Way to improve English Online

1. Online Dictionaries and Thesauri
eference.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.


2.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.

3.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!

4.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.