view some news and make comments instead of reading book and release logs. but how can we practice verbal english, it's hard to find a good person to work together.
