I would like to tell a little bit about my journey learning English. For starters, I never actually studied English in a formal way, so I don't have a clue about English grammar. I learned through what they call today "input-based language learning" and the memorisation of "chunks", but it wasn't a conscious process.

All started with me trying to follow the news about Liverpool FC, which back in the early 2000's wasn't really available in the Brazilian news. I used to use a translator software (this was before Google Translate) to understand what was going on in the UK news.

Alongside that, one thing that really boosted my vocabulary and comprehension was watching TV series and movies with Portuguese subtitles. After some time I was able to assimilate what was being said in English to what was written in Portuguese, and eventually I started to notice some inaccuracies in some subtitles (this was non official subtitles). Then, after a few years I finally tried to watch some TV series episodes without subtitles, and I realized that I was understanding almost everything.

At this point I focused on improving my listening skills, so I dived into the Talk Shows: David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, Jay Leno, Conan, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. The short interviews (normally less than 10 minutes), the high quality audio (the microphones are way better located than in the movies for instance) and the small talk make it a great learning tool.

After reading more and more news in English I picked-up my first book and was able to fully comprehend it. Since then I read more than one hundred books, all of them books for natives, I never actually read a graded reader.

Now I started to write and speak, which will still take some time to improve. It was a messy non structured way to learn, but it kind of worked so far.

Thanks for reading!