ultral Jan 29 2019 at 08:32

How to learn English

4 min

14K

GTD*Learning languages

Tutorial

+15

Comments 17

IpkisIpkis Jan 29 2019 at 08:53

Thanks for the article!
I would add "turn off autocorrection in your smartphone". Autocorrection kind of turns off the brain and you learn much more without it

ultral Jan 29 2019 at 10:50

It's a sophisticated question. On one hand, you are right, but on the other hand, how to find an error(s)?

Murat1992 Jan 29 2019 at 10:22

How to learn English on English… Okey)

ultral Jan 29 2019 at 10:52

why not? It's good opportunity to learn ;) Also, I wrote Russian version, but it is out of date…

Doorsawer Jan 29 2019 at 12:54

in*

CaptainFlint Jan 29 2019 at 14:04

From my experience, I dare say some native Englishmen (sorry, Englishpersons) do need to learn English.

faiwer Jan 29 2019 at 10:24

I found out that Puzzle English contains many possibilities to improve listening comprehension skills. At least they have:

audio-puzzles: they are real-world-scenario sentences that were pronounced by several native speakers in a really simple way: not too fast, fluent (it's important), legible. It's one of the best tools for the start.
video-puzzles: they are just videos (small episodes from movies, shows, also some youtube movies, TEDs, etc) where you can watch it and assemble all the sentences from them by yourself in the follow-up stage.
master-phrase: it's just a game. They are thousands of small video cuts which you can replay as much as you want to and you're supposed to assemble the sentences word-by-word. These videos are mostly from cinema, TV series (e.g. Game of Thrones), youtube shows. In comparison with the previous point: master-phrase game provides a small sentence from the video, not the whole video itself. So you can hear and train to understand many accents, voices, situations and a short term. To be honest I use mostly this tool for my last 4-5 months because I find it out as the best audition tool ever.

One note about lingualeo. It has a very nice dictionary application and not-bad browser extension. They have really awesome grammar training. Also, their game-RPG-based system encourages to learn English again and again, day by day. But their audition training is completely shitty.

ultral Jan 29 2019 at 11:02

From my point of view, lingualeo is good enough for a1->b1. I bought lingualeo premium, because of sale. In general there is no major difference between tools.

faiwer Jan 29 2019 at 11:12

Actually I have B1-B2 and I use Leo as Anki :) Sometimes I do their grammar exercises. Almost all my learn-time I spend on audition in PuzzleEnglish because I find the listening comprehension skill at the most tough one. The one is supposed to spend 3+ hundreds of hours to understand native-to-native speech without efforts. And Leo cannot help with it. Also almost all their new exercises and features are bullshit. I wrote them about it several times, but they didn't fix or improve anything. It seems that they changed their policy or management.

ultral Jan 29 2019 at 11:20

I faced approximately the same issues. However, I chose an other ways:

I write articles & documentation, some times I publish articles. It helps to improve vocabulary, fluency & grammar.
I buy hours at preply for improving pronunciation.
I'm preparing ansible course for foreign colleagues & speech for meetup.

BkmzSpb Jan 29 2019 at 13:07

Disclaimer: this is an attempt to criticize not the author or the content of the article, but rather some of the grammar issues that might hopefully help someone, who is attempting to learn the language on his/her own, to avoid such mistakes.

Based on my personal experience

Even though this article lists all the benefits of your way of learning English, it is also a great example of the downsides of such an approach. I would like to recommend you — and that comes from the personal experience — to pay a little bit more attention to the articles and prepositions. Those are very difficult to memorize and learn to apply correctly. I often make tons of mistakes like that and, honestly, I need to write and then read the same sentence at least once to spot all the missing articles. For some reason, when I write, I do not notice such things, but when I read, the majority of the incorrect prepositions and missing articles just make the sentence sound completely off. It is just screaming in my head like when you hear someone playing off-key. For instance, «Let's go to tools», «The English language is not secret knowledge».
And then there are incorrect verbs like in «I don't sure», «You go to walk».
Anyway, what we all face (or have faced) at some point is that you cannot simply take a sentence in some other language and translate it into English, word by word. You do so — you get something like «Dumb as a tree» and «understand the English voice»

ultral Jan 30 2019 at 16:08

Thank you for your notice.

BigD Jan 30 2019 at 00:04

Need the same about Spanish

ultral Jan 30 2019 at 16:05

exactly the same ways…

Ryav Jan 30 2019 at 16:07

What about dictionary extension for browser? I think, internet reading's simpler to read, than book reading, cause u can consume a bit information lots of time. I've tried to read for my daughter, but she always starts crying. I think, my pronunciations is worse, than she wants. :)

ultral Jan 30 2019 at 16:13

I use lingualeo extension only.

XX_NF_XX Feb 5 2019 at 11:26

Leo's and puzzle's grammar lessons are pretty good, but you should try engblog. As for me they are much better if you repeat topics on a regular basis. They explain in short and easy way why you should use the rule and where it can be used. They also have a great variety of mixed tests like 'Present Perfect vs Past Simple' in addition to the topic tests. The only downside of engblog is that they use Russian to explain everything.