How to learn English by yourself?
A collection of the most effective methods for self-learning English step by step.
In this article, we will talk about the different ways how to learn English by yourself, it will be a great addition to learn English at home.
Use only methods that bring you positive emotions. Mix different ways of learning English language. Don’t do what you don’t like to learn.
1. Watch Video in English.
A great way to further learn English online is to watch movies and TV shows on it.
Watch cartoons in English. Most cartoons are made for a children’s audience, which means that the words will not be difficult compared to regular films. Feature-length cartoons such as Despicable Me, Kung Fu Panda and Toy Story require more knowledge and skill.
If you have difficulty understanding English by ear, we recommend that you watch already familiar films, TV shows – this way you will know the plot and you will not run from dictionary to dictionary.
First, start watching movies with English subtitles. Next, you need to write down the words of the first 5 minutes of viewing and translate them. Now you need to look at these 5 minutes and try to understand again. If the attempt was not successful, watch 5 minutes with your language subtitles and keep going.
Watching TV shows in English is better than watching movies in English. You will begin to understand the meaning faster if you listen to the language of one actor for a long time.
You can also repeat phrases after the hero of the series or movie ; At the same time, you need to pay attention to pronunciation, intonation and manner of communication. This exercise will increase the effectiveness of your training and prepare you to communicate with real people in English.
2. Reading.
Read books in English. For starters, you can take as a basis books with translation and special books for beginners. Reading will give you a more complete immersion in the language than texts from textbooks and enrich your vocabulary. Reading increases vocabulary well and learns new vocabulary.
Read children’s books. Children’s books in English are simple lines, instructive stories and stories. In children’s books, there will be no complex words and vocabulary, for beginners this is a good option.
Read comics. Comics are well suited for beginners just starting to learn English. From the pictures in the comics, it becomes easier to understand what is happening, because the context is immediately visible. Words complement action with dialogue. All together, this is a wonderful and effective method of learning English from scratch.
Dialogue in comics consists of vivid and frequent colloquial expressions. You can write out interesting phrases as you read in a notebook.
Read aloud. Reading aloud is a set of activities that develop 3 skills at once: reading, speaking and listening. When reading aloud, you can increase the speed of speech, English words are remembered better.
Regular reading aloud can get rid of stutters, parasite words, and slips of the tongue.
Do not forget that when reading books aloud, it may be difficult to understand the content of speech. First, read the entire text, try to catch the main idea, ignoring unfamiliar words.
Gesticulation and facial expressions. Practice shows that gestures and facial expressions have a positive effect when learning English. A word or phrase uttered with the use of gestures and facial expressions is well fixed in memory.
3. Listen.
Listen to audiobooks. If you are just starting to learn to read aloud, get some extra help. Find an interesting book for you in two forms at once: printed / electronic and in the form of an audiobook. You can listen to the audio file and follow the text in the book at the same time.
When you get used to reading and listening at the same time, start repeating after the speaker. Repeat intonation, speech. Listening to audiobooks, you get used to the peculiarities of pronunciation, the sound of English speech. You will be able to pick up the difference between sounds that seemed exactly the same.
Record your spoken language while reading. Thus, you can analyze your mistakes made while reading and correct them. For greater efficiency, compare your recording with the audiobook recording.
You can also find the lyrics of your favorite songs in English and sing along.
4. See.
Stick sheets with their names on the objects around you . This will increase the amount of vocabulary and the effectiveness of learning English. The greater the coverage, the greater the increase in vocabulary.
Additionally, you can put English on your mobile phone.
5. Communication.
Look for live communication with native English speakers, or with those who teach in the same way as you. This will increase the productivity of your actions, and learning English will become much more interesting. You can communicate both at a meeting and in social networks. Chat in English, it will improve your English.
Learn new words and phrases out loud.
Don’t forget to review what you’ve learned.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
Ask questions to your teacher.
Learning English on your own is not easy, but also not impossible. You may need a good teacher in the beginning. Training can take place via online or offline. Decide which is more convenient for you.
Motivation for learning English
Why is motivation so important for further study?
Because if you have everything in order with motivation and purpose, you will succeed no matter how effective the training was or what mistakes were made in the learning process.
How to set a goal?
First, decide on the reason why you will start learning English.
You need to understand how your life will improve after learning English.
Poorly set goal – “I want to learn English.”
A well-defined goal is “I want to speak English at the level (Upper-Intermediate) by some date.”
That’s right, when the overall goal is broken down into small parts:
I want to speak English at the “Pre-Intermediate” level in 5 months.
I want to speak English at “Intermediate” level in 9 months.
I want to speak English at “Upper-Intermediate” level in 12 months.
Also suitable:
1. I want to understand a movie in English with subtitles in 6 months.
2. I want to understand the film in English without subtitles in 9 months.
Plan ahead for the maximum gap between targets. Many people put it off and never do it.
An evaluation of the result is required.
You need to know your progress in learning English. You can take tests, read for speed and other methods that are available to you right now.
To achieve the goal, it is necessary to allocate time for which you will study English. You need to make an accurate schedule. You can study for 30 minutes a day and 4 hours a week with a teacher.
The schedule should be fixed so that there is no reason to postpone everything until the next day.
How much time does it take to learn English? Focus on 100 hours of independent work and 100 hours of work with a teacher. There are different abilities to learn a language, and one person needs more time to learn it, and another less. Complete inability to learn foreign languages ​​was not observed.
