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Advanced English: How to progress? | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| nicozerpa Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 4317 days ago 182 posts - 315 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, Portuguese, English Studies: Italian, German | Message 9 of 16 18 February 2014 at 4:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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I second DavidStyles' suggestion. Textbooks for the Certificate of Advanced English (CAE)
and the Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) will help you to reach the level of an educated native speaker, because that's precisely what those exams are about. However, you should try other options to improve your vocabulary. I have got a textbook about Vocabulary for the CAE exam, and that book itself recommends native materials as the best method to increase vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 10 of 16 18 February 2014 at 4:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm also trying to figure out if you are a native English speaker, or a native German. Recommendations would
be different, depending on your background. One of the high school books I enjoyed was "A Day No Pigs Would Die", by Robert Peck. It uses a dialect though. Also, the main character is young, which is why I asked about your age. Other books young people might like include, Catcher in the Rye, which reminds me just a bit of The Stranger by Albert Camus. Another great one is The Cay. More challenging books, and these might be too much especially if you are non-native - unless you are very advanced include The Scarlet Letter, Origin of Species, and The Federalist Papers. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4073 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 11 of 16 18 February 2014 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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English is my adopted language, the language I have been speaking, thinking, and writing
in for years. According to some online grammar proficiency tests I took recently, I tested at the C2 level. My problem is that I have been stuck at a basic C2 level; I can convey my thoughts in business English: short, to the point sentences. I find however, that I cannot write long beautiful, powerful prose that can move/inspire/motivate people. I never acquired this ability, in any language. Language use for me has always been short, to the point, meant only for getting the concrete content across. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5757 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 12 of 16 18 February 2014 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you want to write, don't only read, but write. Copy. Analyze. Modify. Make it your own. It doesn't matter what you start with, the important thing is that you like the style and want to be able to write like that.
You can find people who share your interest in a certain style or author and exchange opinions with them. You could also read a book on academic writing for students of English at university level. You probably know all the expressions used in there, but it may help to be aware that they are markers of a non-fictional style, so you can compare non-fiction to prose you before comparing different kinds of prose to each other. Otherwise, I personally would look at the inauguration speeches given by past US presidents as a starting point. Edited by Bao on 18 February 2014 at 9:30pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5253 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 13 of 16 18 February 2014 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Along with Bao's advice, my advice: try to educate yourself within the language not just about it. If you want to write excellent prose in English try a free creative writing course along with your extensive reading: Creative Writing Course (ocw)- might help to develop some skill. Also try a free OCW (OpenCourseWare) course from. say, MIT about Literature (ocw). I agree that reading more and writing more are important. A creative writing course and a literature course will help to focus those tasks. Edited by iguanamon on 19 February 2014 at 1:41am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6694 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 16 19 February 2014 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have been thinking about this. It is obvious that your native language will have a large role to play when you start learning a language. Some sounds will be easier to make, others (remnants from your own language) must be avoided like the plague, and the same applies to vocabulary and grammar. You get some words and constructions almost for free, and you have to avoid false friends in both realms. And it is almost certain that you know fewer words, fewer idioms and fewer culturally determined items than a native speaker who lives surrounded by his/her language. But does that mean that your native language plays the same role at a later stage in your learning process? I'm not so sure about that. Your passive skills will probably be ahead of your active skills, and that means that you should be able to read and understand native sources without using translations and with just a minimum of dictionary lookups now and then - so on the input side the umbilic chord back to your own language has been cut long ago. Forget about the influence from your own language. The problem is that the output side tends to lag behind, and here the only cure is to use your target language in practice by speaking, thinking and writing in it. And now you may say: I've already done that, and see - I'm stuck at the bottom of C2 (which actually is something of an accomplishment in itself!). The answer is: if you want to become a C3 (defined as the level above a mere C2) then you have to pose yourself some tasks that are above C2. So I assume you already read literature and technical stuff and listen to English TV programs and all that at a native level, but you need to do things at the same level yourself. So my advice no. 1 is quite simple: write a book! You don't need to publish it (just planning to do so would probably block you), but this project will force you through all the nooks and crannies of the English language, and you would have to spend a lot of time on something active instead of just gobbling up things made by others. And then you have to ask people who are better than me at speaking how you can find equally hard tasks for the spoken language. Just speaking to a door would soon become too boring to contemplate - doing videos would be better (and again: you don't have to publish them). Or maybe drama classes in English would do the trick, but not in Germany with lots of other students at your own level - mediocre non-native costudents are poison for any serious learning project and probably more harmful than speaking to a door. You might have to spend at least a couple of weeks with a fulltime project in an Anglophone country to get enough exercise hours at a sufficient level. And no, I didn't say academical courses - any kind of activity where you are in the constant company of native speakers would do. And have I done this myself? Not really, but the medicine may work still even though I haven't taken enough of it. Edited by Iversen on 20 February 2014 at 12:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Antanas Tetraglot Groupie Lithuania Joined 4803 days ago 91 posts - 172 votes Speaks: Lithuanian*, English, Russian, German Studies: FrenchB1, Spanish | Message 15 of 16 02 March 2014 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, longer does not always mean more powerful, beautiful or inspiring. Check out, for instance, the work of Paul Auster. The more mature a writer he becomes, the more austere is his language. As he himself have said in one of his interviews, he needs to put a lot of effort in order to write as simple and plain English as he is credited to. And you have to re-write your story several times. The first draft will never be good enough. There is no such a thing as spontaneous good prose. The tradition of short powerful sentences in English literature goes back as far as Hemingway. Or, to take an example from another language, whose German is more powerful, that of Kafka, or that of Thomas Mann? Alexander McCall Smith is another writer who can say a lot in a small paragraph. Although he is not considered to be as much a "serious" writer as Auster is. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| linguaholic_ch Triglot Groupie IndiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5039 days ago 69 posts - 96 votes Speaks: English, Hindi, Bengali Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, French | Message 16 of 16 09 March 2014 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Norman Lewis' Word Power Made Easy is very efficient in teaching vocabulary. Not just vocab, but also their origin and pronunciation.It is very user-friendly.
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