Top ways to improve your English online
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Off topic.
You know, the web is a big place. There’s lots of information, but you just need the right tools to find them. You can learn a lot online, from how to tie a tie to how to make gadgets.
Likewise there are thousands of resources on the web that you can use to improve your English, here are a few of them that I’ve been using over years to brush up my language skills:
Online Dictionaries and Thesauri
Reference.com gives you free access to a feature rich online dictionary and a thesaurus to help you out when you can’t figure out what a word means to you. Plus, there are also other alternatives to try out like ‘The Free Dictionary’, etc.
And if you’re just a Google maniac like me, you can fetch the meaning of any word in an instant. Just type define: followed by a word in the Google search box. Press Enter, you get the definition of the word you typed from various sources. (Here’s an example).
If you want good pronunciation references, this site is for you. Howjsay.com has a huge database - type in a word, and hear it instantly pronounced for you.
In case you don’t have an access to the internet on your PC, there are loads of offline dictionary software you can install on your computer and update your vocabulary once in a while.
Read News
My English Teachers always advise us to listen to news and read a lot of news everyday. If you’re bored to read news traditionally, there’s the web to the rescue. Hundreds of sites report on developments across the world, but usually people prefer BBC and CNN.
You can always pour get the latest news mailed to you everday, or even use RSS to keep yourself updated on the happenings.
Side by side, you can also learn a lot of new terms and words that’ll enrich your knowledge.
Listen to news, radio and podcasts
Youtube is the latest craze, but Youtube isn’t just a repository of all the junk. It does have lots of good videos on education, and speech training. You can always go search and watch interesting ones.
The BBC also has one minute news updated every hour on its site. Besides special video coverage on specific news stories is also available for you to watch.
You can even listen to radio on the internet, streamed to your computer. You’ll find a lot of music centred radio stations, but surely there must be a few talking on useful stuff like education. iTunes is a good player supporting
Besides multimedia news and live radio, you also have something called Podcasts.
Education related podcasts are wide spread, there are always loads of free podcasts you can download and listen to on your computer or your portable device.
One of my favourites is the Grammar Girl podcast where the ‘Grammar Girl’ gives you English Grammar tips everday.
Just Vocabulary podcasts present synonyms, antonyms and example sentences in a short audio file for people who might be taking SAT, TOEFL and other such exams.
All these can help you improve your accent!
A Word a Day
Now, this is a very popular tradition. Wordsmith.org is one of the world’s most subscribed newsletters. Everday, the website features a word and you can get to know about its etymology, pronunciation and more.
The Yahoo website and the Merriam Webster Dictionary portal also have similar pages updated everday.
Read Blogs
There are millions of blogs on the web, and if you’re just not interested in news controlled by mainstream media, you can always use some social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon etc to find blogs and sites based on your interest.
You can always use RSS to subscribe to a blog. Besides niche blogs, there are blogs like this one for example specifically focused on providing tips to improve your skills in writing. The BBC Learning English site also syndicates contents from blogs and provides you with a lot of useful tips.
Even the Oxford University Press has a very interesting blog here.
Blogs are varied, and each blogger has his own style of writing. You’ll get a lot of inspiration to write seeing their posts, this in turn will fuel your English skills and knowledge.
Play Games
No, not the kind of action games people usually play.
I’m talking about something like Jumbles and Crosswords. If you can’t get enough of just one jumble puzzle everyday on your daily newspaper, fire up your browser and point to www.jumble.com. Hundreds of puzzles here that you can play online. Besides, you can also buy books filled with jumbles and more.
The more you play jumbles, the more you’ll improve.
Crosswords are not a scarcity either, check this or this website for interactive crosswords.
Take Quizzes
Got enough nerve? Test your skills, your knowledge. The BBC Learning English website continuously updates its site with interesting quizzes.
More Quizzes to improve your English: English Club, About.com Quizzes.
Grammar Resources
This is one special page that I should mention here, filled with 40+ links to popular pages that’ll help you improve your grammar skills.
If you like this post, please vote for it on Digg, or bookmark it on Del.icio.us or Stumble it! Thanks! Also, don’t forget to share your views in the comments.
Photo Credits: powerbooktrance, jaboney, richardholden, tamaleaver, seanomalone, st3f4n, leepro
Popularity: 42% [?]
Awesome tips buddy - stumbled! And that baby with the headphones is so cute…!
It’s said that you are what you read. So true for many people.
Good guide man! Thanks.
Hi Shankar,
Really good information. Thanks for providing the details…
I’ll tell you two more secrets. That’s the way I quickly learned English.
Read lots of Story Books and Novels (Especially Harry Potter etc which are Basic English)
Watch lots of Movies (Almost most of the Hollywood movies are very great than Indian movies)
Both these ways are both fun and excellent tool to learn quick English… Particularly watching movies will dramatically improve your English Pronunciation and Vocabulary.
Thanks…
@Haris: Glad you liked them
Thanks for the bookmarking support!
@Ashwin: You’re welcome, glad you found it good.
