FLUENT ENGLISH IN 30 DAYS

How can you improve your English in 30 days without an English course? These tips will help you boost your English – all by yourself and from home.

Why do it?

• Do you have an English meeting or work event coming up? Are you afraid that you might not be fluent or professional enough in English?
• Has “learning English” been on your bucket list for a while, but you never got around to it?
• Are you too busy to go to an English course with regular classes?
• Have your been working with an English learning app? Do you feel like you’ve learned a lot, but you still need to improve your speaking?

If your answer is yes to any of these, this 30-day program will be a great way to:

• speak more fluently
• start to think in English, not German
• improve your English without investing a lot of time

What do you need?

You won’t need any special tools, paid apps, English conversation partners or a trainer. What you will need is:

• a bit of time
• some discipline
• enthusiasm

How does it work?

Focus on speaking

This 30-day program has a clear focus on speaking. You will not learn any grammar. In fact, it will be totally ok to make mistakes. Nobody will correct you. This is a good thing if you’re trying to get more fluent. Rather than worrying about making mistakes, I want you to just speak and start to feel really good about your English.

Only you

It may feel strange at first, but you will be in this program alone. No teacher, no conversation partner. Nobody to motivate you. Nobody to correct you. The one big advantage of this system is that you will be totally independent. In my experience, our biggest enemy is time. We all have too many things on our agenda. Working on your own means that you can just switch to English at any time of your day. Think and speak in English whenever you can.

Switching from German to English

How many English words and phrases are there that you understand when you read or hear them but that you aren’t using actively? This 30-day challenge will help your brain access these words more often. Turn the narrow trail that leads to a word into a highway. This will make it much easier to switch quickly from German to English.

30-day program for speaking fluently

Day 1: Set goals

Before you do anything else, define realistic goals:

• How good would you like to get?
• Are there any specific topics you should focus on? Do you need to speak about your business, your products, politics, the economy, etc.?
• How much time can you realistically invest to meet your goals?
• How would you like to feel about your English after the 30 days? Paint a vision of yourself (on paper or just in your mind), how you are speaking confidently and eloquently to a specific person in a specific context.

Day 2: Define your program

Based on the goals you defined on Day 1, create a program that works for you.

Your program should include:

–> 5 min of speaking to yourself every day

Speaking to yourself out loud will help you improve your flow. You will also become more comfortable about how you sound in English.

Topics to speak about:

• Your day. Your week. Your plans for next week.
• Your family, your friends, your colleagues.
• Your business, products and customers.
• A person you admire.
• Politics.
• The financial markets.
• Whatever moves you.

–> Think in English

I also call this the “Moving to Australia” tip. Try to think in English all day. What’s this called in English? How would you say that in English? Think in English in the morning, in the car, at work, in the shower, on the sofa and in bed.

–> Listen & watch in English

Try to schedule 2-3 “sessions” per week where you listen to an English podcast, TED Talk or radio station or watch something on Netflix, Amazon Prime or YouTube in English. Use English subtitles, if necessary. Listening is a very natural way of learning new words and the sound of the English language.

–> Input-output exercises

At least once a week, try to add a 5-10 min speaking session to your listening & watching session. Talk about what you just heard.  While you’re speaking about this specific topic, you will be using many of the (new) words you just heard. This is a fantastic tool to expand your vocabulary.

–> Check your goals

At the end of every week, sit down to evaluate your progress.

• How much time did you spend on English this week?
• What worked well? What didn’t?
• Was there enough speaking in your program?
• Were the things you did in line with your goals?
• Will you need to adjust your program?

Day 3-30

Do your program.

Day 30

Evaluate your progress.

• Have you reached your goals?
• How do you feel about your English now?

Special tip:

Audio-record yourself before and after. Use the pre-installed voice memo app on your phone or just do a video without pictures.

• Before: Speak about how you feel about your  English, when you need English, what you’d like to learn etc.
• After: Speak about how the program went, what you learned from it and how you feel about your English now.

Send me an email and tell me how it went. I would love to learn from you: What worked well and what didn’t?