Personal experience: 5 proven methods of learning English from scratch and ways that do not work

Today there are many opportunities to learn a particular foreign language on your own. At first glance, it seems that this is not difficult: the network is full of recommendations, video tutorials, applications that should help anyone speak another language. The girl decided to test the effectiveness of some techniques on herself. Her experience will be useful to those who are just about to start studying. Adme.

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There are tips that don't work, but there are also good alternatives to these tips that can be much more effective.

Angelina had never studied English before. At the same time, every year the need for its development for her grew. It was difficult for her to work, she wanted to read foreigners on social networks. She was also afraid to travel to places where her native language was not spoken. She says that she was simply ashamed, because it seems that everyone knows English today.

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When Angelina wanted to determine her primary vocabulary, she did not even suspect how many English words she really knew.

“Brand names, catchphrases, inscriptions on equipment and many other minor attributes of life have already put into my head a base sufficient to name many objects and actions,” she says.

Learn Common Verbs

Council: teachers of foreign languages ​​​​recommend the development of any language to begin with the study of verbs (moreover, learn each verb at once in all forms).

“Yes, many words had to be written down with transcriptions. I still don’t know what the rules for reading English text sound like (they were learned at the level of intuition during training),” says Angelina.

The bottom line: it took her about seven minutes to memorize one verb. And she spent a few more seconds a day on fixing: she simply ran the new word through all forms, thus fixing it in memory.

The method proved to be very effective. Angelina says that having learned the most common everyday verbs, it is already possible to communicate in English (after all, most of the everyday phrases of the average person are built around the action that the speaker asks or talks about).

Card Applications

Council: use special applications to expand vocabulary in which you need to fill in cards by memorizing words.

Result: Angelina noted that cards from applications help memorize words, but she has never used many words that she learned thanks to such an application in speech. Therefore, Angelina decided to find a way to expand the vocabulary that was relevant to her. She came up with an alternative.

Replacement: much more useful in her case was keeping a diary.

“I made notes in it every day and gradually expanded the list of words I used. What I had to tell the diary about every day was fixed in memory naturally,” she says.

Use language exchange

Tip: use language exchange platforms to practice communication. This is an online language exchange. The concept of language exchange is very simple. Basically, you find people who are learning your native language and offer to help them. In return, they will help you learn your native language.

Result: language exchange applications did not suit Angelina. She says that mostly not native speakers wanted to communicate in the application, but residents of Turkey, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. They themselves had recently learned English and made many mistakes in it. Their goal was not knowledge, but firt, as the girl noted.

Replacement: she eventually persuaded her husband to join the study of English and practiced speaking and writing in English thereafter only with him.

Daily communication

Tip: try to have as many conversations in English as possible, make language practice daily.

Result: Angelina and her companion also tried to communicate as much as possible in English. But she says that finding topics has become more and more difficult each time. After all, having a meager vocabulary, subconsciously a person first of all thinks about what he can say, and not about what he wants to say.

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Replacement: To practice translating their thoughts into English, they came up with the game “Guess the Song.” One of them remembered a song known to both of them and translated its meaning into English (as close to the text as possible), and the second had to guess this song. “In the first days, we could play with short breaks for two hours, or even more,” says the girl. This technique can be used not only with songs, you can talk about the plot of a film or book.

Watch films in a foreign language

Council: Watch your favorite English movies without translation.

Result: This method did not suit Angelina. She quickly became bored, and she did not see where she could apply the phrases she heard in the movie.
Replacement: She replaced movies with watching live broadcasts of popular English-speaking Instagram users. She liked their lively speech. In the comments they could ask questions or simply read the remarks of other viewers of the broadcast. “For me it was much more useful, and my involvement was much higher,” says the girl.

First realization of success

Angelina felt that she had her first steps in learning the language when she understood an English-language meme without translation. After that, she began to read as many users as possible, writing in English on Twitter and Facebook. She says it helped her learn to understand slang, epithets and abbreviations.

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“This was a very important moment for me, because in connection with my work tasks, I first wanted to learn how to translate posts from social networks and entertainment portals,” she says.

After 3 months

Angelina assures that three months is enough to learn simple communication in English. But he emphasizes that the learning process should be constant and systematic, without interruptions. Now she can easily correspond with a native speaker without a dictionary and an online translator.

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