Howdy there?

Today I had a chat with Tony, my colleague in ILM. It was a lovely conversation after a long time (almost after 6 months). We both exchanged many things that have changed in both of us. The conversation did touch our days as colleagues in our previous company.

Only that time, I remembered that I was a successful spoken English tutor in my previous career with ILM and its respective schools. I also recollected my days when I started blogging. I still remember now, my first blog was about spoken English created in blogger. I wrote nearly 10 posts before exporting that blog into wordpress. I moved to WP mainly for its simple yet attractive UI.

Now it’s time to digg that old life style again. I’m going to continue blogging in blogger with the same niche. Yes, it’s about genuine tips on improving spoken English. I’m not going to touch written English part. For one reason, I never touched that part during my entire career with ILM.

So, let’s move to that blog created in blogger. Here is the link…

http://spokenenglishtips.blogspot.com

Do visit this blogspot blog when you have time and enjoy reading my genuine tips on improving spoken English.

Hope I could meet you there. BFN.

BTW, my heartly thanks to Tony.

Hi there,

This is a forum targeted towards India. The forum admin has been doing a noble task by providing contracted work to unemployed people in India. He has his unique style of selecting people for his work. He needs to know what kind of computer, internet connection one has got before assigning work. He also needs to know how many hours a person can dedicate. And finally he expects a proper resume too.

He has a point here. Let me go through one by one.

• There are many people who don’t have a proper computer and/or reliable internet connection in India. There are people who still use P3 computers (with 128 MB memory and Windows 98) and expect to earn $10 an hour. And there are some people who have a BSNL connection and think it is a reliable connection. There is no doubt BSNL has done a great job by making internet avaiable to rural people with affordable rate. But the question is, “Is BSNL reliable?”. I bet it isn’t. You could refer http://broadbandforum.in/ to see others’ opinion on this issue.
• And the next point is availability. He’d like to know how many hours a person can dedicate. He doesn’t want anyone to quit his/her present job and take his assignments. However, he’d like to know if the applicant can stick to what he/she promises. For example, if an applicant assures to work for 4 hours a day, every employer in this earth expects the same from the applicant.
• Finally resume. There are brilliant people, who speak/write English naturally/fluently, out here in India. Well, in reality, how many of them are working as a freelancer (part-time or full-time)? It’s hardly countable. Many of those exceptional people join in companies where the starting package is more than what their parents earned in ten years. So it is natural to ask their resume before applying for a job.

A similar system was followed by www.luckweaver.com. Unfortunately, there were many people who started scamming. Hope it wouldn’t happen to http://wahm.in/forum

Fluentzy.com

The best place to improve your fluency. Of course, you must be ready to spend some money. It’s worth spending money there, instead of joining in a spoken English institute.

This website also offers the material in e-book format. This electronic edition would be very useful if you are prefer to take it along with you in your laptop wherever you go like me.

You could see the sample pages *here*. Overall there are more than 20 sample pages. To see them, check the column on the right hand side. It has got links to the remaining pages.

There are plenty of genuine tips available in this website in general about how to improve spoken English by self-study/self-practice.

From today, Fluentzy materials are going to cost more(close to 25% increase). Still at Rs.2.5K+, it is still(!) cheap considering what one could gain from Fluentzy books. So I still recommend it for everyone who would like to improve their spoken English to a greater extend.

Think about how much a spoken English institute charges for a complete course on spoken English.

Love to hear what you think about Fluentzy materials/books/e-books.

There are many good things we could say/write about reading books. For me, books play a considerable part of my life. Since childhood, I’ve been reading books/magazines/newspapers with great interest. For the last 10 years, I could even count the no of days gone without reading books.

Here are my favorite books that I go through on a regular basis.

1. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Steven Covey(and co-authors).
2. First Things First – Steven Covey.
3. Stomach (In Tamil) – Dr. Selvarajan.
4. All books from Art of Living foundation.
5. Enid Blyton’s books.

Hey, I forgot to tell you that you can improve your English if you read books of conversational type.

If you want to improve your ‘Spoken English’, your mind might have come across this question already.

Here is a tip…

The books based on the “Conversational” kind of content will suit best for you. Here too, if you are only a beginner don’t have the temptation to read all those fatty novels written by ‘foreign’ authors. Actually, if you start reading them, at one stage you might lose the enthusiasm to improve your Spoken English.

Start with books of less than 100 pages in length. If you could not find them, start reading children’s magazines. You could see plenty of “Conversation English” in them. If you are comfortable reading them after a month or so, then slowly change your reading habits by reading novels of decent length.

If you are really serious in improving your “Spoken English”, spend at least 2 hours for reading ‘Conversational English’. It doesn’t include ‘Newspaper Reading’.

Happy Reading …

Does newspaper reading improve your English?

Yes, to some extend depends on what you read.

But in general, newspaper consists of written English.

So, I consider it as a waste of time reading newspapers thinking that it will improve your Spoken part.

How do you rate your English?

Here is the tip…

If the other person (whom you are talking to) can understand what you say without any difficulty, then…

YES, your English is really GOOD.

If you want to get some work through Internet, you need two things

• Patience.
• Hard-work.

In fact both these things always go hand in hand.

So, if you don’t have any of these two, you will DEFINITELY get FRUSTRATION.

There are many good dictionaries available in the market. But I use the following two regularly.

• Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.
• Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English.

The good things about both these are that they both have got plenty of practical example sentences which we may need to look when we learn a new word.

The Other Dictionary which I would recommend is

Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.

Happy Word-Hunting…