Hey guys,
I need your sincere opinion :)
i want travel for study english. in your opinion is possible to be fluent in 6 months, if the person be very dedicate and study in a good school???.
What is the secret for learn and understand english very easy and very quickly?
Is possible to be fluent in 6 months? and how to be fluent?
Thanks for your attention and your help
There are no secrets. Just like learning any skill in life (a sport, a dance, a musical instrument, etc), it takes hard work and lots of practice. But there are some ways to make your practice more productive -
1) Find a reason to motivate yourself to learn that language. Even if you put in the hours, if your heart is not dedicated towards that language, you will not be able to absorb it. So you need to find a reason. That reason could be - you want to learn to understand the lyrics of your favorite American artist, you want to travel to Australia, you love the culture of the UK, etc. Find your reason to get really obsessed with English, so that you will think about English all the time.
2) Practice all 4 skills - reading, writing, listening, and most importantly, speaking. Use a combination of resources - videos, news, music, talk to native speakers about a variety of topics (food, travel, technology, fashion, etc)
3) Be consistent. Spend 1-2 hours every single day working on English. 1-2 hours every day for 1 week is much better than 10 hours in a single day.
4) Make mistakes. Make lots of mistakes. Conjugate verbs wrong. Look stupid. Freeze during the middle of a conversation. You have to just keep failing over and over again. To speak a language fluently, you need to first speak it poorly. Speak it poorly, speak it less poorly, speak it better, and finally, you will speak it fluently
"Fluent" is a really bad way to describe someone's level in a language. What does fluent really mean? Does it mean that you can order food at a restaurant, ask for directions on the street, or book a hotel for the night? Or does it mean that you can talk about the pros / cons of controversial political and social topics, and maybe you can write news articles in English as a journalist?
I cannot really answer your question, unless you tell me what you want to do with English. Requiring English for a job is quite different from requiring English for holding a conversation with a British boyfriend.
Also, as the others have mentioned, there are no “secrets” — just scores of techniques that you can use to improve your learning at different points along your journey. If I had to choose one, I’d say that what goes on inside your mind is more important than the activities that you engage in as you study. Maintain a positive attitude, choose the right course for you (not for somebody else), and enjoy the ride!
First of all, you seem to know a lot of English already, so it’s not at all clear what you mean by “fluent”. Judging by your writing, I imagine you can already have decent conversations — unless you’ve neglected speaking. If that’s the case, you’ll simply need to work on speaking — no big deal. Besides that, Portuguese and English are reasonably close — it’s not like your native language is Japanese or Arabic. I once had a Brazilian student who went from absolutely zero (seriously) to a intermediate with strong speaking skills (of course, no super-advanced vocabulary or specialized grammar) in two months. He’s not a language genius, it’s just that he had time and was willing to invest it in learning English. Actually, he is an unusually focused individual — most people wouldn’t spend as much time studying as he did, however. (I see from the comment before mine that Cleverton is another Brazilian who understands this well.) I actually would *not* recommend such an intensive program unless you have a really good reason for learning the language quickly — with concrete plans to use it every day after boosting your fluency. Otherwise, it can be as quickly forgotten as it was learned. BTW, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to “study in a good school”. You have thousands of good teachers right here on italki. You can have the benefits of private lessons, and you pay for each class as you go, so you can switch teachers any time you like. Language schools put you in big groups (with students of widely varying abilities) with one teacher that you don’t choose. And they make you pay months in advance (I wonder why…). The schools have no incentive for students to learn quickly, master English, find a good job and quit coming to class. And who wants to spend time commuting to the school?
