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• Hello everyone and welcome back to English With Lucy.

Today I am going to talk to you about the four things

that you need to study every single day if you want

to improve your english quickly, in a short period of time.

Now I have made quite a few videos about how you can

incorporate and integrate english into your daily life.

But this video is going to take it a step further.

Throughout this video, I’m going to answer loads of the most

popular questions that you put underneath all of my videos.

Questions like, how do I know which vocabulary

I should learn?

Or how can I know where to start with grammar?

What order do I go in?

There are so many YouTube videos out there,

but I don’t know which order to follow.

Or questions like, how often should I schedule

classes with teachers?

Or another really important question, what’s more important,

grammar or pronunciation?

Should I learn grammar first and then perfect

my pronunciation?

Or should I speak english with perfect pronunciation

and bad grammar?

Which should I do first?

I’m going to be discussing all of that with you today,

so let’s get started.

The first thing that you should study every single day

if you want to become fluent quickly, it’s pronunciation.

With pronunciation, practise makes perfect which is why

I’m asking you to do it every single day.

And my honest, professional opinion is that pronunciation

should be studied from the very, very beginning.

I’m not sure about your experience with english teachers.

Please comment down below if you’ve had a good

or a bad experience.

But I’ve seen many teachers put too little emphasis

on pronunciation and too much emphasis on grammar.

I taught in Spain and I saw students leave school with great

grammar, sometimes better than my own, but I couldn’t

understand what they were saying because their pronunciation

was so bad.

And by then, they had spent so long speaking with bad

pronunciation that it was really hard for them

to make a change.

So what I’m saying to you is don’t learn grammar first

and then introduce pronunciation at a later date,

start with pronunciation.

The best thing to do is just to study them both at the same

time, but really, really make an emphasis on pronunciation

because grammar is a strict set of rules,

but pronunciation is a lot harder, there’s an art to it.

Correct pronunciation helps with so much more

than just sounding like you know how to speak english.

Knowing correct pronunciation will transform

how you understand other people.

Once you know how a word is pronounced,

you will understand it when somebody says it to you.

Students always ask me why their listening skills

are so bad, and I tell them it’s probably

because your pronunciation skills are lacking.

You don’t know how to say the word, so how will you

understand when someone else says it to you?

So how can we improve our pronunciation?

Will obviously this lesson is far too short to teach you

absolutely everything, but I would say that the best place

to start is the IPA, the international phonetic alphabet.

Please let me know down below in the comments if you would

like me to do a series on the IPA because I have been

considering it for some time.

Now in complicated terms, the IPA is an alphabetic system

of phonetic notion based on the Latin language.

But in simple terms, it’s a tool that will help you

understand phonetic transcriptions.

Those little squiggly, weird words that I often put

in my pronunciation videos.

Once you understand how to read and comprehend

transcriptions, you’ll be able to understand any word

you read in a dictionary.

I have put a link in the description box to my absolute

favourite interactive IPA chart.

You click on each element and somebody says it for you.

It’s brilliant.

If you dedicate yourself to learning one phoneme

or one diphthong each day, within two months you will

know the whole thing.

So practise everyday.

Other ways that you can improve your pronunciation,

listen to how natives speak, that’s a given.

And also, do some research on the differences

between english accents.

For example, British english, RP receive pronunciation

and general American.

Once you understand the differences, you’ll be more in tune

to the general pronunciation of english.

Alright, point number two, lessons with teachers.

I wish you the absolute best of luck.

Point number three, grammar.

I receive so many questions about grammar, people seem to be

so confused about where to start.

People want me to number my videos and put them in order,

but I have to tell you, sometimes following a strict order

isn’t the best way to learn a language.

Now you know that my saying is don’t wait for someone

else to educate you, educate yourself.

Well, I’m goin to say the same thing again.

You need to test yourself.

You need to find out where you’re lacking in grammar skills

and then you need to fill in the blanks.

The order in which you need to study grammar will be very

different to the order in which your friend needs

to study grammar.

I’ve linked a really good website down below.

If I were you, I would go through every single english level

from A2 onwards, or maybe even A1.

And if you get a question wrong, or if you get multiple

questions wrong, you need to review that grammar topic.

If you don’t feel completely confident with the grammar,

you need to revise it.

You shouldn’t think ugh, well the present simple

was the first lesson we ever had when I was 10 years old,

so I don’t need to do that again, I need to learn

the conditionals and the subjunctive.

Like a house, you need to have strong foundations.

This is all about identifying your weak spots

and making them strong spots.

How can you study effectively if you don’t know

where you’re lacking?

It just doesn’t make sense, but it always surprises me

how few students take this approach to learning grammar.

So, you know what you need to do now.

Click on the link in the description box, test yourself at

every single level, and then write down all the topics

that you need to do.

And then study them in order of level and that is the order

in which you need to study grammar.

Simple.

Alright, on to the last topic,

and possibly the biggest topic.

It is vocabulary.

Lots of students ask me what vocabulary they should learn.

Well it all depends on what your goal is

with learning english.

If you’re learning english simply to pass an exam,

if that’s your priority, then your priority should be

learning the exam vocabulary.

Most exam boards will have a full list of all

of the vocabulary that you need to know

up to a certain level.

Make sure you have that list, cross out every single word

that you immediately recognise, and the condense the list

of unrecognised words, and study from that.

Now words that are not on your curriculum are likely

to pop up and appear in exams.

This is why you need to read around the subject.

Exams usually have set topics.

You might have to talk about holidays, you might have

to talk about weather, you might have to talk about business

growth, who knows?

Every single day you need to choose a topic and you need

to read an article around it.

That will really help you build

your topic specific vocabulary.

Now what if you were learning english because you want

to become fluent, not because you want to take an exam?

In that case, the most sensible option for you is to learn

vocabulary that you come across in your daily life.

Now I’ve spoken so many times about the word diary.

I’ll mention it quickly again now.

Always have a notepad or a phone list handy on you

every time you see something and you don’t know how to say

it english, note it down and the at then end of the day,

research what they are in English and have that list

to study from.

You should make a habit of contemplating the conversations

that you might have that you’re likely to have with

your peers, your colleagues, your friends, your family,

and consider the vocabulary that you might need to have

successful conversations in those situations.

At work, you might be talking about what’s for lunch,

you might be talking about time keeping, you might be

talking about meetings, you need to talk about what

you’re having for lunch, go on YouTube and search

for What I Eat In a Day videos.

That will be a pretty good way of taking

in some more vocabulary.

If you’ve got a friend that likes dog training

or something like that, watch some dog training videos

with subtitles and try and take in some more vocabulary.

You’ve got to be so proactive in the way that you approach

learning vocabulary because there is so much to learn.

Start with what you really need and what you think you’ll be

able to practise frequently, and then slowly expand

to things that you are less interested in

or less likely to use.

Aright, that is it for today’s lesson.

I hope you enjoyed it and I really hope

you learned something.