【英語】3 Steps to Speak English Confidently
Learning English can be a challenging to some, especially when it comes to polishing your speaking skills. Speaking English confidently, however, is rather important to English learners as it can be beneficial when it comes to job hunting in Canada. Particularly, I see that a lot of Japanese people struggle becoming fluent in English, which I believe partially relates to a person’s low self-esteem and low self-confidence in English. I will tell you the secrets to confidently speak English.
Why Do You Need to Speak English with Your Confidence?
First off, even if you don’t talk clearly and barely say anything in Japanese, we most probably understand or manage to guess what the context is with our special read-the-air power. Conditionally, we find more values in behaviours or sophisticated uses of the language rather than just confidence in speech.
Unlike Japanese language, English is a significantly low-context language in which it is necessary to clearly indicate meanings in order to have a proper conversation. Low confidence could lead to speaking English indistinctly which could cause confusion in a conversation.
In order for ESL speakers to thrive in English speaking countries, being able to have conversations with confidence would provide you with more opportunities in expanding your communities and building a human network.
Even in a hiring process for a job, confidence is evaluated by hiring teams in the sense of professionality and credibility so that giving yourself a proper speech training is advantageous for those who looking to get a job.
With that said, you should talk confidently in English, and here are 3 steps you can utilize to improve your confidence and fluency in English.
3 Tips to Speak English Confidently
1. Don’t Be Afraid of Making Mistakes
All you need is to practice over and over again. As I see myself an ESL speaker, I understand that most English learners are scared of making speaking and grammatical errors, and which forces them to only use minimal, easy vocabulary while speaking so they can avoid making embarrassing mistakes.
Other than the temporary benefit of speaking generic language, we repeat the same simple sentences and words till listeners get tired of that. And when you need to speak with people outside your community at a differing level of playing words, you will lose your confidence in your speech, and it gets rather difficult to talk to you.
So, the speaking practice with fear of making mistakes on daily basis isn’t a good strategy to improve your speaking skills. I would say that no matter when you speak English, actively try to use other vocabularies and learn from your mistakes.
If anything with your pronunciation or the use of vocabs, it’ll help you improve your verbal communication skills. That ultimately establishes your confidence.
Furthermore, as ESL speakers, it is absolutely normal to make mistakes.
For the fact, there are many international students and immigrants here and there in Canada and some of them, however, make countless mistakes in English after they lived in Canada for over a decade. But they speak English so confidently and even work in companies in Canada, which is seriously challenging as you find how I managed to get hired in Canada.
2. Try Not to Use Any Terms That You Don’t Understand
You know that English has a lot of cool idiomatic phrases and metaphoric terms that are hard to understand without identifying what they exactly imply in the contexts, and some of us try to use them to sound cool, which I used to do.
Well, don’t do that.
I advised you to willingly use more vocabularies, although I would strongly recommend you stop using those “cool terms” in order to avoid confusions.
Again, English is a low context language which requires you to state your point as clear as possible. I know that this will be a challenge for English learners to properly use around English speakers.
Misusing any terms that you don’t fully comprehend could lead to miscommunications, which is not totally cool.
Learning new grammar terms and vocabulary can be a great way of studying a language, although it would be best to avoid them until you understand how to properly utilize them.
One’s confidence in speaking shows when they know what the terms they use imply. Say, you would never use peculiar Japanese proverbs.
3. Speak Slowly and Clearly
Nowadays, we have access to TV and YouTube where people often speak in an unclear way that makes words difficult to understand. Most ESL speakers then start to feel discouraged as they believe that is how most English speakers talk.
As time goes by, your language fluency improves, accordingly. Take children by way of an example, children start with exaggeratedly speaking English in the process of mastering the language rules and they will speak so fast and murmur afterwards.
In comparison with monotonous Japanese, English is rather rhythmical besides its phonetic sounds. English can be a little puzzling language that reinforces you to follow strict rules in order to sound properly so that parents need to make sure that children adhere the manner.
The English language consists of complex rules regarding pronunciation and accents. I have blog posts focusing on improving your pronunciation and accents.
Speaking slowly and clearly can help in avoiding confusion and in practicing without being afraid of making mistakes. As a result, that will help in making you more confident in speaking with others.
Whenever you are unsure of something, ask for clarification to your English-speaking friends and learn!
Closing
There is a lot of ways you can become confident in speaking English.
Again, all you need is industrious practice to accomplish your objectives. In pursuance of mastering English, Shadowing should be the best way to study.
I hope this article helps with any challenges you might be having talking in English, please let me know your feedback in the comment section below.
