13 Tips for Lifelong English Fluency

There are no absolute answers. There are millions of methods and tests and programs that
attempt to guide us to this goal, and as useful as these are in limited ways, most of them fail
to reveal to us the essential ingredients to success.

There are certain ingredients for fluency, such as effective communication, grammatical
competence, cultural awareness, and confidence, but at the end of the day, the recipe for
fluency is unique to each individual learner.

Today we’re going to show you how to build your super effective recipe.

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Finding Your English Learning Path

1. Clarify WHY You Want to Learn: Ask yourself this important question. Do a good job
clarifying this and use your answer as your inspiration and guide for the entire process. Do
you really want to learn? Does the motivation come from you or from what others expect?
Until your WHY comes from within you, in a way that you can access and forms part of your
attitude, your path to fluency will probably be difficult, unimaginative, and inefficient.

However, if your “why” is strong and sincere, it will inspire you and energize your entire
process. The best language learners know why they are learning, and it isn’t because they
have to.

To learn more about clarifying your goals, check out the article, The #1 Reason Why You
Aren’t Learning As Much English As You Want

2. Organize Your Life, Plan Your Process, and Set Goals: Research different methods,
schools, and programs for learning. Be aware that high quality alternative options and
opportunities for learning are increasing every day. Do you want to study online, with a
school, or with a private teacher? Do you have a clear idea of what this will demand from
your life?

Talk to friends who have already studied and those who have been successful, as well as a
variety of schools. Sit in on classes to see which one you connect best with. And finally, set
goals not only with your English (the final result), but also with your attitude and approach to
the whole process.

To learn more about setting goals, check out the article, Simple But Powerful: Creating
Goals for English Learning Success

3. Build A Support Network: Ask for the support of your family and friends. Search for
mentors, people who have already been successful, teachers and friends in the real world,
as well as virtual language learning communities (such as the RealLife Global Community).
The more successful language learners you surround yourself with, the more their attitudes,
strategies, support, and confidence will rub off on you. Furthermore, in times of confusion,
these people can and will help you.

4. Effective Methods / Effective Learning Styles: There are universally effective learning
methods and there are personal learning styles. The Communicative approach, for example,
is a very effective method for learning languages for any type of learner. In fact, this is how
we learn naturally.

The Communicative Approach treats meaningful communication as the vehicle for learning a
language, focusing primarily on function rather than structure (which isn´t ignored, but rather
something that plays a complementary role in the process.)

Understanding your learning style would be to recognize how you as an individual learn. Are
you more visual, auditory or kinesthetic? As a general rule, things you usually like doing are
probably more in tune with your learning style. If you learn better visually, maybe TV shows
and movies are your best bet, while if you’re an auditory learner, podcasts and music could
be helpful.

If you don’t know how you learn, pay attention as you go along and experiment with different
strategies because it’s going to teach you a lot about yourself. This is a big reason why
people who learn a second language as an adult have a much easier time learning a third.
They are more aware of how they learn.

5. Take Responsibility For Your Learning: Just do it. Dive in head first. Learn to enjoy it. If
you aren’t engaged, don’t quit, but rather take responsibility and find out what is going
wrong. If you aren’t learning, ask yourself why not. Maybe there are circumstances and other
people who play a role in your learning process, but nobody can learn the language for you.

You can’t blame it on a lack circumstances, time, money or opportunities. You have to want
it bad enough to overcome the external obstacles. Worthwhile accomplishments aren’t easy,
but if you enjoy the process, it´s well worth the payoff. But also, sometimes taking
responsibility means having the courage to change things around.

On the Path to English Fluency

6. Have the Right Attitude (Enjoy the Journey AND the Destination): Constantly evaluate
your attitude towards learning English. Learning a language is not like learning math or
science. If this is how you learned English in high school, it’s time to change your
perspective.

Effective learning is engaging, interesting, and a something that brings the topic to life.
Effective learning is to enjoy the process AND strive for the result. Think back to an
experience where you enjoyed learning, where time flew by and you always looked forward
to it.

Accessing this type of learning is not easy, but if you follow the above tips/ steps and have
an idea of what it should feel like, you can start gathering the attitudes, support networks and
resources to facilitate it. This will bring you an enjoyable process as well as the achievement
of your goals.

7. Dedicate Yourself Every Day/ Create Routines: Be consistent, dedicated, and diligent with
your efforts. Excellence is a daily habit, not a twice a week class. You should insert English
in your life every single day, or at least 5 or 6 days a week, because nobody reaches
excellence in anything without daily application. You probably don’t need to “study” every
day, but find convenient moments in your life where you can create routines that allow you to
play around with English, enjoy it, and learn in a relaxed way.

