My Way of Learning English

#poem Published: 2021-11-30

What is this?

I’m going to write some notes for myself about my recent ways of learning English. I’d be happy if there’s anything useful for other English learners. Your feedback, advice, and criticism are all welcome.

I think that the appropriate learning method for an individual largely depends on their current English ability, so I’ve written a little bit about my English ability at the end of this post. It is likely to be boring for people with better English skills.

Attitudes

Try to remember all the English expressions

I try to memorize all the English expressions I come across, even if they are uncommon slang or jargon. By “memorize”, I mean I add the card with that expression into Anki. From my experience, I feel that I encounter most of these words again within a year. If you forget and search for the same word again, it is not only inefficient in the long run, but it may also lead to the consequence where your vocabulary will not really be reinforced. If you are really sure that you won’t encounter the word in the future, it’s fine, but it’s difficult to judge instantly by looking at the words.

Not use Japanese at all

I feel that in order to improve your English skills, it is not really good to be aware of the presence of Japanese language when doing something in English, no matter what the context is. One reason for this is that I feel it is really difficult to use both English and Japanese simultaneously because the sounds are radically different. It’s important to eliminate Japanese sounds to improve your English pronunciation (especially the Japanese vowel sounds あいうえお).

Focus on one accent

I believe that focusing on one accent that you can speak and understand with confidence is one of the good ways to speak good English. I generally speak and listen to American English, because there are a wide variety of materials from the U.S. (there are of course regional differences within American English, but I don’t pay much attention to that). I feel that by being consistent in terms of the accent, I can concentrate on practicing without having to think about other accents. I know that there are many people who speak with a mixture of accents, and I was one of them, but recently I feel that I can speak English in American accents without any hesitation. It is often claimed that it is important to be able to understand various kinds of accents, and I agree that it’s a good thing, but being exposed to various accents on a regular basis doesn’t necessarily leads to being able to catch various accents.

Tools

The OED

The OED is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is said to be the most reliable English dictionary in the world. If you like to just look at dictionaries or are interested in etymology or history of words, this is a must-have. But if you don’t usually use an English-English dictionary, or if you just want to know the main meanings of words as fast as possible, I don’t recommend subscribing to it. Well, it’s not easy to use at all, because the definitions are a bit quirky and sometimes complicated, and more than half of the definitions are examples of meanings are obsolete.

Anki

This is a very useful app for memorizing words. I can create a card with image -> English word, whenever I can. When I can’t, I just create a card with English word -> English definition. In this way, I learn how to explain a lot of things, which is really helpful to improve my speaking skill.

DeepL

I use DeepL a lot in my English writing. After writing a series of English sentences, I usually translate them into Japanese by DeepL, correct the output a bit by hand, then translate them back into English again, and correct the English by hand. It takes some time, especially until you get used to this process, but in my case, thanks to this, I don’t really need feedback from native English speakers (I asked native English speakers to correct my English with DeepL several times, but there were almost no parts to be corrected).

My English skills

• EIKEN Grade 1
• this vocabulary test I took a while ago shows that I know(?) 21373 words (though I’m not sure this is reliable).
• I watch most English videos without having subtitles, and when I can’t understand something, I usually watch it again with English subtitles.
• I can basically say whatever I mean in English (which doesn’t mean I can speak good English).
• I read 2 or 3 books (mainly novels) a month in English.
• I usually use English resources and talk to myself in English at work.