How to improve your skills easily at home?

There's an enormous amount of English music right at your fingertips. If you aren't already listening to English music, do it now. Pick a band or artist or more from your favorite genre and give it a try. Listen to it daily and focus on the lyrics as well as the sound. What are they singing about? Can you spot phrases that you know?

Highly recommend you start using Spotify if you already haven't. You can browse through many genres, search for artists and songs and make your own playlists with this one simple tool. You can get the app on your phone, too, so your selected music can follow you wherever you go.

The Internet has made it easy for us all to get access to thousands of English spoken movies, and there is something for everyone out there. Do you have Netflix or maybe HBO? Great. You have a ridiculous amount of choices just waiting to be watched. If not, just open your TV. Or if you don't own one, there are a lot of online channels too, where you can watch series, movies, documentaries, and news broadcasts for free.

When you've picked the one you like, again, concentrate on what people are saying this time, too. If you can, change the subtitles to English. It might be easier to follow the dialogue, when you hear and see it at the same time, in the same language. Try to spot phrases, words, idioms, and expressions that you already know. You might notice that you already have a pretty good understanding of the basic conversations. If something is unclear to you and you want to check it out, a simple google search will help you.

Podcasts are great, I can't recommend them enough. They are probably the best tool to use, if you want to listen to native English speakers talking as naturally as possible. Podcasts are audio files presented in episodes that you can listen to wherever you are.

They are available on iTunes and Spotify, for example, but you can also listen to them online (podbay as an example is one option), or download an app Podcast Addict.

You can listen to people talk about just everything. Just search with the keywords of your own interests and then simply listen.

If you're not really a fan of TV shows or movies, you might be still interested in watching something on your free time. The selection of different kinds of videos on YouTube is massive on its own.

Vlogs (short for video blogs) are blogs where the used format is video instead of text, which means that you can watch and listen to people talk about their blog's subject. Some vloggers concentrate on specific subjects depending on their interests, some just go through their daily lives. You can try to find the ones that meet your own interest by searching with keywords on YouTube.

Like said, the variety of videos is enormous, and it is shown also on this list of the most popular YouTube channels. Check it out and see if there's one for you too.

It's always good to keep up with the world and what is going on around you. So why not change your source of this information to English? Next time when you go out and buy yourself a newspaper, why not pick one that's in English?

Or if you would rather get your news online, visit the websites of newspapers such as The Times or The Guardian.

There is also a great website called News in Levels which offers world news for English students in three different levels based on your English skills. I highly recommend this website for everyone from beginners to more advanced students, to use as a reading practice.

Magazines can be easier to get into than newspapers, because they might be closer to your own interests.

Especially on those days, when you feel less motivated, grab a magazine or go online to search for one of your choice, and read about what is interesting to you specifically.

If you've never read a book in English, you should not maybe pick up The Lord of the Rings trilogy just yet. There will be a time for that in the future, but first you should start with something little more simple. Grab a children's book, or a book that you have already read and know well, and get familiar with the style of fictional narration. Once your reading gets more fluent, you can challenge yourself with reading an interesting book you haven't read before.

Of course, non-fictional books are also a good option. Some of them might be easier to understand, too, depending on the subject. If you pick a non-fictional book, you should check out this list of common IELTS topics and pick a book that covers some of the subjects. This way you can also improve your vocabulary on the common topics as well as your reading abilities.

Reading an interesting blog is a great tool when it comes to adding more things to read on your free time. They're usually easier to read than informative text, because they are written in freer style than newspaper articles or other more formal texts. Also, you will most likely find one or more that you enjoy reading and that are interesting to you, since there are thousands of blogs available online.

The easiest way to find blogs that meet your interests is by doing a simple google search. It's very simple, and once you find one or more you like, it's really easy to get a little addicted to reading them.

If you would like to concentrate on more educational blogs, and read about English language and studying, here you can check out for learning English.