How Can I quickly learn to listen,
read, write, and speak English?
Quickly is a relative term and is dependent on several factors: Your prior exposure to English, the amount of time you’re prepared to devote to daily study, the Course being optimal for you, and especially the Program Design you register for. But, I will try to answer your questions honestly because you deserve that!
Lets go over the 4 main language learning skills you’ll need to develop if you really want to be fluent in English: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As in Spanish, all 4 skills are interactive and are used simultaneously during the course of a day. You don’t have just a listening day followed by just a speaking day! We at Maestro Ingles believe the 4 main language skills should be taught together with the following focus:
1. Listening
The very first thing you did when you were a kid to learn your native language was just listening to what everybody says! Likewise, as an adult, you have to practice, practice and practice to develop your listening skills. It is not enough to simply have an online lesson. You should also listen to our included sound files to practice hearing new words and phrases. Nowadays, technology offers various kinds of applications or web pages you can use. You can watch movies or YouTube videos, or listen to music in your free time. Listening is the basis for being able to speak correctly and that is why we include a listening component in almost every lesson.
- Speaking
The second step you did as a kid was to imitate the sounds you heard before. Just try to speak the words!. The key to making progress for speaking is to talk. Talk to other students and to native speakers to understand the cadence and rhythm of the language. We even provide Zoom sessions with Native Speakers to help with this process. You have to be confident in yourself and try to talk as much as you can. It doesn’t matter if you make mistakes because, when corrected. you can learn from them. We again include a speaking component in almost every lesson! You can even practice in front of the mirror at first or record yourself with the cellphone. Another Maestro Ingles utility is a TTS (text to speech utility) which allows you to take any word, phrase or paragraph and instantly hear it pronounced. in addition to the lessons, you should try to read out loud to practice pronunciation. Finally, it is very helpful to set up small goals every day such as learning a new expression, idiom or word. We will provide you with around 10 new words in every lesson. including the all-important cognates to speed up the process!
- Reading
As a child, the third thing you did at school after listening and speaking was learning to read. You repeated the vowels and letters continually to make sense of the words! As an adult, this process is rarely used because child-like repetition doesn’t work as well teaching adults. Rather, there expect more accelerated methods. As adults, we’ve learned to start reading from the title to know what the content is about. This is where our instant translator comes in handy. It both speeds up the process of knowing what the content is about and offers instant understanding of English words even if you’ve never seen or used the word before. In times past, at this point, you would take notes about the words you didn’t understand so you could look them up in the dictionary. In the modern tech era, most students don’t like to use the paper dictionary, especially when online dictionaries, browsers and our own lessons provide instant definitions phonetic symbols for pronunciation as well as knowing if the word is a verb, an adjective, a noun, or other part of speech.
- Writing
The fourth step in the process of learning a language is learning how to write in that language. This skill is in the 4th spot not because it is less important. On the contrary, it is a challenge to learn how to write correctly. Like speaking, writing is not just an isolated skill. It actually requires you to draw on other more basic skills, like the being able to write the Alphabet, have a basic Vocabulary, and understand Grammar (Sentence structure, Parts of speech, and Punctuation and capitalization). In a way, it is just combining everything you have learned into written form! However, before writing you’ll need to organize your ideas. You need to remember the 3 main parts of most texts: introduction, body and conclusion as well as reviewing punctuation which is going to help you with cohesion in your text. With the Maestro Ingles course, you will start with writing words, then basic sentences, then more complex sentences, then small paragraphs and full text.
ln conclusion, the learning process is different for all students. Yet we all learned Spanish more or less following the above paradigm. The main point here is that you don’t simply learn the 1st skill, then go on to learning the 2nd skill, to be followed by yet a 3rd skill and finally a 4th skill. You are exposed to the 4 skills simultaneously but you may not learn them at the same rate. In other words, one student may find the Grammar easier than Conversation, while another student may find building Vocabulary easier than Writing. But by including all four skills in each lesson, and checking comprehension or each of the four skills after each lesson, the Maestro Ingles program identifies any ‘lagging’ skills and continually encourages students to develop all 4 skills together.
This is not a Total Immersion Program where the student moves to an English-speaking country and is surrounded by language all day, everyday. They hear, see, talk and are talked to in English every day. The are ‘immersed’ in it.
Our program is similar but without the expense or inconvenience of moving to an English-speaking country. We call it Near Immersion because it seeks to immerse you 2-4 hours a day in the sounds, sights, reading, speaking, sign-reading, restaurant-ordering, shopping, and travel terminology you would likely be exposed to while visiting an English-speaking country.