How to improve your English language skills?

When we talk about improving English what exactly do we mean? Is it enhancing your vocabulary, learning new phrases and idioms, understanding grammar, improving your comprehension, identifying common errors, working on translation skills, understanding analogies, getting grip on punctuation, learning how tenses are structured and how they are “used”, knowing about sentence structures? Yes, all of these and a lot more. It’s a complete package and there’s no overnight, sauna-belt solution to this English conundrum. All these things plus “style”. Let me interject this piece here with some words on style and we will revert to basics later. Style, in my opinion, is most commonly ignored while teaching English and students are also not cognizant of this fact that what separates men from boys is style and expression -- you may have some excellent thoughts in your head but the way you express them makes all the difference. What makes an ordinary chef a master chef? 

Among other things, style and presentation. Find your voice, your style of writing and practice it to perfection. Be so good they can’t ignore you. But what is style? Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style. There are many things that make writing interesting and hard to ignore but, for me, the most important of them is how you structure your sentences. An excerpt from the internet is pertinent here: Think about how primary-school children write: it’s all short sentences. I got up at seven this morning. Then I had some breakfast. Then I walked to school. Then I had Maths. I don’t like Maths. Then I had English. That was better… no wonder most people get the idea at that age that long sentences are good, and short sentences are bad. When we pause to think about it, we know it isn’t true, and yet it’s still a practice that we slip into: trying to make our writing sound better by making our sentences longer. Had that primary-school child been a more skilled writer, they might have written: “I got up at seven this morning. After I had some breakfast, I walked to school. I had Maths, which I don’t like, then English. That was better.” Two of the sentences are still just as short as in the original, while the rest are longer – and it’s the variety that makes it so much more readable. Remember Varied sentences good, long sentences bad. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being. Work on yourself first and let’s start from the basics to find your own voice in the later stages of development. To the basics, we return. Get a firm grip on grammar – a grip so firm that your thoughts are automatically articulated into sentences of your liking and structures of your choice. Know that there are four basic structures of English sentences and you must know how to use them. So, do you know your way around verb tenses, grammar and punctuation and can avoid the common pitfalls? Congratulations, you have qualified to be an “aspirant”. To become an officer now you need to polish your skills with toil, tears and sweat. You read a newspaper and don’t understand what’s going on? There are certain words you haven’t heard before, a certain phrase perhaps? Make a diary and start writing new words with their Urdu and English meanings, identify which part of speech they belong to — noun, verb, adjective et al.— and use the word in a sentence or rewrite the sentence you have just read from the newspaper or book. We need practical vocabulary and there is no need to learn those SAT or GRE words. I never did. Just used the technique mentioned above and built a sizable lexicon for myself that is practical and usable. What to observe while reading? Don’t just look for new words; rather, observe the sentence structures, order of words, identify parts of speech, see how paragraphs are constructed, and check the coherence and clarity of thought. There’s much to observe, learn and imitate. Read good authors and imitate their style. Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river. You have to read good to write good. There is no alternative to this. Whoever tells you otherwise is selling something—maybe his notes. RAIMAL RAJA