Clever Geek Handbook

How to learn a foreign language

I will talk about how to learn a foreign language and I will do it on the example of personal experience in learning English. I started learning English when I was 36 years old , and now I have fluent English (both written and spoken), confirmed by official certificates. In order not to be unfounded: I have an IELTS certificate of 7.5 points (this is C1 level) and a NAATI translator certificate. In short, I know what I'm talking about.







Table of contents:







  1. Retreat about smart people and other polyglot
  2. First step
  3. Which teacher is needed (teacher level)
  4. Where to look for a teacher
  5. Skill Development: Listening
  6. Skill Development: Reading
  7. Skill Development: Writing
  8. Skill development: conversation: pronunciation
  9. Skill development: conversation: language barrier
  10. Lexicon
  11. The most important thing




So the question is: “How to learn English?”.







Be patient and work hard. You cannot learn English in a month. And do not learn in two, and six months is not enough for you. Any real time period is from a year, and this is provided that you do a lot and regularly. Personally, I studied for 3 years, and I did it every day, sometimes several hours a day. Therefore, we stop believing in miracles and begin to work patiently. And below is a story about how to do it.







1. Retreat about smart people and other polyglot



Yes, indeed, among the human population there are individual individuals who are genetically (oh, only genetically?) Predisposed to learning languages. In all language schools there is a story that once upon a time, in a terry year, they had a student who in six months learned “all of English in its entirety” and began to speak like a native speaker.







Such, indeed, are sometimes found, but:







  1. These people are so rare that we can say that they are unicorns, which everyone heard about, but no one saw.
  2. If you are the same unicorn - why are you reading this article ?!


Conclusion: since this article is not about elves, ents, and other unicorns at all, we will not recall about polyglot in this article.







2. The first step



The first and main thing is to decide why you need a language. The question sounds corny, but it is key and many people do not answer it correctly (cross out) sincerely.







Take, for example, the goal “I want to watch films in English without subtitles”. This pseudo simple goal can only be achieved if you have fluent English (C1 level and above). Moreover, you can be C1, and not have enough vocabulary for free viewing. For example, if I put on a film about the Negro quarter of New York, I won’t understand a belmez, because there will be a lot of slang. As a result, the question arises: why spend several years of life on such a goal, if now all the films are available in several translation options? After all, the goal, of course, is ambitious, but it is a goal in the name of the goal.







Another example of an inadequate goal is to learn English “to be”. The fact is that the language is forgotten if you do not use it, and, for example, I have to study as much as 2 times a week solely to simply maintain the level of my language. Learning a language for the future is not the smartest idea.







Below is an approximate “grid” of tasks and the corresponding level of knowledge of the English language







Pre-intermediate Intermediate Upper-intermediate Advanced
Do not abyss abroad To work in Russia For work abroad (but not in English-speaking countries) For work in English speaking countries
Understand what is written on the signs Telling everyone that you know English (and that will be true) Be able to state your thoughts Talk, watch movies, listen to podcasts


3. What teacher is needed (teacher level)



If you don’t know how to skate, and you need to play hockey (with ice puck), then cool skates will not help you, and it is unlikely that you can enjoy the difference between an expensive club and a cheap one. The idea is that from the point of view of practical benefits at the initial stages of training, the equipment quality is “acceptable”, “good” and “professional” differ slightly. Similarly with teachers.







At different stages of learning English, different teachers taught me









Each of these teachers did an excellent job, but because The tasks were different - do you understand that all of them (these teachers) cost me different money? This is a good example of how a correctly set task allows you to not only achieve your goal faster, but also save on the way to achieve it.







The idea is that if you have the task “To work in Russia” - you do not need a neutral speaker. Depending on the task, there are the following gradations:









The secret is that even if your goal is Advanced, one way or another you will have to go through all the English levels. Therefore, start small and change your teachers as your language level grows. And yet, if you are preparing for a specific exam, check the teacher for the appropriate certificate.







