Listening is the most important of the four skills you need to master for good communication. There are so many easy and comfortable ways to improve your listening skills. With the emergence of new media like television and web, improving listening has become much more relaxed activity. Here are a few tips to learn and improve your listening skills.

1. Though it looks peculiar in these hyped days, listening radio will help a lot in improving listening skill. Don’t always try to write every thing you listen. Sometimes just listening helps much.

2. Prefer watching English TV Channels than your local language (vernacular) channels. Children programs are very much useful during initial stages as the language tends to be simple. Unfortunately, most of the children programs are being dubbed into regional languages for marketing and business reasons. Try to choose programs that you would enjoy. Also remember that much of you hear on television is colloquial language.

3. Watching Hollywood movies will also help you. Choose movies with subtitles, for easy understanding. Nowadays most of the movie channels are telecasting Hollywood movies with subtitles.

4. Internet has been an important source of learning. You can search for huge listening resources on the web. Every day there are more and more places to learn English online. Most of the learning resources on the net are free. You can use any popular search engine like Google to locate a few such sources.

Speaking and pronunciation are essential are ingredients of learning any language. These are much sought after skills in learning English. Here are a few tips to speak English with correct pronunciation. Talking to your-self will be the first important technique. Talk about anything and everything you like to. You can practice this at your home itself and also at places wherever you find privacy. If you are not comfortable with this in initial days, try reading out loud until you feel contented hearing your own voice in English. Here are some more tips for you.

1. Take a small audio recorder and record your voice. This might be very uncomfortable. But this will help you a lot in finding weak points in your pronunciation. Listen to yourself a few days later to find the sounds you have difficulty hearing.

2. Keep using telephone / Mobile for conversation. Participating in class and learning common idioms also will help you.

3. Try to understand the sounds that your language does not have in practice. For instance, some languages don’t have the ‘r’ sound. These types of sounds require more practice.

4. Practicing tongue -twisters can be worthy idea. Avoid using a translation dictionary or electronic dictionary. Always have an English-English dictionary nearby. Think of your English- English dictionary as your helping hand. Use online dictionaries when you are using the Internet.

5. Record vocabulary in a personal dictionary and review this every night before going to bed. Write a sample sentence for yourself. Don’t use the one from the dictionary.