HACKER Q&A
📣 Gooblebrai

How do you keep improving you English skills after a long time?


I'm afraid the title didn't let me to write the full question as it was too long:

Non-native speakers living in English-speaking countries, how do you keep improving you listening/speaking skills?

I have been living for 8 years in an English-speaking country, I work and live fully in English but it feels like my speaking/listening skills have stagnated and I'm not improving anymore. Even if I get 98% of a conversation, sometimes that 2% contain important details that I miss and it's quite annoying.

So, how did you keep improving?


  👤 logicalmonster Accepted Answer ✓
Just thinking a little out of the box here, but might going to loud venues work to exercise your weakness best? The hardest place for native speakers to communicate is in a loud bar/club where you really have to actively listen and can barely hear the other person's words even when you're close up. Going to loud bars and clubs might be an interesting way to try and learn to understand the other person even when it's very hard to hear what they say. If you can master that, you can communicate anywhere.

As a potential alternative, maybe try picking up some kind of ham radio communicating as a hobby and work through trying to communicate with garbled long-range voices that are hard to easily understand.


👤 sinuhe69
I wonder if it’s because of the auditory part or of the social and meaning part. If it’s the auditory part, you can practice listen to harder sources and in more difficult environments as other suggested. You can also speed up audio sources to practice listening on them.

If it’s the meaning part, then you can only improve with more social interactions as that’s the only place where people really talk :)


👤 ezedv
One effective way to improve your English is through consistent reading and vocabulary building. Personally, I find reading a blog about Blockchain (https://www.ratherlabs.com/blog) to be both informative and enjoyable. Whenever I come across a word that I don't understand, I make a point to look it up in the dictionary, which not only helps me to better understand the blog post but also expands my vocabulary. By regularly engaging with written material and challenging myself to learn new words, I'm able to improve my comprehension and fluency in English over time.

👤 dyingkneepad
Read fiction books. I actually read comic books, and there's at least 1 new word (mostly adjectives!) every single issue I read. The nice thing about comic books is that it allows you to constantly change authors, and new authors often introduce new words. I basically learn 0 new words per day at work and doing normal "life" stuff such as reading news, but for some reason fiction literature is always teaching me new words. I also read for my kids and often have to lookup words from their books in the dictionary.

I watch "Rachel's English" on youtube and was able to learn a ton of stuff that was never taught me anywhere else. There's a ton of stuff that I thought I knew until I found her videos.


👤 skydhash
I'm not in an English-speaking country, but I work with an American company. What I do that improves my listening is consuming my media in English. I watched movies, videos, and pretty much everything in English. I also listen to audiobooks. But the biggest improvement is done by reading books. I read a ton of fictions, mostly fantasy and science fiction. These tend to have a wider range of vocabulary than even non-fiction.

👤 WheelsAtLarge
-Read books on subjects you enjoy. It's very important that you look-up and understand everything you read.

- Conversations are the best way to improve your english level. They force your brain to look up information and add new information. Also, you are forced to use what you know. There are a lot of english learners that can pass top level exams but they can't speak the language. It's very important that you speak it to improve your level.


👤 nicbou
I found that Gmail's autocorrect fixes a lot of small grammar mistakes. I wish I had something like that in more contexts.