I will not give advice on choosing a specific person, because







  1. The teacher’s selection criteria “character, attitudes, age, ability to inspire learning, gender, is not late, hair length”, etc. ... These are not at all criteria for the teacher’s professionalism, so we don’t discuss them in this article, but they are important for your the teacher suited you psychologically
  2. Ratings, reviews, lesson statistics and complaints are those formal criteria that will allow you to choose the right person, not a bouncer, but this is the subject of a separate article


4. Where to look for a teacher





5. Skill development: listening



Listen to podcasts. There are special podcasts for people who study English (for example, Luke's ENGLISH Podcast or a bunch of others ), there are just podcasts in English (hello BBC and generally any ratings where podcasts are listed). There are many of them and they are different. Your task is to surround yourself with English speech, preferably about a subject that you like, and sooner or later English speech will begin to penetrate your consciousness and you will begin to understand it.







Remember that the style of speech, accent (in Russian “spoken”) and vocabulary will fall into your consciousness unconsciously and automatically, so you need to be careful when choosing a podcast. A concrete example, imagine that you are learning Russian:









If your goal is “to be understood in the ghetto” - listen to the English-language analogue of Oleg Mongol, if your goal is “to be able to maintain a conversation on a wide range of topics” - listen to the English-language analogue “To Infinity and Beyond . ”







Naturally, people are not alive as podcasts alone, there are TED Talks , there is watching TV shows in English, there are a bunch of Youtube training videos. But the essence is the same - we take and surround ourselves with the correct English speech, which sooner or later will settle in your head.







6. Skill development: reading



Subscribing to foreign media, magazines, blogs and any other print / blogging resources is our everything. Just open the resource and start reading, trying to choose topics of interest to you personally.







The most important thing is to choose the right text complexity according to your current level of English. If there are more than 3 unknown words in one sentence, then this text is unnecessarily complicated for you and it will be difficult and uninteresting for you to read, therefore, reading through the dictionary is difficult. In this case, you need to find a simpler text.







I highly recommend reading adapted English literature. The essence of adapted literature is that they take a famous book and retell the contents of this book using only simple, widely used words. Those. it’s like if you take “War and Peace” and put it in the language of a 4 year old, 7 year old and 9 year old child. As a result, we get 3 different works with one meaning, but with a different vocabulary.







When you pick up such a book, its cover says either the level of knowledge of the language the book is designed for, or the number of words you need to know in order to read this book normally. Language level - elementary, pre-intermediate, etc., the number of words - in pieces. How many words do you know - you can find out by clicking on this link . You can see how these books look here .







However, with literature in the original adapted English, you should be careful, it is heavy and replete with coined words. A series of books about Harry Potter with all this magical magic-shmagia is a vivid example of this. Let me explain by the example of the Russian language: imagine that you are learning Russian and you come across the book “Alice in Wonderland”. There is a poem that begins with “Cooked. The creamy shores puffed out on the nava, and the zelyuki grunted, like the mumziks in the Move. ”Question: How many Russian words will a person learn from this quatrain? Well, you get the point.







7. Skills development: writing



This is the most difficult aspect of learning any language and, at the same time, I will say very little. You need to perform a sequence of 4 steps:







  1. Write a text (paragraph, letter or essay)
  2. Submit text for review
  3. View the result and do the work on the bugs
  4. Repeat item number 1


And so in a circle to infinity. With each new iteration, your letter will be a little bit better, but, unfortunately, so little that you will not feel it. But if you compare "as it is now" and "as it was last summer," the difference will be obvious.







Humble yourself, there is simply no other way. Practice, practice and practice again. The only thing is that you can slightly automate item number 2 using different programs, for example Grammarly , which perform the minimally adequate function of checking the lexical correctness of typed text. On the other hand, these programs are not yet able to replace a person, so do not build the illusion that you can do without a teacher.