@Srinivasan: Couldn’t agree more. Reading literature improves your vocabulary a lot. Pronunciation I rely on watching news. Not into movies yet
Excellent post. It would surely help me in improving my english and i was looking was an article like this. This guide will surely help many . dugg and stumbled
.. keep up the good work
Great post buddy even for people who know English these resources will be quite useful. Dugg and Stumbled
Grea tips, Shankar! Watching movies and reading a lot books has helped me a lot!
Stumbled.
Awesome tips bro. I read a lot of books to imrpove my english.
Great tips for people whose main language is not English but want to communicate using english. I think when you want to learn a language, you need to do 3 things: listen, read and speak. When you are able to master this techniques, then you will have no problem in writing too.
Your new blog design looks awesome.
What is the name of that website in the read news screenshot that has all the headlines?
Obviously it’s not BBC or CNN…I’ve been hunting for that site for a long time!
@Kanak: Thanks buddy, glad you liked it
@Keith: Thanks Keith.
@K: Yeah you’re write. Watching and listening to news helps a lot for sure.
@TClain: Absolutely true. If you need to improve your language skills, you need to listen, speak and read and also, write.
@Thiru: Glad to hear that. Just switched.
@Angrywaffles: Neither do I know. It looks like widgets to me.
I’m a gringo (US native), and like a few said, novels still garden my usage and vocabulary. Good novels, that is. And they train your thoughts onto some very interesting supports. I’d keep away from pop garbage. It makes you sound like pop garbage.
I love quizzing too and feel quite chuffed when I get up to 50% correct answers of the BBC mastermind quizzes.
Pity Mastermind was discontinued a while back though 
Oh one more…. for those who want to improve their English vocabulary, yourdictionary.com sends to your email inbox a word everyday along with its meaning. For instance today’s word is bivouac, yesterday’s was procrastinate and so on. Its good fun to see how many you already know.
the news picture is running http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm which is pretty nifty.
What I would like to know though is why the posts author includes a picture but doesnt mention it…that reeks of stealing pictures from online (they are credited but that does not make it legitimate)
Hey Buddy, Good Post !
In my life i have never used these stuffs even while i studied.
I think here after these will help me to improve my English knowledge and also to write good english in my blogs. !
Between My congratulations as you have gone to the Front Page of DIGG !
Thanks a lot. I am an ESl student, those are the exact sources I need.
cool…i like it…keep up the goodness buddy…
Well, I really like and digg your post. Could you please tell me about more podcast or MP3 Audio resources.
Top 7 Ways to Overhaul Your English Online…
[…]Thesauri and dictionaries are only a good beginning if you are looking to seriously straighten out your language skills online.[…]…
Nice post, but the least you could do is credit the photos you use.
Searching Flickr for “crossword” I found this one http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardholden/516449701/ which is clearly licensed as Creative Commons, which means you can use it as long as it’s attributed. Not only that, but you actually copied them to your own blog instead of linking back to Flickr, which is basically theft.
Maybe you could write a “Top ways to respect the creative work of others” post?
@ALAN: I HAVE credited the photographers, you can see the links at the END OF THE POST.
@Kaash: You can read more about podcasts here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
@Techblissonline: Thanks
@Zack: Glad to know that they prove useful for you.
@Otto: Thanks for that piece of info, it’s cool you know.
@Logesh: Thank you.
@Recliners: Yourdictionary is good, but I’m now sticking to wordsmith and a few others.
@Sue: LOL novels are indeed good to read.
So man, great article i came from digg
I am a Chinese and I chose to started a blog in English.
If you are interested in that, take a look at http://www.ifgogo.com
A very good domain ,isn’t that ?
I am also a WebDeveloper and WordPress Geek, hiahia !
Hi,
Can you please tell me what is the software or the news site, that we see on your laptop’s screen? I just did not manage to find it in your links.
Thanks for sharing information with the rest of us…
Top ways to improve your English online…
Top ways to improve your English online…
Good tips for learning any language. Some useful links also. Thank you.
How about a list of similar resources for learning Spanish?
[…] Shanker Ganesh’s article made it to Digg. What more can be a compliment to an excellent article like this which will teach you ways to improve… […]
Top ways to improve your English online…
[…][…]…
“Listen to news, radio and podcasts”
Try this:
http://www.itunes.com - podcasts
http://www.freetube.us.tc - news
http://www.bbcplayer.co.uk - radio
To work out (and test) your English vocabulary, I suggest using freerice.com.
Can any one tell me what is the software on the laptop’s screen above?
(Which site or which reader?)
Hello,
Nice article thanks.
For English as a second Language, Gymglish (www.gymglish.com) is pretty good too; it is not free but I find it worth every euro.
Gerard
[…] Top ways to improve your English online - Shankar Ganesh […]
Shankar, top notch article with all possible ways listed. I learned english offline and then came online to improve it. I remember following one of the above ways. And congrats on getting to the Digg front page. Have a great weekend. Merry Christmas and Happy New year.
[…] Top ways to improve your English online (tags: english language learning reference education) […]
I use dns shortcuts by OpenDNS.com
defi for http://definr.com/%s
def for http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A%s
mw for http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourceid=Mozilla-search&va=%s
the “%s’ will be replaced by the word you want to be defined.
example:
If you type def ENGLISH in the address bar…
Google will give you definitions of that word.
