Alternative Title: How do you organically/naturally learn (Practical) English?
Why?
This blog is my response to a very dominant trend of IELTS speed running within my home country. I am not against it, I mean, it’s really good that you have something to aim for when you learn something, but at the same time, I am a bit concern over the practicality of such learning style (e.g. Can you use English fluidly/fluently in real life without spending that much mental effort?). And, I thought, there should be at least a “showcase” of at least one other learning style to act as an antithesis to the exam prep style, and for the sake of diversity in learning approaches.
Although, mind you, I am writing this while preparing for another standardized English certification exam:))
Disclaimer
All of this is according to my own experience in learning the language, where I do the “slow-burn” approach. Throughout most of my school life, I do not do any serious English exam prep, not even with IELTS (to which I got a score of 7.5, fyi).
Keep in mind that, it may or may not suitable for you (I do know some of my friends prefer the exam prep style).
I hope this little tutorial would be able to help a bit on your journey in learning the English language.
What do you mean “learn organically”?
It is to build up your skills in using the language naturally and sustainably over the course of time. That way, the skills you pick up along the way, even if you forgot due to the lack of exposure to the language (e.g. not speaking to other people), you should be able to smoothen the rough edges of your speech after a while. Personally, it took me roughly 3 months to get use to speaking to my friend(s), whom do not speak my mother-tongue.
Note: While you can totally speak to your local friends in English (and it’s really encouraged to do so), it is still highly, highly recommended that you speak to someone from elsewhere, since it’s still pretty damn rough when it’s your first time speaking to someone of different accent (you know, the kinda accent that you have never heard of, even on Youtube). I am definitely not sponsored for this, but if you are in Hanoi and you are interested in talking to strangers (and potentily make new friends) in English, look up “Bla Bla Hanoi Language Exchange”.
Okay, now we shall go straight to the point.
Purpose of learning - How do I learn, in general
Ask yourself:“Why exactly do I want to study English?”. While this seems to be a very obvious question, the answer to the said question will be the foundation in building own learning style. Since the answers would be very varied, I can only show you my approach to this question.
My answer can be sum up as: “Necessity is the mother of all learning”.
I learn English as something I kinda must do, in order to learn those niche things and hobbies that, unfortunately, only have (quality) tutorials and documentations in English. Since I like so many things over the courses of time, the materials that I use in my own learning is very diverse: scraps of texts (short texts); tutorials of all kinds; newspapers; cartoons; TED; academic materials; research papers; etc. Even my phones and desktops are all in English for the ease of bug fixing, as they have way more guides in the aforementioned language.
In my own learning experience, I basically just read/listen to anything that I feel fancy to know, then my skills just very naturally develop without myself being even aware that it is developing. The reason I am saying this is, because recently, I just realized that, after a very long time not touching any books, when I finally open up one trying to read a bit (this one is in English), I suddenly realized that now I can read pretty much most books in English rather effortlessly.
Some notes:
- The critical weakness of my approach should be on how my grammar is weak.
- My writing is also not very good, simply because that I don’t write that often. Yes, this is not something you can just observe from people, you need to write AND make mistakes by yourself. I also personally highly, very discouraging toward the usage of AI.
- I do not impose strict rule on how I should write, as you can see in this blog post.
I will address these matters further within the next sections.
Now, onto some more specific skills.
Reading
As I said, just… read anything you can find, or anything you are interested in. Please do not be concerned about the difficulty (aka “whether it is way too easy”), as things would naturally evolve, as long as you are still reading. I do not recommend any sorts of rushing or trying to read complicated text way too early on (“too early” here means you feel tired, or very uncomfortable reading something), because those habits will build up a lot of fatigue, and it makes you not really wanting to learn.
Lots of people recommend to read books and/or newspaper in English. For me, when I still was not that good yet (level B2), reading a newspaper was a bit tiring; And, reading a whole book, was rather stressful (even if it’s Harry Potter). So, it’s perfectly okay if you can not read ’em yet, just go read something else:)
Listening
Same goes as reading. Listen to anything and everything you can find or interested in. If you find something way too daunting to listen to, stop a bit, then come back later or switch to other things that may of be interest to you.
Also, a lot of people seem to really recommend listening to the BBC, CNN and so on, so forth with other news channels. Once again, I don’t really enjoy listening to them much, so I listen to, or watch tutorials, instead. Oh, yes, you can also watch TV Series and Movies, as well, you do not need to turn off the captions, just try your best to hear what people is saying. (Unsponsor, btw) I recommend:
- The Big Bang Theory
- Friends
- Brooklyn nine-nine
- Doctor Who
- Other sitcoms you may know of…
- For films, just pick what you like. To me, they are all hard to listen to, anyway, at least to the best that I can remember.
Hint: Looking at subtitles is not a sin, you know. I do that all the time, although I can hear the video perfectly well, as it’s less straining for my brain in terms of information processing.
