How to improve your English skills

When we want to improve our English, it's easy to think we need to spend hours and hours studying. But practising a language can also be part of small everyday moments: listening to a song on the way somewhere, watching ten minutes of your favourite series in English, reading a few pages, writing a few sentences, or trying to say out loud what you've done during the day.

The key is to keep in touch with the language and find ways to practise that you can enjoy and keep up over time. Here are six ideas to get started.

You don't need to do a full study session every day. You can set yourself small challenges: learn a new expression, remember five words, listen to a short audio clip, or try to build three sentences about something you've done.

Practising for short periods on a regular basis can help keep what you're learning active, and it makes English start to appear naturally in your routine.

Easy tip: start small. A simple goal you can keep up is much better than setting yourself a huge routine you'll abandon after a few days.

Do you have a film you've watched so many times you practically know the dialogue by heart? Perfect: it can be a great place to start. Watching films, series, cartoons or videos in English lets us hear how the language sounds in context: different voices, rhythms, expressions and ways of communicating.

If it's still hard to follow the content entirely in English, we can use subtitles as support and gradually remove them as we feel ready. And remember: you don't need to understand every word to follow what's happening. Images, gestures and the story itself also give us information.

That song you've been singing for days can also become an opportunity to learn. Listening to music in English helps us get used to sounds, pronunciation, expressions and vocabulary in a different way.

You can listen to the song first just to enjoy it, and afterwards look up the lyrics. Do you recognise any words? Is there an expression that repeats? You can even pick a line you like and find out what it means and in what other situations you could use it.

Easy tip: don't turn every song into an exercise. Sometimes listening, singing and enjoying the language is also part of learning.

Reading in English doesn't mean jumping straight into a complicated novel. You can read a comic, a short story, a news piece about something that interests you, the instructions for a video game, or even posts from your favourite accounts. What matters is finding content that suits your level and that you genuinely want to discover.

And when an unfamiliar word appears, don't rush straight to the dictionary. First look at the sentence: what's happening? Which words do you know? Can you guess what it might mean? Learning to use context is also part of learning a language.

To learn to speak English there comes a moment when we have to do exactly that: speak. And we don't need to wait until we feel our English is perfect to start.

You can practise with classmates, friends or family, but also with yourself: describe what you're doing (I'm making breakfast), tell how your day went (Today I went to...), or record yourself for a few seconds talking about something you like.

Making mistakes is part of the process. The goal isn't to build a perfect sentence every time we speak; it's to gradually gain the resources and confidence to communicate better and better.

Writing can also help us organise what we know and discover what we still need to learn. But it doesn't have to become a traditional exercise either: you can write a few lines about your day, create a character, make up a conversation, write a list, or imagine a different ending for your favourite film.

Start with what you can already express. Later you can start adding new words, structures and ways of saying what you want to say, because using English to create something of your own means the language stops being just something you're studying and starts becoming a tool to express yourself.

You might learn a huge amount from listening to songs. Maybe you prefer reading. You might remember words better when they come with images, or need to repeat an expression several times before feeling comfortable using it. We don't all learn the same way, so we don't all need to practise the same way either.

Practice, watch, listen, read, speak, create: you don't need to do it all. Start with something you enjoy, make a little room for English in your day and, little by little, start making it your own.