I Studied Programming And English. Week 8 Report.

I started tracking time because it’s hard to track progress from my studies on a short distance. But the recorded hours are the real numbers, which I consider to be my result.

It’s already week 8, almost 2 months since I started. And that’s enough distance to feel qualitative progress.

I noticed that reading articles in English is easier for me, there are fewer unfamiliar words, I stop less often to understand the meaning of what I’m reading, and I catch myself thinking that I’m reading a couple of paragraphs without stopping. Roughly speaking, now I can read articles almost without an interpreter, I understand 90% of the text. This is all very motivating, because I feel the obvious progress, making sure that the strategy I have chosen is working:

1. Read Medium
2. Add unknown words to Anki
3. Memorize words
4. And read again…
5. Learn grammar
6. Try to write

And if something works, you need to keep doing it and work through it more deeply

This is also reading.

I have long ago abandoned reading books in favor of reading articles on Medium, because you can get more modern, lively and actually used words and phrases from it. In addition, reading articles is more informative, each article is 1 topic, which is immediately disclosed and can be useful. Books though give a general cultural idea, there is no applicable information in them as such.

Still, I am not as interested in reading articles as I used to be. I will definitely continue, but it is already turning into a kind of routine. I would like to read too, but in a different way. And this week I tried two things.

1. Text Games

I’ve wanted to play a game in english for a long time. And there is a certain type of game where everything is based on text, narration, dialogues. They are essentially interactive books with beautiful graphics and a soundtrack that deeply immerses you in the story. There is no action in these games, just reading and choosing phrases from the dialogues. I started playing Roadwarden.

Roadwarden

Perceiving the text is difficult. Do not understand every fifth word and spend 10–15 minutes to translate with a dictionary and understand the text on one screen. In general, I move on the plot very slowly. But shit. This is so interesting that I have a real desire as soon as possible to learn new words to better understand the text and find out what’s next.

2. Subtitled video

What is watching a movie with English subtitles? It’s essentially the same as reading, just the addition of voices and visuals. Now that my reading skills have improved, I’ve tried watching movies, TV shows, and YouTube with English subtitles again. And — oh, the miracle! I understand enough to watch videos with subtitles, before it was just useless. Movies and Youtube I won’t watch for now. Movies take too long, and YouTube subtitles are robot generated and not always correct. TV series, on the other hand, are fine. Series are only 20 minutes long, plus the series have more casual dialogues. Especially if you’re watching something from “regular life”

I stopped at Silicon Valley. At first I just watched a couple of episodes with subtitles. But then I started to think about how I could get more understanding? I started translating the subtitles and rewatching the series. I definitely got more understanding, but I went ahead and rewatched without subtitles at all. The bottom line now is that the algorithm looks like this:

1. First, I just watch the series subtitled in English. I don’t translate anything, I just watch.
2. Then I unload the subtitles and read them without the video, like an article/book and try to get as much comprehension as possible on each sentence. This is quite an unusual process because I’ve already watched the episode and when I read the subtitles I get images and scenes from the show in my head. It is possible to translate in parallel with watching, but it takes longer.
3. After that, I put the episode without subtitles and watch it by ear only. Concentrating on the speech, all my attention is on the voice, the visual context and my previously done translation. I think it really rocks my listening comprehension.

I end up watching the series in English without subtitles and understanding most of it. That’s just fucking awesome!

Not long ago, I couldn’t read without a dictionary, let alone watch a series. Before, I could only assume I was progressing based on the tracker and counting the number of hours. Now, I feel real qualitative progress, which is very motivating to keep learning. My efforts are rewarded. My motivation to study has increased 10-fold, and now I want to take it seriously.

I’m pretty sure that the key to my progress is memorizing words from context (Medium articles). The program I wrote to automatically create flashcards has helped me a lot in learning English. It is raw and has many flaws, but I feel the real benefit and continue to improve my program. I’ll tell you about it in the next report. This one is already a big one.

Next report — Week 9

First report — Week 1