Do you fear speaking in English because you worry your friends will make fun of you?
Do you fear speaking in English because you worry about what others would say on your mistakes?
Do you fear speaking in English in presence of others because yours is not as good as theirs?
If yes, read on. In this post, I’ll try to deal with this topic at a fundamental level.
This post contains a comprehensive list of rules which will cover almost all subject-verb agreement situations.
(Note that my comments are enclosed in square brackets ([]) throughout this post.)
Here are the 16 rules:
All of us read something or the other every day. Can we make use of a small part of that reading to improve our English language skills – mainly written English, but to some extent spoken English as well – at a much faster rate than we currently are?
Yes, we can. (The similarity of this sentence to Mr. Obama’s 2008 election slogan is purely coincidental.)
Through reading slowly and attentively, crawling in other words. If you can make crawling a regular habit, you’ll improve your English language skills at a much faster clip than your peers.
Non-native speakers mispronounce by the dozen every day. Even fluent speakers. Even those working in high-paying white-collar jobs.
Why can’t they correct these pronunciation mistakes? Why have they been repeating these mistakes for years, even decades.
The answer is this question: will they take corrective steps when they don’t even know they’re mispronouncing?
In this post, I’ll list correct pronunciation of more than 250 commonly-mispronounced words in English. And places. And brands.
Writing is far more challenging than speaking. Observe and you’ll know. Many more can speak well than who can write well. Even proficient writers face blank-screen syndrome (struggle to get started). Nothing of that sort happens in speaking.
Before you get into the idioms, I would give you a tip if you want to use them (versus just know the meaning).
It’s relatively easier to remember words than to remember idioms (and proverbs), because idioms typically contain 3-4 or more words. Remembering a string of words in the correct sequence and recalling them in a flash while speaking isn’t easy.
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