Five Ways to Learn English That Don't Work

Those who undertake to learn a new language are given a lot of advice: learn words, watch movies, listen to podcasts. However, not all methods are equally effective and lead to good results. Forbes Education I decided to figure out what definitely isn’t worth wasting time on.

1. Listen to a speech in a foreign language in the background without trying to understand its content

Many people think that it is enough to immerse themselves in the environment, and the brain will gradually learn to decipher what it hears. Unfortunately, listening to foreign speech in itself is useless - it only gives the opportunity to form a general impression of the sound of the language.

What to doListening to speech in a foreign language is essential, but it should be done sparingly and meaningfully. Don't try to absorb the entire language; you need to understand its structure step by step. To do this, listen to short pieces of material on familiar topics, note new expressions, and recount what you heard—in the foreign language, of course. Any modern textbook will include listening exercises. At beginner levels, they are much more effective at improving listening comprehension than podcasts and TV series. It's best to begin using authentic materials at level B1.

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2. Watch movies with subtitles in your native language

This method seems effective: it seems that the brain itself will establish connections between what a person hears and reads. Unfortunately, this method will only work for very short and frequently repeated sentences. You can remember how “hello,” “bye,” “thank you,” “no,” and “can’t be” sound in a foreign language. But deciphering longer phrases is much more difficult. In addition, oral speech is significantly different from written speech. In the speech flow, words cling to each other, some sounds drop out, some merge. What is heard never exactly matches what is written. To superimpose an unfamiliar sound pattern on text in your native language and immediately figure out which word means what is a very difficult task.

What to do: watch films with subtitles in the original language. You need to work with the film as with an educational video: pause, write out interesting expressions, try to guess their meaning and check them in a dictionary; watch short episodes first with subtitles, then immediately without, so that you can focus exclusively on listening and not be distracted by reading. Repeat the lines after the characters, while trying to reproduce their intonation. This requires patience and effort (and you just want to enjoy the plot), but it can provide a real breakthrough in the language. Film is a concentrated linguistic reality, an excellent material for studying oral speech with its accents, colloquial expressions and authentic intonations. Carefully analyzed and analyzed ten minutes of the film will give more than an hour of viewing with Russian subtitles.

3. Learn words in lists

Language consists of words, so it seems that if you memorize a lot of them, you can pass an interview in a foreign language and read fiction in the original. But, unfortunately, it is impossible to learn a language this way. For our brain, words in lists are a set of unfamiliar sounds that it will erase from memory at the first opportunity, no matter how much you shuffle the cards in various applications. In addition, simply memorizing words will never tell you the rules by which they are combined, which means you will not be able to construct correct sentences.

What to do: learn word combinations and use them in speech. We don’t speak in lists, unless we want to quote Blok: “Night, street, lantern, drugstore.” We use word combinations and ready-made language models, the existence of which in our native language we often don’t even suspect. We just know that we should wish good morning, not good, as in English, and walk along the street, not in it, as the French would say. Each language has its own rules for combining words. Therefore, it is much wiser to memorize the combinations “verb plus noun” or “noun plus adjective,” paying attention to articles and prepositions, and not to individual words that are unclear how to “make friends” with each other. In addition, it is important to understand in what situation one can use this or that expression. There is no point in learning lists of fruits and vegetables. It is much more useful to read the dialogue between the buyer and the seller, see how the phrases are constructed, remember the most common ones, such as “I’d like half a kilo of apples, please.”

4. Do lots of grammar exercises and nothing else

Grammar is indeed important - it explains how words change. But often language teaching is focused on grammar alone. This can be convenient for both the teacher and the student. However, if you do nothing else, the question inevitably arises: why did I do a million exercises, but still can’t speak?

What to do: do not ignore grammar, but do not reduce language learning to rules and exercises. The goal is not to go through a textbook, but to learn to express thoughts in a foreign language. It is important not to memorize when a certain tense is used, but to learn to use it in speech - correctly and appropriately. This requires experience: you need to read and listen a lot, observe and analyze, and then construct your own statements using this or that tense.

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5. Avoid making mistakes in speech at all costs.

As a rule, we started learning a foreign language at school and therefore firmly learned: mistakes are bad, they lower your score, and their number is used to judge your level of language proficiency. As a result, many have come to the conclusion: it is better to say nothing than to say something wrong. This significantly slows down the progress of learning a language. In fact, mistakes are inevitable: we are mastering a complex tool for expressing thoughts, learning to think and speak differently.

What to do: speak without fear of making mistakes. Don't wait until you "learn the whole language" - you should speak from the very beginning. You need to build your own phrases - even the simplest ones; apply in practice what you have learned in theory; find opportunities for communication; look for native speakers, talk to your teacher, your deskmate and yourself. It is very useful to keep an audio diary and tell yourself in a foreign language how your day went, as well as keep a regular diary and write posts on your favorite social network. Then you can give the texts to the teacher for checking and rewrite them. To really learn any expression, it is not enough to see or hear it. You need to use it several times and in different situations. Then it will truly be remembered.

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