General information about English language
Vocabulary of the English language.
In English, including all its dialects, at the time of this writing, according to various estimates, from 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 words. An average of 15 new words appear in the English language every day.
The active vocabulary of an average educated native English speaker is between 5,000 and 8,000 words. In passive, educated English speakers can know between 15,000 and 50,000 words.
An amazing fact: based on the ratio of the vocabulary of the English language and the vocabulary of a person, it follows that an educated Englishman or American understands only 3% of the words, and uses 1% of the words of his native language in his asset.
For a non-native English speaker, it is enough to have 1500 words in the asset for absolutely normal communication.
Shakespeare’s vocabulary is 33,000 words.
More than 20 million people in the United States cannot read at all and know less than 400 words of English.
Geography of the English language.
English is the official language of 57 states and 26 territories that do not have state status.
English is:
– the language of 3 European countries: Great Britain, Malta and Ireland;
– language of 2 states of North America: USA and Canada;
– the language of 14 states of Oceania: Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanatutu, Samoa, Micronesia, Kiribati, Tonga, Marshall Islands, Palau, Nauru, Tuvalu;
– language of 4 states of Asia: India, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore;
– the language of 22 African countries: Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana, Gambia, Mauritius, Swaziland , Seychelles;
– the language of 11 island nations located in the Caribbean and Central America: Jamaica, Trinidad and Tabago, Guyana, Bahamas, Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis;
– language of 1 state of Central America: Belize;
– the largest territories that do not have the status of a state in which they speak English: Hong Kong, Puerto Rico.
This is a list of countries where English is the official language. The exceptions are the US, where there is no official state language, and the UK, where the legal status of English is cryptic.
The total number of people living in these states is 2 billion 250 million people.
There are only 400 million native English speakers in the world who speak English as their first language.
There are 600 million people who speak English as a second language.
Most residents of states where English is the official language do not speak English.
For example, native speakers of English in India are 2% of the population.
Linguistics of the English language.
Linguistics is the science of the structure of language. Do not confuse with the philology of the English language – the science of the culture of the English-speaking peoples. The vast majority of Russian universities train philologists, who later work as translators and teachers of the English language.
The three foundations of the English language, with which everyone who tries to learn English is familiar to one degree or another are grammar, phonetics and vocabulary.
a. Vocabulary.
Vocabulary is the vocabulary of a language, which is described by the section of linguistics – lexicology. Without a vocabulary, it is impossible to know the language. Various methods of teaching English have their own approaches and methods for increasing vocabulary.
b. Phonetics.
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that describes pronunciation. In some techniques, emphasis is placed on setting the correct beautiful pronunciation and it is argued that this is very important when learning a language. In other approaches to language learning, the pronunciation is set as much as necessary to make speech intelligible and do not try to instill a British or American accent.
c. Grammar.
Grammar is a branch of linguistics that describes the rules for constructing fragments of speech. The attitude towards the need to study grammar among representatives of some schools of teaching English is much more categorical. There is an opinion that grammar is not necessary to learn at all.
The most weighty argument is the fact that the majority of competently and beautifully speaking and writing native speakers do not know the grammar of their language. It is obvious that knowledge of grammar is not necessary in order to master the language, but it does not follow from this that this knowledge is useless for learning English.
We are not familiar with any serious research confirming or refuting the need for studying grammar. On our site you can use a complete, well-structured guide to English grammar. The argument for learning grammar is that that it is not as big and complex as it seems. Absolutely the entire grammar of the English language, described in detail with examples, can fit on 150 pages of printed text. And if you exclude details, subtleties and details, and leave what is needed for a non-linguist studying English, then you can fit in 80 pages. Learning English is hundreds of times more difficult than learning English grammar.
English Grammar consists of two sections: Morphology and Syntax.
Morphology focuses on the word, its forms and parts. On our site you can get acquainted with the sections related to morphology: parts of speech (noun, verb, pronoun, etc.); grammatical categories (tenses, degrees, moods, etc.)
Syntax describes the structure of sentences and phrases. On our site you can read a lot of interesting information about the construction of sentences (narrative, descriptive, interrogative and many other sentences) and about punctuation.
Linguistics, in addition to grammar, phonetics and lexicology, includes a significant number of very interesting sciences: phonology, areal linguistics, dialectology, interlinguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguistic geography, psycholinguistics, word formation, philosophy of language, quantitative linguistics, morphonology and many other sciences of interest to aesthetes and professional linguists .
If you are not a professional linguist, then all you need is vocabulary, phonetics and probably grammar.
Interesting Facts about English Language:
The word “set” has the most different meanings from the words of the English language – 194 different meanings.
Most words – synonyms describe the state of intoxication. 1224 synonyms.
The longest word in the English language has 189,819 letters. The most popular long word in English is the 34-letter word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, which means the word you say when you don’t know what to say. The word is specially designed to be long and hard to pronounce in order to spend more time pronouncing it.
PS In this article, we tried not to repeat well-known facts that are written in millions of articles about the English language. Some of the facts presented here are doubtful and surprising. The strangest of them, such as the existence of a word with a length of 189,819 letters and the ratio of the vocabulary of native speakers to the number of words in English, we tried to repeatedly check.
Information for this article was collected from various English-language sources, in particular from Wikipedia in English. All the facts given here are confirmed by various sources that are not the “yellow press”. If any of the statements in this article are not true or out of date, please let us know.