How To Speak English?

How can I improve my English? What are some general tips to speak conversationally?

• My mouth rolls when I speak. I just lose track of words because I speak fast. I speak so fast that sometimes I am not able to concentrate on the content I am speaking about. But I tend to speak fast because it makes me more confident. When I try to speak slowly, I become more conscious about the way I speak, about the fear of making grammatical errors. I speak well when I speak fast but that makes others sometimes difficult to understand what I am speaking about. I sometimes fumble also and my tongue rolls. If there is any exercise to improve this, please help.

• Answer:

  Practice with a friend or someone who does not make you nervous.  Then you can slow down your pronunciation without as much stress. Find native speakers online who are willing to skype or do a google hangout conversation session.   Talking to a stranger online, might take some of the stress out of worrying about making mistakes. Do the free version of http://www.livemocha.com and use the chat utility to talk to people who want to learn your language.  You can do a language exchange where they help you and you help them. Listen to individual word pronunciations on http://www.forvo.com/languages/en/  You can hear a bunch of different dialects across a wide range of English speaking areas.  It might help to hear how people with different dialects pronounce English words.   When you can hear a variety of different dialects, it might help you to differentiate between what is an understandable pronunciation and what is not. Realize that words spoken individually sound different than words in a sentence.  What you think of as "rolling" just may be your own attempt to copy the fast speech phenomena that happen when native speakers speak quickly, i.e. I want to go to the store vs. I wanna go t'the store.   Native speakers DO roll the words together.  You just have to learn which types of "running together the words" is actually like native speech.   Your "rolling" is just you trying to overcompensate maybe for the types of things you hear native speakers doing.  Don't be too hard on yourself. Go sit in the mall in the food court and listen to people talking.  You'll hear all sorts of English and you may learn some new slang.  Take a notebook to write things down the way you hear them.