We’re certainly living in unusual times. It seems that every week, there’s a new challenge for us to navigate, a new concern for us to worry about. With all of this constant change, it might be difficult to think about how you can keep practicing your English effectively and also safely. Living in New York City presents additional difficulties since our city is still seeing so much tragedy, and our previous activities have been halted due to so many businesses being shut down due to the realities of the pandemic. As we approach the one-year mark of us living with COVID-19, you might have grown accustomed to certain elements of the change in lifestyle, but you might also be thinking about new and creative ways to keep your English skills sharp in a weird and difficult time. There are a ton of creative ways to keep these juices flowing. Here are few innovative ideas that you can try to make sure your English skills stay strong in a challenging time.
1. Take advantage of YouTube and other video platforms
We’re lucky that we live in a time that is so virtual – it allows us to connect in ways that we’ve never been able to before. Our technology gives us ways to stay in touch with one another, and we have so many amazing platforms that gives us ways to learn as well. If you want to take advantage of these platforms while we’re spending so much more time at home, we’re lucky that we have so many options available. YouTube is one of those platforms that has proven to be a valuable resource for learning. There are tons of helpful videos that can help you practice in practical ways – instructors will give you various tactics to use and direction that is applicable for the real world. There are also TONS of apps that you can use from your phone that will help you interact with others, learn different tactics, and generally just keep your English skills sharp. Might as well take all this extra time at home and put it to good use!
2. Practice your writing skills
One of the best ways to stay fresh is to practice your writing. This could be either just free-writing, like in a journal to keep your thoughts in one place, or it could be creative writing. Write a poem, a short story, or even just coming up with random scenarios. This will help you exercise multiple scenarios and tactics, like dialogue, explaining a setting, or even just getting into the practice of writing in longform English. If you want to take it up a notch, read it aloud to others to get feedback on how you did with your English writing – this will help you better understand what you’re good at and what you need to work on more.
3. Host a Zoom party
They say that the best way to stay fresh with your English skills is to speak it. Schedule a half hour with friends each week over Zoom to just practice speaking English with each other. You’ll hear from your friends how we’ll they’re doing with their practice, and you’ll be able to help each other out if someone’s stuck on a certain word or pronunciation. Your friends will coach you, congratulate you, and help you. Plus, this is a great way to stay in touch with your friends, especially since seeing each other in person isn’t much of a possibility these days!
4. Keep up with music and movies
If you’re like me, you’re spending a lot more time with your TV catching up on shows and movies that you never got around to watching. Come up with a list of movies or TV shows that you’ve always wanted to see, and watch them in English. This is a great method since the actors use language that represents how most people speak English, so it’s a good practice to learn from those shows and movies. And listening to all kinds of music has never been easier, thanks to streaming platforms like Spotify. And now that podcasts are also more available than ever, you’ll be able to tune into any kind of podcast to get used to different accents and word choices in English – plus, you’ll be learning something while you’re listening, so it’s a win-win situation! You won’t run out of any options thanks to our technology these days!