How I’m learning English
Learning a new language is a great adventure which it is full of fun. I’m learning English and I have my own approach since the first day, but it has been changed and I want to share it with you.
Farsi and Arabic were my first languages I started speaking in, and English was my favorite language since I was only 10. I couldn’t attend any class due to some issues, so I decided to learn it myself and I can speak/write in English well, at least to communicate with natives.
Now, I joined the university to study the Master of English Translation and Interpreting, so I was thinking about finding some new ways to learn more (vocabularies, especially) and I’m on a good path, so I thought it may be helpful for you.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
I didn’t believe it before I try it myself and see the results. The dictionary is the most important thing you need beside you, but the key point is that the dictionary must have English-to-English translations. It’s the key!
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) is a great one which I have learned a lot from! It explains you the word in very great details and gives you many useful and applied examples you’ll use in your daily life.
Every time I learn a new word, I try to make some phrases and sentences using that word. Some of the words I learn are very common used, so I may use them when I tweet or write a post on Facebook.
TV Series
Watching TV series is a great technique which will help you get better in both listening and learning new vocabularies and idioms.
What I have done so far is to watch each season of How I Met Your Mother with English subtitle. It helps me improving the listening skills, and also I’ve learned a lot of new words and idioms. And don’t forget, I’m enjoying the show itself.
Open up your notes app on your phone or pick some papers and start watching, anytime you hear an unfamiliar word, write it down. After that (or while you’re pausing the show) try to search it on LDOCE, and let me assure you, you’ll enjoy learning!
Spaced Repetition Technique
The previous two methods I told you about are ones that most English learners know about, but this one, I don’t think everyone does!
Spaced repetition is a technique which helps you remember anything you want — vocabularies, quotes, phone numbers, etc. How it works, it’s been explained in depth on Wikipedia, so I won’t write about it, but you’ll need some tools to handle this process for you.
Anki is an amazing application you can’t live without. They’re promoting their application as follow:
Friendly, intelligent flash cards. Remembering things just became much easier.
And they’re actually right about it! I was searching for apps like Anki, so I asked my followers on Twitter, and E. Ahmadi introduced it to me.
You create your flash cards, and ha-ha, you’re ready to go.
Conclusions
In my opinion, English is an important language that we need to learn, so I tried to share my new approaches about this matter. They’re not new, make-you-say-wow ways, though they’re great enough to help you find your path.
If you are trying some other ways, I’d like to know more about it, so share it with me and people who may read this.