Some recommendations are Lifestyle English (covered in #10), which would include learning
with music, TV shows, podcasts, in addition to online communities and resources.

8. Don’t Accept Mediocrity: Don’t accept mediocrity from yourself or from the people you
depend on for learning. To reiterate the above point about excellence, mediocrity is treating
English like a twice a week hobby. Accept that you’re not going to be 100% perfect on your
path to fluency, but you can learn a lot at every step, and you don’t have to ever settle into
an attitude of mediocrity.

It’s easy to sleepwalk through life with mediocre attitude, a mediocre plan, a mediocre goal,
a mediocre purpose, a mediocre school or teacher, or mediocrity on any of these 13 tips, but
you get what you give, and fluency is not for the mediocre attitude. When you start expecting
the best from yourself and others, some really awesome stuff starts to happen.

Baby Steps to Fluency9. Relax, Have Fun, and Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself: Try to make it
as fun and interesting as possible. Imagine your English as a baby learning to walk. You
need to give the baby a lot of space, cushioning, support and patience so that it can fall as it
needs to, enjoy itself, and learn how to do it without being judged.

One of the things that makes children such awesome learners is that they naturally do these
things. As Dan Millman illustrates in his book Body Mind Mastery, “If babies held the same
tendency toward self-criticism as adults, they might never learn to walk or talk. Can you
imagine infants stomping, “Aarggh! Screwed up again!” Fortunately, babies are free of
self-criticism. They just keep practicing.”

Your English is your baby and it needs your patience and love to develop.

10. Make English into a Lifestyle: Connect English to what you already do and like to do.
This is called English For Life. Even if you have a hard time understanding what they are
saying, just having contact with something you LIKE will help you little by little start to make
sense of it.

If you like listening to English language music, start trying to understand the lyrics. If you like
watching TV shows, make a routine out of watching them. Listen to online radio, music and
podcasts, and other native speaking sources when you’re cooking at home. Configure your
 Facebook, cell phone, e-mail and other programs and devices into English. Use your
imagination.

Lifelong English Fluency

11. Understand that Fluency is Not Perfection: People that don’t speak English look at
English speakers and think they speak perfectly. The truth is that very very few non-native
speakers speak perfectly (and even native speakers make mistakes). Even if they don´t
admit it to you or themselves, most fluent speakers make mistakes, have a significant accent
from their native tongue, and struggle with their own problems.

The point is that fluency is not about perfection, which for non-native speakers is pretty much
impossible. Fluency is about meaningful communication, and all the rich world of cultural
and professional opportunity that comes with it.

12. Constantly Review and Renew Your Process: While patience is surely advantageous to
language learning, you can’t be afraid of making changes and renewing your process from
time to time. What worked for you at an earlier stage of the process may not be working for
you now, and it’s important to keep every step of your path fresh and spontaneous.

This could mean changing resources, trying different learning strategies, or even switching
schools or teachers. My recommendation: Assess your progress every 4 to 6 months. Ask
yourself how things are going. This demands a high degree of self-awareness and
sometimes courage, but it’s essential. You might ask yourself: Are you enjoying it? Are you
learning? Are you still inspired? If not, what’s the problem?

Take charge of your process.

13. Be Proactive, Create Opportunities & Use Technology To Your Advantage: In line with
English For Life (covered in #10), to really get to a level where lifelong fluency is a real
possibility, you need to be extremely proactive. English needs to be a part of your everyday
life. You need to constantly be creating opportunities where you can use English.

This may include a lifestyle that promotes travel to English speaking countries, but it should
definitely include an intimate understanding and use of certain strategies that give you
contact with the language anywhere in the world, such as podcasts, online radio, TV &
movies, and local communities that organize in person English speaking gathering, such as
Couchsurfing.

Reinvent Your English, Reinvent Your Life

These tips were written for learners of various English levels, so I know some of these might
be common sense to you, but I believe that everybody always needs constant reminders.
Really, most of these tips can be applied to success in any area of life.

English fluency is not the universal and perfect application of all of these tips, but people that
learned the path to fluency know what they want, they organize their lives to fulfill these
dreams, and they are proactive. They know that to realize a dream, they have to start putting
their dream in terms of a plan and a deadline, find the necessary people to accompany and
help them on the path, and to learn to enjoy the process as a part of their daily existence.

They are the same ingredients for success in anything. You just have to decide you want it
bad enough, start walking, fall on your face and keep getting up with a smile on your face.
Good luck!