Understanding English

Many people, especially from non-English-speaking countries, have found it difficult to understand English and as English usage become more and more prominent in their everyday life, this become an even greater problem that they have to face. Unfortunately, there is no instant way to truly understand it.

Setting Your Goal

First of all, you need to understand that there are many areas of language competence which may not be able to complement each other. For example, if you really want to understand English to the point where you can use it fluently in an everyday conversation, a book might not be the answer. Or if you aim to be able to write an academic paper or a novel, comprehension of verbal speech might not cut it. In any way, you can only achieve one target using one tool at a time.

Speech

To be able to speak fluently in any language, you need to use the language in everyday encounters. You'll need to speak with other people, daily, who also speak the language. Having a daily verbal conversation with a native speaker who is also willing to guide you through the language would help greatly!

Reading

One way to be able to read English texts easily is to have develop a sense of contexts. When you see a new word that you've never read, you may resort to the dictionary, maybe the one with translation to your language.

You see, each sentence in any text would always have a context so you can always almost try to approximate the meaning of the new word. But if you are still not sure of your approximation, you can always open the dictionary with English-to-English translation. This way, when you're making sure that you've got the actual meaning, you also strengthen your English vocabulary and understanding without needing to drop to your native language for the meaning.

Writing

For writing, you'll need to go beyond dictionary, you'll need a thesaurus. In writing, it's almost imperative that you utilize a broad spectrum of vocabulary. To achieve this, you can try yourself to 'only use a word once.' This means that if another word is available to describe something, use that. If you can use a particular word for your scenario, use that! The dictionary and the thesaurus is your friend.

Listening

Listening to English speeches has the probability to be the hardest task. For one, there are many accents, dialects, and slangs that are used by different people around the world. Words may have different spellings or meanings, there are phrases specific to an area, and etcetera. It's best to just listen and, similar to reading, try to mark contexts inside the speeches to understand them. If possible, you can ask the orator to say the sentence/word one more time or even explain the meaning to you.

– Koo, Tito Novelianto