Colloquial English - How To Get To Grips With Speaking English

Using informal English will make you sound more fluent, but it has to be current (not out or date) and appropriate to the region and age group. An Iraqi acquaintance used to say something was "awesome" when he meant very impressive. It make him sound more like a native speaker, but a native of New York and not London, as it is not commonly used that way in the UK except sometimes by people much younger than he was.

Informal English changes more quickly than formal language. Each generation has its own inventions that parents cannot understand. Young speakers will have been influenced by television so their vocabulary may be more 'international', which often means more American. And you have to choose whether you want to use an informal expression or go further 'downmarket' and use slang.

A young person might describe something very good as 'wicked' - a wicked night out is a very enjoyable one, not a night spent being evil. They might also say that something is 'well good' meaning very good, but only a very young person could use such an expression without sounding unnatural. By the time either expression is printed in a reference book they will already be out of date so, unless you are under 18, it is safer to stick to informal expressions that are not slang.

A thesaurus can often be misleading by offering words that are out of date, but it can also lead you some useful discoveries. If you use a computer to search the Word thesausus for 'popular' you will find that a person or an idea can be all-the-rage, meaning fashionable or, as we also say, flavour of the month. If you search 'unpopular' you discover not only formal words like ostracised or shunned but also 'out-of-favour'. But I recently saw an on-line forum advising its readers that an unpopular person was a 'stinker', which has not been in current use for at least about sixty years.

One of the easiest ways to learn a language is to collect 'chunks'. Instead of learning one word at a time is more efficient to learn several words that are always used together. For example, an idea may come to you 'out of the blue', meaning unexpectedly. An untidy workshop may be full of 'bits and pieces', implying disorder. When we summarise information we might begin the sentence with "to make a long story short". These chunks of language help to build up a sentence quickly and make it sound more natural and fluent. Some chunks are a short form of a proverb - 'better safe than sorry' - so you can also sound wise.

Certain words always go together, so that we 'make a mistake' not 'do a mistake'. These are called collocations and include the colloquial phrase that we might 'make do with' something that is not exactly what we want. We just put up with it (tolerate the situation).

Among the things we have to put up with in English are homophones (fare/fare) homonyms (many meanings for the word fair) homographs and polysmes (different meanings for the words like bear or bank). This allows us to use words that may seem similar but actually have quite different meanings in an informal setting, or when used slightly differently. For example, if you are lost you can ask directions for the way back (formal). Informally, you can say that something happened 'way back' meaning a long time ago - way back in 1962.

With a little practice, you may find that in no time at all (=soon) you will become 'too clever for your own good'.