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It's awesome, you can practise this at home.

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If you're reading this, I imagine you want to speak better English and communicate in a more confident and competent way.

When we communicate effectively we are able to express our ideas and opinions, share experiences, and build relationships with others. When we struggle to express ourselves, we feel unvalued and insecure. As human beings, we want to participate in group discussions and have an impact on the society around us.

In the modern world, we communicate across borders. English is the closest thing we have to an international language.
By speaking better English, people all over the world can hear our voice. But, to speak better English, you need a teacher, don't you? You need to take English classes, right?
Well, English teachers and English classes definitely help. But, studying English for a few hours a week may not improve your spoken English very much.
What you need is to become a self-directed learner, somebody who takes responsibility for their own learning and creates their own learning programme to develop their English.
Now, it's certainly true that speaking is a social activity and is best done with other people. However, you could say the same about many activities. Leo Messi became a wonderful football player because he spent hours every day for many years practising by himself.
You can do the same with your English. Here are 33 ways to speak better English, without going to classes.
4. Watch short video clips and pause and repeat what you hear. YouTube is an amazing resource for language learners and you probably already have your favourite clips. My advice is to watch short clips and really study them. With longer videos, you may find your attention wanders. The key to improving by watching videos is to really listen carefully and use the pause button to focus on sounds and words. Many YouTube videos now have captions.

7. Learn about weak and strong forms of common words. When you know about the 'schwa' sound, you will listen to native speakers in a different way. English is a stress-timed language which means that we use a combination of strong and weak forms of some words. For example, which words do we stress in the following sentence?
I want to go for a drink tonight.
How do native speakers pronounce to / for / a in the sentence? We use the schwa sound so it sounds like:
I wanna go ferra drink tenigh.
Learn how and when to use weak form s and your speaking will improve overnight. You will also learn to focus on stressed words when listening to fast, native-speaker English and you will finally be able to understand us!

8. Learn about word stress. When words have more than one syllable, we stress one or more of them. For example, the word intelligent has four syllables but which syllable do we stress? Click here to find out. Remember that the small vertical mark above the word identifies the stressed syllable: /ɪnˈtel.ɪ.dʒənt/

9. Learn about sentence stress. Sentence stress refers to the word or words we stress in a phrase of a sentence. When we stress a word, we help the listener understand what is important. If we stress the wrong word or don't stress the key word, the listener may get confused or not realise what is important in the sentence. A few years ago, I enrolled in a gym. I was asked to attend an introductory class at ' five to six'. The Hungarian receptionist stressed the word ' six' so I arrived at 5.55. She looked at me and told me that I was late and the class had nearly finished. She should have stressed ' five' and ' six' so would have understood that the class lasted for one hour and began at 5pm! For more on sentence stress, read here .

10. Identify fixed and semi-fixed phrases and practise them. Fixed phrases usually contain between 3 and 7 words and include items like:
to be honest on the other hand
A conversation is made of grammatical structures, vocabulary and fixed or semi-fixed phrases. In fact, t o tell the truth , on the whole, most of the time, my friends and I , communicate with each other in a series of fixed and semi-fixed expressions.

Learn the communicative function of these phrases and practise how to pronounce them (remember weak forms, which words are stressed) and use them in your everyday conversation. Click here for a list of 1000 common phrases .
Yellow doesn't get on well with hair. Maybe yellow is jealous of blond because blond and hair are frequently seen out together having a great time. Yellow doesn't understand why hair prefers blond because yellow and blond are so similar.
Listen carefully for common combinations of words. Short and small have similar meanings but people have short hair not small hair. High and tall are often not so different but people have high hopes but not tall hopes. Foxes are sly not devious. Hours can be happy but are never cheerful. Idiots are stupid but rarely silly.

13. Learn short automatic responses. Many of our responses are automatic (Right, OK, no problem, alright, fine thanks, just a minute, you're welcome, fine by me, let's do it!, yup, no way! you're joking, right?, Do I have to? etc.) Collect these short automatic responses and start using them.

14. Practise telling stories and using narrative tenses. Humans are designed to tell stories. We use the past simple, past continuous and past perfect for telling stories but when the listener is hooked (very interested), they feel like they are actually experiencing the story right now. So, we often use present tenses to make our stories more dramatic!

16. Learn about chunking. Chunking means joining words together to make meaningful units. You don't need to analyse every word to use a phrase. Look at the phrase: Nice to meet you. It's a short phrase (4 words) which can be remembered as a single item. It is also an example of ellipsis (leaving words out) because the words 'It' and 'is' are missing at the beginning of the phrase. However, we don't need to include them. Learn more here.

17. Learn about typical pronunciation problems in your first language. Japanese learners find it difficult to identify and produce ' r' and ' l' sounds; Spanish don't distinguish between ' b' and ' v'; Germans often use a ' v' sound when they should use a ' w '. Find out about the problems people who speak your first language have when speaking English and you will know what you need to focus on.

20. Use a mirror and / or a sheet of paper for identifying aspirated and non-aspirated sounds. Aspirated sounds are those with a short burst of here, such as ' p' in ' pen, and unaspirated sounds have no or little air, such as the ' b' in ' Ben'. Watch this video to learn more.
What a terrible tongue twister. What a terrible tongue twister. What a terrible tongue twister.
22. Practise spelling names, numbers and dates aloud. This may seem very basic to some of you but if you don't practise, you forget how to say them.Have a and at place names here.

23. Learn about common intonation patterns. Intonation (when the pitch of the voice goes up and down) is complex in English but it is very important as it expresses the feeling or emotion of the speaker. Here is an amusing introduction to intonation.

26. Learn why English is a stress-timed language. The rhythm of the language is based on stressed syllables so we shorten the unstressed syllables to fit the rhythm. Syllable-timed languages (such as Spanish) take the same time to pronounce each syllable. Here's an which might explain why you speak English like a robot or watch this funny clip here.

31. Learn exclamation words and fillers. Watch or study this list of 100 common exclamations here.
Now, here's your CALL TO ACTION. In the next 33 days, spend 15 minutes every day on one of the tips. I'm sure you'll notice a huge improvement.
And maybe one day you'll speak English like Messi plays football!
Thanks for reading the post.
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33 ways to speak better English without taking classes

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If you're reading this, I imagine you want to speak better English and communicate in a more confident and competent way. When we communicate effectively we are able to express our ideas and opinions, share experiences, and build relationships with others. When we struggle to express ourselves, we feel unvalued and insecure.

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How do you feel after watching this video?
Feel free to express your feelings here.
Enjoy the video ♥♥♥

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A wide variety of activities to be chosen!

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A wide variety of activities to be chosen!

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Vote for the best activity to be carried out in the next class

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Liven up your speaking and listening activities with a great range of ideas, resources and display materials.