Have you ever tried to learn something new during the summer holidays?

Some of my students have their school exams right now and ultimately no time to study English. Some of you will have entrance exams until the end of July.

What I’d like to tell you is that there’s no excuse for not learning! Especially for you, my best of the best students.

As you grow up (even if you’re 99 years old you still grow up) you should learn new things daily to keep you successful and happy.

Today your goal is to find out how it’s better to manage your time. I’ve read one quotation from Benjamin Franklin, and it was like a strike to my head: “You May Delay, But Time Will Not.”

Yeah, that’s my personal fear of time running out in my early twenties. But why should anyone on the Earth spend the precious and limited collection of days doing nothing?

Summer is the best time for you to break your stereotypes and start a new life today!

As all of us know the best learning is a combination of study and practice. The scientists say that up to 90% of the knowledge used right after learning will be observed, and we’ll remember it.

There are few things that you can do now to practice and learn more English this summer.

1) Watch movies.

You can either watch an English-speaking film with subtitles in English or your native language. Tough the second variant is not the best one. If you’re a complete beginner (Okay only for total for beginners) you should start watching English series with the English subs, starting from your native language audio stream.

2) Listen to the radio in English. The best is to listen to the news, social, economic stations.

Though it may be extremely frightening, keep listening every day. After some time you’ll be able to pick up some words, then phrases. Over time, you’ll understand the speech at once.

Songs are much funnier and pleasant, but sometimes (most of the times) you won’t hear anything about correct grammar, lexis, and even pronunciation.

3) Read.

Here the piece of advice is different from the listening. Read everything: books, journals, Internet articles, and labels.

4) Write.

You can boldly begin your poet or writer career. I’m not kidding.

Usually writing helps people to organize their mind, think over clearly what they can’t do in thoughts. So there are benefits of starting to write today.

Meanwhile, if using a foreign, a new, an unusual language to express your thoughts in writing, you’ll find new ideas, a different understanding of the situation. A lot of writers who used two dialects in their oeuvre agree that they had another style and logic.

As for me, I’m much more serious and focused when using my foreign languages. From one hand, I try to make my speech or printed text correct, and clear to the listener. From another hand, I have different emotional experience of other languages.

I wouldn’t like to hurt any of the ESL or native speakers, but my feelings about French are wider than the English ones. Only because I’ve learned English a little later than French, I had less time talking English.

5) Speak.

Finally, stop sitting at home. Go outside or call your friends to use your excellent English-speaking skills!
*Small note to this point: if you’re deaf or mute it’s not the best situation, but there are also foreign tongues for you, and you also can discover new languages.

Don’t try to imagine any possible and impossible excuses for not speaking the language that you’ve been learning for some time already! Please, be courageous here. It’s impossible to learn a language without a talking habit.

Few points against your “not-speaking-alibi.”

a) “I don’t have English-speaking friends.”

Do you study the language at school, at the University, anywhere else in a group of other students? So you have got the whole group of learners and the same number of people to talk to.

b) “No, I learn at home, alone deep on the Internet.”

Okay, then it’s high time for you to give up with apologies. Start an active search of English-speakers in your city (if you’d like to leave the house for some time), or on the Internet to use G+ Hangouts and Skype to speak to new friends.

c) “I’m afraid.”
d) “First I’ll learn more than I’ll speak.”
e) “I’ll make money enough for a long trip to the UK, USA, Australia… And there I’ll talk to the real natives.”

Dear c, d, e, you don’t have to speak ahead to natives as it’s difficult to understand at once this kind of English without previous exercise. You will never learn enough before you apply your skills. The fear is the best friend of the failure.

6) Teach.

Yes, it’s the truth that you actually learn something better when you teach it, as you try to get the most prepared to your lesson, you look deeper in all possible information sources, etc.

7) Use grammar.net on a daily basis. 

You can use the search field to find the needed answers to your questions, or you can just follow the updates, study infographics, find the links to the most interesting and useful sources.

This list can be used in no particular order; the main idea here is to use these suggestions. If you want to learn anything new, you should stick to it.