 I'm a student, but I graduated from my university 20 days ago. Congratulations! What did you study? What was your degree in? Yes, my major is English. I teach English for students. I was used to teaching for a form-bright English teaching assistant. I'm here in Seoul, South Korea right now to speak at a seminar organized by the State Department for English teachers from 10 countries in East Asia, including Vietnam. What advice would you give people who are trying to improve their English? I think the best way for an English learner is to start with listening skills. They first try to listen to movies with English subtitles, and then they can learn new vocabulary with learner-advanced dictionary. They can try to mimic the pronunciation in the dictionary, so it can help them to listening when the words are in the long sentence. For Vietnamese people, we do not have too many chances to talk with foreigners. So it's a little typical for Vietnamese to enhance their listening skills. So the most important thing for Vietnamese people and other people, other English learners, if they want to enhance their listening skills, is try to mimic the American and British accent, because if they can speak as well as the American and British, they can listen to them. If they pronounce the word correctly, they can recognize the word when it's in the sentence. Hence, they can improve their listening skills. I have one question for you. We gave our students a tape recorder. They can recognize, they can understand the tape, but when they step out from the university, they step out from the class, they talk with the foreigners, they cannot understand them. Can you help me to identify the differences between listening in the class and listening in the real-life situations? I think the one difference is that often when you listen to recordings, it's professional, often it's professional speakers. It's actors or it's announcers, and so it's not like natural speech where there are false starts and people speak fast and don't necessarily speak in grammatical sentences. That's a challenge. I think that ideally you would have, the students would be exposed to natural speech to the kind of conversations that people have where they actually speak in real life. You want to try to find maybe on YouTube videos where people are speaking, but where it's maybe less scripted and more natural. I want to give two more advice that I want to offer to the English learners that we should try to listen to many accents because many people are speaking English around the world these days. We have Indians, Vietnamese and other nations. I think the best way to improve their listening skill is to listen to many voices of English in order to recognize their standard accent of English. The most important thing is that I used to tell my students is not to use headphones or earphones when they listen to English because if you use earphones or headphones, the sound is clearer than you listen to English in real life situation. So I think if you use earphones or headphones when you are listening to English it's not for you if you have to listen to English when you meet foreigners. I train myself since many years in English, self-education because I have learned French and Russian as languages in the school for many years and so I work a lot and I don't have time to go to courses in schools or universities because of my busy work. So I'm going always to Facebook and to Voice of America and BBC English. We get a lot of questions from people asking what advice do we have for learning English so it sounds like you've got some great advice. So you're busy and so how is it again you learned these languages? How did you use Facebook to help you learn? I started with BBC a very simple book and after this I found out on Facebook your website and I'm reading the comments and I'm reading how other people in other countries they learn in the same way English like me, what they have for questions and I also watch your channel and I also have English friends in America and so I get trained Skype. And I visited London and Los Angeles and New York and this is how I train my English and I read everyday magazines fashion magazines and news but especially fashion magazines. I have learned English by myself and I am not very classical learned I didn't classical learn English but I am very interested to learn and continue and try to progress my language. So what did you do to teach yourself? I started by myself by self teaching since I think 1990 I think yes it's a long time but you see how I can speak now and that time it was zero I didn't know anything but now I speak a little bit yes. So what kinds of things did you do? I mean did you watch movies? Did you read books? What did you find most helpful to you? Yeah, I started with a cassette and a book during the tape. Do you remember before CDs and I started with very basic instruments and I started with that including a book and step by step I listened at first and tried to read the book. After that my job was in business field and I had some contact with the foreigners like Italian, German and English or Korean or other nationalities. So gradually my English became a bit better. I mean now you hear it. So it was helpful for me but my starting was with a book and with a tape. But my listening part is very weak because I have faced with several nationalities and people with several sense of the pronunciation and it was very difficult. Even when now I am speaking with you I understand you very difficultly and when I speak with a Chinese the pronunciation is different and so from the part of the listening I am very weak but from speaking I think it's better. My name is Abdel Anis Sayed. I am from Egypt. I am a first graduate from the faculty this year from the faculty of electronic engineering in Morpheus University and I appreciate every effort that does from the oil learning English from there I appreciate this really I appreciate that. Well let me ask you a question I've been asking other callers. How did you learn English? What do you think were the most effective strategies you used to help you learn English and what advice would you have for other people? Yes the very important thing for learning English is the patient for learning any languages and this learned us for practice many words in every day practice English in such very important fields in reading especially in reading magazines reading every books if you specialize in your fields and from my study I study communication engineering and I used to learn English from writing and reading English because of my study. For communication department in our faculty we learn for five years in English materials we have many materials we have our courses that specialize in English and my advice for them is practice and the practice and the practice.