20 Minute Routine for Fluent in 6 Months

For fluent English you can study for 3-6 months and without leaving home.

And no more 20 minutes a day. Without even involving other people. Like teachers or interlocutors.

I am Igor Poyurov and I have been teaching people in IT to do this for 2 years now and now I am sharing specific exercises with you.

There are 4 levels of exercises for speaking English without getting out of bed – Speaking exercises

Level 1 – voice messages to yourself in TG with a picture

You need to subscribe to some channel in Telegram that posts pictures on any topic every day. You need pictures. Second, write out all the questions of the English language – How much, Who, Why, and so on. Every day, look at a new picture and answer all the questions of English on this picture.

Level 2 – voice messages to yourself in TG with history

It's about the same, but this is no longer a dry listing, but storytelling. There are few short instructive stories in Russian, here you can take English-language ones. We read the story, you can even translate it in a translator. We turn on the voice recording in Telegram and tell this story, having previously closed the tab with it (so as not to read from the sheet)

Why do you need a voice in TG? First: If you have premium, you can translate your voice into text and throw it into the translator into Russian. And see if the translation matches what you wanted to say? Yes – great. No – okay, pay attention to the discrepancies and remember. Second: The voice adds a sense of dialogue, recording is a little more like talking to a living person than talking to a wall. This way you can survive and get used to the stress of a conversation.

Level 3 is ChatGPT or Skyenga Telegram bot

Modern neural networks can listen and talk back to you. You set the topic you are talking about and discuss anything with it. From the new part of WOW to why generics were brought to PHP so late.

Level 4 is like a chatroulette. Website

The most complex, but also effective tool. This is a free site for those who learn languages ​​in the world. The downside is that you need to enter rooms of strangers. In 3 out of 4 cases, you will be immediately excluded. Because rooms are often created “for their own”.

It can also be a hindrance if you are not very used to communicating with strangers. But if there are no such problems or you are ready to overcome them – the service is super useful.

Speaking will only cover 50% of communication in English, for the other 50% you will have to work with your ears

I'll tell you something strange that prevents you from perfectly understanding English by ear – Listening exercises

Listening to TV series is fine, good. Super. But turn off the subs.

The most effective option is to turn on a specialized series:

1. Emily in Paris for Marketers

2. IT Crowd for IT specialists

3. Suits for lawyers

We start watching and hear the first complete phrase. Preferably not a long one. If you understood every word of it – great. We listen further. If not, we listen again 1-2 times, wrote down all the words that we understood and the MOST IMPORTANT PART – we turned on the subs and checked how the phrase looks as a whole.

And an important point: you don't have to understand 100% of the speech. It's not necessary. 80% of the analyzed speech is already ideal. 50% is acceptable. Below 50% – you need to pump it up.

Transition: Why I said to turn off subtitles is because by doing so you are pumping up your reading, and there are much better tools for pumping it up.

Additionally – sometimes it's worth switching to YouTube and public speaking on it. The series is a polished format. The characters read lines from pieces of paper into a microphone. In reality, it's not like that. I love TED talks by various speakers, you can find real English there.

Over the past year I have read 3 books, 50+ articles and over 200 posts in English – Reading exercises

So how do you start reading English like a native language?

What usually prevents you from reading freely?

1. Lexicon

2. Inability to hold a long sentence in your head

3. Misunderstanding how words interact with each other

And three solutions

1. Learn words – read the last chapter of the article

2. Anchoring Principle

3. Understand that parts of speech in English are dead and very flexible

Let's start with the last one. Parts of speech in English are dead and every word can be any part of speech.

You all know that:

home – house

question – question

school – school

In all three cases, the words are used as other parts of speech. As verbs or adjectives. The same happens with adverbs and other parts of speech.

Yandex and Deepl translators understand this concept very well.

Anchoring is a mechanism that I came up with myself to make it possible to understand long phrases without decades of practicing English among native speakers.

Whenever I or one of my students had trouble following and understanding a long sentence, I would highlight three things in it in bold:

1. Prepositions at the end of a thought

2. Nouns

3. Pronouns

You can also divide by commas if there are enough of them (usually there are few of them in English)

It is always on one of the three points that the semantic piece ends. After that, each of the mini-phrases is not very difficult to understand. And if you translate and understand each one separately, they will come together in exactly the same coherent thought as if you translated the whole sentence.

If, in a situation where you can’t understand the whole sentence at once, you try to translate it word by word, you’ll get gibberish (I have a dog).

A couple of examples:

What are you talking about I didn't do that

What are you talking kid I wanna eat all of that

I didn't eat all of that It's not my fault

Every text you read was written by someone so that you could do the same, download writing

Now I can freely tweet\Link in English. What should you do to have the same opportunity – Writing exercises

1. Get Grammarly. Even native Americans who blog ALWAYS recommend having this browser extension.

With writing, everything is quite simple.

Exercises for writing:

1. Write comments

2. Write tweets and posts

3. Translate articles into English

4. Translate book chapters

You don't even have to publish the translated stuff. If your goal is to improve your writing skills, you can easily feed the text to translators or neural networks to see how clear the meaning is and how readable the text is.

In writing, the importance of mistakes increases, you have time to check – so here you can think a little about grammar.

And so that you have enough words for all this happiness. Pumping up your vocabulary

I Solved My Vocabulary Problem in 6 Months and 10 Minutes a Day. But There Are Some Oddities You Need to Know – Vocabulary Exercises

It's a pity that “1 year ago” can't be expanded by months, because it would be clear that most of the 2000 words were learned in the first few months.

A few main rules that I have learned over the years of English and trying everything that was advised in books and by teachers:

1. Don't learn words from lists

2. Study several times a day

3. Don't try to drag words into the active

Initially, we learn all words in the passive voice and that's how it should be. Words become active naturally – if we hear them often from colleagues and people around us. Forcing words into the active voice by force has never worked for me. Although I tried EVERYTHING that was suggested.

For half a year, I built phrases with words from the passive EVERY DAY so that they became active. And even that, no. But the words that I often saw and heard – instantly became part of my communication.

To learn, choose an application like Linkua Leo. Or any other with two mandatory functions:

1. Add your own words to study

2. Add your own translations of these words

That's roughly what I did in 2022, when I decided to use discipline and habits to say goodbye to the problem of English. Which I studied from 2002 and 2nd grade of school until 2022. Since then, I speak fluently and all thanks to the described mechanism. Well, and also brought 70+ people to Fluent.

I help with each lesson instill as a habitwhich does not require effort.

Glad you read it. I hope your English will improve from the suggested exercises to the desired level.