This is very helpful for me when looking up meanings, I hope it helps all of you.
Since you mention dictionary.com, just thought I’d throw this in. It has a pretty cool feature(cheat sheet) called crossword solver. If you’re a crossword lover you may want to check this out, while improving your English.
Great post Shankar! Good resources mentioned here.
This is really cool - Stumbled!
[…] Source [Shankar Ganesh] […]
hey! dude.. such an amazing post.. you have given beter tips than my English Teacher.. and totlay agree with Srinivasan paul joseph sir
Very nice article.
Merry Christmas!
And Happy new year too.
I use google for the definitions.
Thanks for the mention of wordsmith.org. I just subscribed it and hope to learn a lot of new words. I placed your post url for the referrer field while subscribing.
The link on “offline dictionary software” is malformed and is giving out 404 page.
Ganesh
Must admit…This was a killer post ..
Good post shankar, useful resources there
@Aw: Glad to see people from your part of the world liking my article
@Will: You’re welcome.
@Alis: The app is here - http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm (the credit goes to commenter ‘Otto’ who found it).
@Maru: Great resources, thanks for sharing.
@Gerard: Thanks for the info.
@Ram Karthik: Thanks, and best wishes to you too.
@Aseem: I never noticed those crossword puzzles. Thanks for the heads up, I’m going to check it out.
@Nirmal: Thanks Nirmal, I’m really glad you guys liked it.
@Kumar: Thanks for stumbling it.
@Nicholas: Hehe glad you liked it.
@Recliners: Thanks and same to you! Have fun.
@Jalaj: Thanks for pointing it out, I’ve fixed it.
@TechDune: Thanks man, thank you for the Digg support.
@Pallab, Ram: Glad you liked it.
To everyone, Happy New Year!
Wow, nice post, Shankar.
Although I am late, but still could not refrain myself from praising this post.
[…] [Read this article on Shankarganesh.] […]
We all have our own ways do we? I learn a lot of vocabularies from playing games especially RPG! Planescape Torment and BG rocks!
A friend of mine learns a lot by singing and remembering rap songs.
[…] esto está sacado de este articulo How to improve your english online, mas algunas pequeñas añadiduras mías. Articulos SimilaresComo seguir estudiando, 100 recursos […]
nice article there ..stumbled
Also Read comics online
and if you wanna screw your english and become a fast typer~~~join yahoo chat haha[:D]
Very well researched article. BM’d. Thank you.
@Silki: Glad you liked it.
@Syahid: That’s interesting. Games can also improve our English.. Hmm…
@Shashank: That’s a nice tip
@Rambhai: Haha
@Vinod: Thanks for bookmarking it dude.
Thanks for this post. Nice ressources.
Here is another ressource which might be useful for somebody learning English:
http://www.eslpod.com/website/
It is a very nice podcast.
Cheers,
Janus
Taking part in forums for English-speakers learning your language is also a great help. You can both benefit from mutual learning and understand each other’s challenges.
Thank you for those advice, I am a translator also who work on english to my native language, but you know when you work as a translator you may need sometimes tools other than those and they cost a lot, when I say a lot, I mean really a lot, cause you know sometimes the same word would give different meaning in different sentences,
I leaned the english through my earlier schools and then at my medical studies, but really the thing that really helped me alot was watching movies and listen to them, I am a really crazy about movies and watch them a lot, also I listen to some educational lesson on radio that might give me sometimes new information,
Anyway, thank you for all this,
Regards.
This is a great post! BBC is a great way to get your English up to scratch because they speak clearly and pronounce word correctly.
Great tips! This would definitely help me improve my english.
Nice post. I think listening to english radio is a good way of learning the language.
Wow. I’m impressed at the
way you handled this topic.
thanks
Thank you so many great links to learn from.
Thank you for the help i really learned something
hi man your post is good man, this could help many students like me who aspire to write the competitive exams.n
than x for the guidance.
Very nice post, Thank you
More links for English learning:
http://www.roadtogrammar.com
http://www.eslhq.com
http://www.eslcafe.com
and the BBC has good stuff on its site too
…oh, and yahoo answers is good practice
I am the host of the Just Vocabulary Podcast. I live in Cape Town, but I am originally from the Netherlands. So I had to improve my vocabulary. I started this podcast 2 years ago to offer English as a Second language-students the SAT, GRE and TOEFL words in a short audio file with synonyms, antonyms and example sentences. (http://www.justvocabulary.com). We have quizzes, and other studytools.
Would it be possible to add my podcast as a resource?
@Jan: Thanks Jan, I’ve added your site to the post.
Very interesting post, for sure grammar is very important to be perfect if you want to improve your credibility online.
[…] To improve your English online […]
Thanks. it is very usefull info.
nice article. i want to learn english grammar. which website or book is suit for me.
Great post. Even as an English person some of those resources are invaluable. The picture of the boy with huge headphones on is a very nice touch.
John
Dear Shri Ganesh,
Hi! How are you?
Thanks for all the information to improve English. Keep it up.
Bye
Rajeev