English is not my native language, which makes my challenge of improving it harder.
I wonder what strategies and lifehacks worked for you to make your speech more concise and eloquent?
yes, i know that it’s all about practice. But which specific ways and kinds of practicing are most effective ones is not clear to me.
If you're looking to improve your verbal fluency, I would absolutely recommend lots and lots of television. Find a show you love, watch it lots, and try to copy what the characters say -- in rhythm and intonation. Even better if you can find a show where there's a character you identify with, an actor who is similar to you in "type". Get closed-captioning transcripts of episodes and try to say each line before and then compare with how it's actually said. I would say this is absolutely #1.
I see other recommendations here for Toastmasters and for improv comedy. Toastmasters is specifically about public speaking -- if that's your goal then absolutely, but if you're looking to improve personal conversation I'm not sure it will help much. And while improv comedy is a blast (I've done lots myself), I don't think it's going to help much with linguistic fluency. There's a ton of focus on physicality and teamwork, but it will go much better if you're already very comfortable with your speaking.
All of the best students I ever had in English classes would basically watch the TV show "Friends" for like 2-3 hours a day, I'm not even joking. It's surprising how well the TV route works. And after that it's really about practice -- figure out whatever situations you can have a lot of conversation with native speakers in, if there's some kind of local club/activity you can join.
To be concise and eloquent is also the downstream effect of values that form a personality. It's not something you can affect by imitating, it is the effect of cummulative competence and practice over time. You need the intellectual confidence to ask questions and interrogate your surroundings with benevolent and sincere interest. That confidence comes from finding a kernel of moral clarity that enables you to relate to the world by assuming its approval, to be a protagonist in it, and not a guest or subject who must be meek or deferential to it. Value pith, grit, vision, and humility, but postpone being too humble until you are sure you are great.
"Brevity is the soul of wit," isn't just about humour, it's about intelligence. The essence of english comedy is our surprisingly many synonyms that have wry and ironic collisions in their meanings. Absorbing the comedy practices a sense of humor, which becomes a new sense for interpreting your surroundings. Teasing out the same sense of paradox using humour leads you to the crux of literally every topic. If you can find the joke, you have found the edges of truth and belief.
I used to worry I wasn't being concise until I saw other people try, so take heart.
- what you intend to say
- what you actually communicate
- what the other person takes away from what you said
If you say a factually true thing in a very insecure way for example, the other side might not be convinced. If you mean to say something, but always find yourself to lack the words to communicate what you wanna say, chances are that what you actually communicated was not the thing you intended. It can also be that everything you say is alright, but your articulation and levels are off (too silent, too loud, slow, fast, unclear etc).
As with any thing you want to get better in the first step is to figure out which thing specifically needs improvement. A good way to do this is to record yourself and listen to it.
1. Practice talking out loud, possibly in front of a mirror. Hear the sounds of the words as they leave your mouth. Speech is a function of motor processing that can be improved with practice like any other muscle memory.
2. There is a time aspect to speech, like music. Once speech has left your mouth in front of an audience you cannot take it back. It is spent, like time. Think about it like plumbing, like the words are sewage. Your mind runs about 2.5x faster than your mouth. Stay calm and be very deliberate with each of your words. If your mind runs out of control the words cannot escape fast enough and things get backed up. Keep a slow constant rhythm just to get your words out perfectly. Once you master confidence with your speech your faster mind allows you to think ahead to the next wonderful thoughts while your mouth is speaking.
3. Use your education to influence your spike vocabulary. This sounds obvious, but it isn’t. You must reinforce your spoken words with the strengths of your advanced writing skills to ensure your statements are clear, concise, and logically connected. This takes practice and it all comes down to confidence.
Similarly, you could probably enroll in a night-class for English at a local community college.
Look up videos of Obamas major speeches to see how he talks. Write down 5 topics/questions you'd often speak about, stand in front of a mirror, and give a timed 30 second mini-speech in your best Obama impression (no funny voices). If you can, record them and show them to a friend for critiques, so you can track your progess.
A couple reasons this works:
(1) He speaks slowly and deliberately, which is (a) very compelling, as it projects confidence and thoughtfulness, (b) accessible, especially if you need to think about what you're saying, and (c) it slows down the conversation, encouraging full thoughts from others, rather than rapid, back-and-forth exchange.
(2) Most people discount the value of presence (posture, eye contact, facial expression) in verbal communication. Obama does it all really well, and in a way that's pretty linearly-improvable (i.e., they're still helpful even if you're mediocre, and keep helping as you get better).
It's easier to cover-up your own lack of clear thinking, by using complex sentences and long words. You can easily deceive yourself. So I try to be concise, in the hope of clarifying my own thoughts. I suppose you can express your thoughts clearly and concisely in your own language, otherwise you wouldn't be asking; I just wanted to note that it's not necessarily a matter of foreign languages.