Writing & Grammar
These are my weak spots, and they do go hand-in-hand with each other.
Grammar
My weakest spot, so I will address this first.
The thing is, when you learn according to your interest and instinct, you do not have a structure, because there is none. Also, generally, no one care about grammar when you speak, and I learn most of my stuffs through speech of some forms or manners.
To be honest, I absolutely did not aware about the concepts of grammar until I am 13. It was thanked to my middle school teacher, Ms. Hien, who spotted that and helped me fix the problem. Despite her best effort, I didn’t grasp them that well and I also hate learning those boring stuffs. Now I only try to learn it properly for creative writing, where the grammar actually does matter, by a lot. Luckily, since I am not that bad, a cheatsheet should be able to ‘fix a bunch of worms in the can’ (expl. that phrase is a derived version of “a can of worms”, to which I made it up myself, pretty cool, isn’t it?).
Writing
All I can say is, try to write a lot, and make as much as mistakes as you can. It could be about anything you like to write, really, don’t limit yourself. When you read again of what you wrote, you would be able to recognise the mistakes that you make, and then you should go ahead and fix the thing. Doing all of these on paper can look really dirty, you may like to type it in your laptop. In general, for this task, I do not recommend using a phone, it’s tiny and there are lots of distraction (unless you use a somewhat crippled/very old phone that just got magically necromanced from the dead by installing custom rom, then sure, go ahead, type on that phone:))
I am going to revive my previous remark here, because I am lazy:
My writing is not very good, simply because that I don’t write that often. Also, yes, this is not something you can just observe from people, you need to write AND make mistakes by yourself (I personally highly, very discouraging toward the usage of AI, btw). I do not impose strict rule on how I should write, as you can see in this blog post.
I almost forgot to address this:
Why there is no strict rule in writing here? Also, why no AI?
For the first question, basically it really depends on what you are writing about, who are you writing it to, in which context, and optionally, though a lot of times it’s compulsory, what is your writing style. Although, I personally find that most of the time, I usually only ask myself whether what I am writing is formal or informal. In the specifc case of this blogpost you are reading, since this is my own space where I can do basically whatever I want to, I would love to insert my own stylings in my writing, obviously. And my usual writing style is pretty much the same as my speech style.
With the second question: AI making you lazy is one thing. Another thing is, it eliminates the process where you have to realize your own mistakes and fix it on your own, hence eliminates the learning process as a whole.
Another thing you might ask, is that whether should one use a software/script/bot to fix your writing. It’s up to your purpose, really. I don’t use them, as they are a huge nuisance/eyesore to deal with. But I would likely use it in a more formal context and the text is long. Otherwise, Imma just eyeballing the piece for about 5 times.
Speaking
Just get yourself an oversea friend.
Just kidding. Though, the joke is at least somewhat true in this particular context.
While you can totally speak to your local friends in English (and it’s really encouraged to do so), it is still highly, highly recommended that you speak to someone from elsewhere, since it’s still pretty damn rough when it’s your first time speaking to someone of different accent (you know, the kinda accent that you have never heard of, even on Youtube). I am definitely not sponsored for this, but if you are in Hanoi and you are interested in talking to strangers (and potentily make new friends) in English, look up “Bla Bla Hanoi Language Exchange”.
Also, when you speak to someone from a different culture for the first time, please try to be open-minded and do your best to put yourself in their shoes, because no matter how much you prepare, there will always be things you simply cannot anticipate during the conversation. That said, you should also expect the other person to reciprocate, meaning that they should show you the same patience and understanding. While this might sound a bit confusing, but you’ll understand what I mean once you’re actually “there”. And, if you experience something different entirely, that’s absolutely valid, as well.
I also hope you don’t have to suffer the reciprocation issues like I did (To those who I call my friends, this is what I meant when I said that my speaking ability comes with a big price).
In the case that you do not really interest in anything…
I have constantly mentioned throughout this blogpost about how my interest dictates how I study English. However, in the case that you do not have anything interest you, the best I could say is that, you may try:
- Do the “exam prep” approach. Yes, it does work, just not for me.
- Form your very own approach of learning, through extensive research and, this is a bit corny, listen to what your heart say. There are definitely other means outside of this blog that you can do in order to create your own learning style.
- Play video games in English. Especially those with lots of lore you can read. But don’t be way too greedy;)
- I do translation work in my past times. Maybe you can try that?
- When you translate, please try your best to look up each words in the dictionary, then string them together, make sense of the sentence structure and vocabulary choices. Using the translator and/or LLM should be your very last choice for this case scenario.
For my next trick
A “sequel” to this post would probably be “Songwriting with English as your second language”. While I haven’t write anything entirely by myself yet, I do have something up my sleeves;)
Join my course!!!
Again, just kidding, I don’t do that. However, I absolutely can help you a bit here and there. Please send me an email if you wish to ask me anything:)
After all, learning a human language is useless if you don’t interact with, well, a human.