Improve your English at home

There are several ways to strengthen your English skills at home. Some people don’t like classes and prefer independent study. Others lack time or a language community to support them. Whatever your situation, try the following different methods for good results: 

1. Most important: Enjoy what you are doing! If you don’t like it, you won’t practice…and you must practice every day. 
2. Establish your goal and focus on it (ex: improve listening comprehension, reduce accent, know all the irregular verbs in the past tense, increase vocabulary, etc.)
3. Practice reading out loud. This is a great way to understand English sentence construction, learn word placement, and verb conjugation. Hearing yourself saying English words out loud is also helpful for improving conversation and writing skills. First try reading simple English texts to increase your fluency and confidence, and move on to more advanced material. 
4. Speak online and practice with native speakers on a free language exchange website. It's free and you can strengthen your skills while making new friends. 
5. Writing is a valuable way to reinforce spelling, sentence construction, verb conjugation, prepositions, vocabulary, and so much more. Keep a journal, write English sentences in an exercise book, translate a passage (without any help) and see how you do. Good English speakers aren’t necessarily good writers, so work on this skill and you will benefit in many ways. 
6. Watch a film that’s easy to understand in English to improve listening comprehension. 
7. Listen to music lyrics. If you’re a music lover, you can do this anywhere. You’ll be surprised at how much you will understand when words are put to music. 

Practice every day, do what you like, and make measurable goals to improve your English at home. 

Simile

Figures of speech are expressions that use language to create pictures in the mind of the reader or listener. These pictures help convey the meaning faster and more vividly than words alone, allowing readers to use their imagination and understand more than just plain words. This is called figurative language.

Similes are a figure of speech. Metaphors are another type of figurative language. Though metaphors say that one thing is another, different thing, a simile says that one thing is like another, different thing. A simile compares two things that are alike in some way. To help you identify a simile, the words “like” or “as” are typically used.

Here are examples of similes using "as":

- as busy as a bee
- as white as snow
- as sly as a fox
- as cold as ice

Examples using "like":

- to work like a dog (work very hard)
- to smoke like a chimney (to be a heavy smoker)
- like watching paint dry (boring activity)
- to fight like cats and dogs

The better your imagination, the more interesting speaker and writer you will be if you use similes and metaphors.

Metaphors

My father is Superman.
Carlo's apartment is a sty.
You are the light of my life.

These are examples of metaphors which are figures of speech, or expressions that use language in a nonliteral way. Simply put, a metaphor says that one thing is another, different thing.

Metaphors create images by comparing, or transferring, the qualities of one thing to describe another, such as:

- Broken heart: Your heart is not literally broken into pieces; you just feel hurt and sad.
- Green with envy: You are not really green, but you are very envious.
- Davide is a bear in the morning: He is not pleasant when he wakes up early. Davide isn't really a bear.

The better your imagination, the more creative you can be with metaphors. Here are some metaphors I've seen to describe people. Can you guess the kind of person you might meet if they were a:

devil
pig
angel
snake
bear

What metaphor describes you?

Flash Fiction

I first encountered a style of writing known as flash fiction when reading the customer reviews on an e-commerce gourmet food site. They were restricted to six words only, like "THIS JUST MIGHT CURE CHRONIC CRANKINESS" or "SWEET AND SALTY, THERE'S NOTHING BETTER".

The reviews above were inspired by flash fiction, a style of writing that uses minimal words (usually 1000 words or fewer) to tell a story. There is no required length but brevity is the key. This literary style has been called the smoke-long story (just long enough to read while smoking a cigarette) and other names including sudden fiction, micro-story, pocket-size story, postcard fiction, and short short story. Author Ernest Hemingway famously used this "short, short story" form in his six-word novel, "For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn".

As you can see by Hemingway's fine example, it is a challenge to write flash fiction because every word used must be essential to tell a complete story.

Sentence Variety

Diversity in your speech or writing requires a good knowledge of vocabulary, phrasal verbs, and idioms; otherwise you'd say the same thing in the same way every time. How boring is that?! Think about adding variety to your new language (and your mother tongue too) to increase complexity and interest for yourself and your audience.

Let's create some sentence variety to this basic sentence: I play soccer.

1. Turn it into a question: Do you know what my favorite sport is? Soccer.

2.Turn it into a passive sentence: The soccer match was won by my favorite team.

3. Turn it into an exclamatory sentence: We scored another goal!

4. Combine it with your next sentence: I played soccer on Saturday afternoon and went to the cinema on Saturday night.

5. Use a transitional phrase: Even though I like playing soccer, I sometimes enjoy being a couch potato.

6. Start with a participle: Riding the bus, I daydreamed about being a soccer star.

7. Put modifiers in different places: My favorite soccer player generously signed multitudes of autographs for his adoring and excited fans.