I don't know how old you are, nor what is your station in life, nor what kind of English you want to speak. Are you a techie? A writer? If you aren't hitched, get a native boyfriend/girlfriend that is interested in the field you want to be competent in. Everyone I know that is really fluent in {$FOREIGN} has, or had, a {$FOREIGN} partner.
Hell, just hire someone with the right competencies, to be your companion for a few months.
His secret? He watches a ton of Seinfeld, haha. I mean a ton. And I think what really happened is he formed a sort of identity with the show- part of him is truly “American” at this point.
As far as to the why/how I started dreaming in Spanish, I think it was how the camp was structured, the camp counselors from Spanish speaking countries made you speak Spanish if they caught you speaking English, which we did since everyone there was a native English speaker, but I just remember counselors rolling up and saying "En Español!" all the time if they caught you, so we'd have to speak it. If there was one strict rule of Spanish camp it was "En Español! No Ingles!" (paraphrasing here perhaps)
If you're not dreaming/thinking in English yet, I'd recommend trying to get there as a measuring stick because then you can literally improve in your sleep. It certainly used to be a commonplace occurrence when you were "immersed" in something, but a knee-jerk hypothesis might be that it is harder to be immersed in today's always-on + connected world. You can probably binge watch any TV show from your homeland, talk to anyone in your native tongue without insane long distance charges or waiting for the mail to be delivered, etc.; it would be understandable, but those things probably have a counter-effect to the goal I'm describing, and those things require some discipline, at least to teenagers at Spanish camp from my experience.
However it's possible to communicate effectively even with limited language skills as long as you do not see yourself as of lower status because of it. Most people who have trouble with communication have low self-esteem or a lack of social intelligence. But everything can be fixed. To start, maybe try with the following: https://thepowermoves.com/communication-styles/ or https://thepowermoves.com/socially-awkward/ Many useful informations on the site.
I ended enrolling in an intensive English course at an Oxford School from the city I was based, and later decided to enroll on a full-year course.
Today, I feel sharper and able to communicate my ideas more efficiently. I still make mistakes, but as far as communicating ideas goes, I am far better.
PS: This year, I am enrolling again just because I want to become ever sharper at communicating, and because it gives me an advantage even over fellow people with English as a first language.
That’s what has been worked for me.
If I could only give one piece of advice - slow down and enunciate. People can be very forgiving of poor verbal skills as long as they can understand the sounds coming out of your mouth. But many people who are not confident in their speaking end up mumbling or speaking too quickly - this ends up just sounding like static. It is easier to understand something said incorrectly but clearly than to try to make sense of jumbled sounds.
I haven't personally tried it, but it makes sense to me based on what I know about training for expertise: it simulates a wide variety of situations that you have to tackle from start to end, but with space to review your efforts in between.
I don't see why it would not work for non-native speakers as well. You just have to set the expectations lower and work your way up from the point you are.
Last year I worked on a project with a developer from Mexico. While his English was good enough, his communication abilities overall were above average. One of his key strengths was to ask for clarification if I said something he didn't understand. That helped both of us. It made me have more empathy in my comms, and it expanded his understanding. So I would suggest asking for clarification if you're not clear, before you reply. Yes, some people will be a*holes about it. But most will appreciate your humility and transparency.
Funny story. My Mexican colleague and I were having a conversation. I said "yada yada yada" from Sienfeld and he asked "what is this yada yada yada?" An enlightening moment for both of us. We still joke about it.
Find a native speaker you want to sound like and compare your recordings. Tv and radio clips work great. Then try to repeat the same lines of the native speaker in real-time.
Keep practicing until you sound like the native speaker.
You might sound cringe to yourself, and maybe cringe to people who already know you, but plow through.
Sounding like a native works wonders. I did this for several non-English languages and when I travel abroad, the locals treat me like I belonged there.
2. Very careful and mindful listening and observing. What do I mean? A large part of communication is non-verbal, and these are cultural and signal things that vocabulary doesn't. Also, tone. The rising and lowering of tone in a sentence changes quite a bit between languages, and is never properly taught IMO and unless you actively try to pay attention, almost no one realizes.
I took their course after reading about how the company's founders reached the Toastmasters world Championship finals in record time. The course was transformational — so much so that I joined their team!
Your ability to speak fluently your professional language should be your #1 priority. I'm not an English native myself so I went through this as well.
It is free and you can focus on specific things on each session. Plus you will meet people in the new country. Good luck!
Any other strategy to speaking great English will take you much longer. Immediate corrective feedback is the path of accelerated learning in anything.
The automatism of your natural language are always going to kick-in.
The best way is to speak slowly and to plan each word that you are going to say. For every speech, I give, I wrote it and works every word before hand.
Success
When I first came to UK as a tourist, I traveled quite a few European countries and was of high regard towards my English. Bummer: starting from Heathrow border control I could barely understand people and they had to make an effort to understand me. Same at the hotel.