8. Skill development: conversation: pronunciation



First you need to choose the kind of accent that you want to work out in yourself. It is very difficult to get rid of the accent once developed in the future. Choosing a teacher, you need to make sure that he has the correct (you need) accent, because your accent will be formed largely unconsciously and you will automatically copy both the accent and the manner of speech.







Try to listen to podcasts, programs, reports, etc. issued by the country whose emphasis you want to receive. If you want an Australian accent - give up films made in the USA, if you want an American accent - say no to Benny Hill's shows.







Repeat words for presenters, actors and broadcasters. Repeated, recorded, listened to your recording, made conclusions - repeated, and so many - many times. Also, try to read aloud.







A very good test for pronunciation is to check whether the Google Speech Recognizer on your phone can understand exactly what you speak in English. If speech recognition is correct - you can stop in the pronunciation pronunciation, if not - we work further.







And now about the main thing. It doesn’t matter what accent you want, Australian or USA, it’s important that the Russian accent is heard anyway. If you are already Advance, then there are special people who are involved in the pronunciation and this is an extremely time-consuming process, but you probably already know everything yourself. If you are not already Advance - relax and take emphasis as a given. If Google recognizes your English speech without errors - everything is fine, but the fact that you have a Russian accent - well, you're from Russia, be proud of it!







9. Skill development: conversation: language barrier



If you have a language barrier, then you need to break it or get around it, because if you are afraid to speak, then you will not speak, no matter how well you know English. It’s like speaking to people from the rostrum, it’s a skill that needs to be developed by practice. There are two ways with the language barrier:









“Throw into the sea” - works quickly and efficiently. If you are forced to communicate on elementary everyday topics, you will have to speak one way or another. If you study in language courses, then the number of such “everyday situations” will go through the roof and this is very good. Although I feel bad about group courses because of their general inefficiency, from the point of view of breaking the language barrier - they (these courses) are ideal.







Bypass is the path of repetition, repetition, and repetition again. It works slowly and not very efficiently, but without shocks. Speak, speak, speak again and sooner or later (rather late, but nonetheless) confidence in the conversation will come. Just do not confuse self-confidence with confidence in speech: the second appears from the first, but not vice versa.







10. Vocabulary



In my deep conviction, words are an integral part of the language, but from the point of view of learning, these are weakly intersecting things. Those. you can know English well (know the times, grammar and use the latter without errors), but if you don’t know that mortar, mortar, mortar and mortar are the same word - mortar, then you just don’t know that. There are active and passive methods for learning words.







Passive - read a lot, listen to podcasts, watch movies, speak a foreign language. That is how we learn the words of our native language while we are small. It works ironically and at any age, but slowly, because we are already adults and the cognitive abilities of our brain are not the same as before.







The active method is to use, for example, cards as a learning tool. There are a lot of methodologies for learning words using flashcards, but I will only talk about one that I myself worked with.







The Internet resource Memrise.com has existed since 2010 and is a platform that stores word cards with related audio materials. When a user works with cards, the site calculates statistics of successful and unsuccessful user responses and, depending on these statistics, draws up an individual training plan. The special charm of this site is that it allows you not only to use training courses previously created by other users, but also to create your own.







Personally, I went exactly the way of creating my own course: I came across an unknown and rare word - I found a definition - I found an example of use - I downloaded the pronunciation of the word from Google Translate - I created a card. This approach is more time-consuming, but it gives better results, because the effect is similar to the effect of writing cheat sheets - while writing you memorize information.







11. The most important thing



For 3.5 years, starting to learn English at age 36, I was able to obtain IELTS 7.5 and NAATI CCL certificates, which, I want to note, is very, very good. Now, when I look back and remember the whole path of training, I understand that the most important thing was the constancy of classes.







I studied English every day for at least 30 minutes, with a total of a week I spent at least 10 hours studying English







The secret is not in the mind, methodology or teachers, but in the regularity of classes ... Learn the language regularly and the result will be guaranteed!







I believe in you!







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