So I got to the nearest local pub and was sitting there really having hard reflections on my language skill, when someone approached me and says something like "Hey, mate, why the long face?". I tried to communicate and to my surprise it was easier than before. In a couple hours and few pints I was supporting not just a small talk, but the full fledged political discussion about Putin killing Litvinenko.
I read later, that alcohol, to put it simple, breaks our internal barriers. In my case language trouble was caused by such barrier named "I must be good at things". So I was trying to build correct phrases, use articles, tenses and so on. After couple of beers I just throwed all these out of the window and was more interested in listening to my peers and getting my words to them.
The same is correct for the work: everyone knows than you are not a native speaker, and no one expects you to use Shakespeare's language. All you need is to get the information from and to your team, no matter accent and other things.
If someone will snob you with your language skills - let them be, they probably don't have any other reason to feel themselves superior to you.
Mimicking videos and speeches
Spending hours with native speakers ( customer service jobs )
Learn songs ( teaches pronunciation, intonation, prosody, enunciation)
Apps like ELSA
I'm an American who emigrated some years ago to Eastern Europe and work in IT with a lot of persons from Eastern Europe, and we do some trainings on working with clients (particularly Americans and UK folk) in IT settings.
All my colleagues are near native fluent in English but what they sometimes struggle with is figuring out the nuances of effective business and technical communication, or both at the same time. Putting aside how a lot of technology terms get absorbed into non-English languages, the main issue is that the speech and stylizing of ideas in their native languages don't translate well to English.
The good news is that even for native English speakers, effective speaking is typically at a fairly low level, and business and technical talk have similar things to practice.
1. Ensure you're on top of articles in English and when to use which one. Even native speakers confuse them for otherwise educated persons and for non-native speakers, it tends to be noticed a bit more. (My Russian speaking colleagues struggle with this sometimes as they don't have articles really)
2. Focus on clarity of thought instead of specific high-level words. I personally think that tests like the TOEFL set non-english speakers up for disappointment as a lot of the items they check on are not common terms in every day speech.
3. English is a bit more "fluffy" than other languages which can come off as direct to native English speakers, and to make it worse, many English classes teach overly formal English to compensate for this. Go to a bar or out to eat with native speakers with the understanding that you want to practice with them and just study how they say things. Keep in mind many native English speakers don't remember the proper terms for rules of English grammar, and you may know it even more than they do. Instead, focus on just mimicking their style and asking how phrases sound to their ear (do keep in mind that everyone has a style of speech, so try to get a few sources to practice with)
4. I actually would advise against watching TV/Movies to learn how to improve communication -- these are highly stylized conversations with a pacing that is only found in TV/movies, you really will find it difficult to convert it. Some podcasts/youtubes might be better, but focus on the more casual channels as popular ones have a specific style meant to be attention grabbing to viewers. An example of one I think isn't bad is LockPicking Lawyer; he speaks about fairly technical things and definitely has settled on a calm and cadenced style, but at the same time the word choice and way of presenting is fairly normal and well received. Find ones like that.
5. Effective business communication is usually about brevity and presenting a large volume of information in a simple and evocative way; that is, you can say something like "our current estimates for the project have exceeded the initial projections and we expect to have to adjust the desired deadline to a more achievable goal". Or you can just say "The current evidence suggests we will miss our initially projected deadline, so we will need to adjust it to a more realistic point." The difference is adding in a lot of excess terminology that really isn't used in every day speech; the concepts are taught in business classes to allow for a teaching framework, but just like latin phrases aren't typically used in US legal proceedings, no one communicating effectively actually uses such terms unironically.
6. Follow the idea of Richard Feynman and first ensure you understand the concept of what you want to discuss. Feynman famously tried to explain a complex subject to first years and gave up saying: "I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it." This isn't specific to English, it's just general communication skills, so make sure you know how to explain to yourself what you want to say, and then you can find the words to further simplify difficult concepts to others.
7. This one is more a personal thing for me, but I advise be the one to ask your speaking partners "am I saying this right?" I've had many colleagues and friends tell me "please just outright correct me when I make a mistake in English", but it's pretty difficult to do in a "right" way, and it's to easy to have a misunderstanding that results in hurt feelings. If you're not sure on a phrase or term, just ask about it and your partners will be much more open to explaining.
8. Since you asked about conciseness, take time to write out your thoughts on complex subjects. Don't edit at this stage, just write. Once you're done, go back over it and start to strike out every extra word and sentence that doesn't contribute to the total understanding of your thoughts. Practice this a bunch and then start recording yourself on new subjects. If you have an opportunity for public speaking with your work, do it. It's scary at first, but you'd be amazed how fast someone can fall in love with it; I'm 100% an introvert, but I've come to love doing presentations on technical topics and people seem to really enjoy them. Planned speaking is really good because you typically have a time limit, and you have to first write what you want to say, see how long it takes you in practice, then cut it down. It's a great exercise that helps you to understand what can and cannot be removed to keep effective communication while keeping brief. Even just for an internal video series or small presentation to friends, it's a great exercise.
Hope at least some of this sparks some inspiration.