I can say a lot of things, if I want to, the problem is that I don’t. But let’s try anyway. English is not a difficult language, as I thought so; I was so wrong, very wrong indeed. It’s not difficult at all. I’ve been learning English, so far, for two years. Now I know that English is pretty easy, is not difficult at all, as I thought it was . By consuming English content, spoken and written, for countless hours, I can understand English and produce English, just like I’m doing right now; without too much thought . If I hadn’t consumed lots of English, I wouldn’t be able to use it. That’s how one learns a new language, by consuming it — you have listening to your native language for a long time before you could speak it; everybody has.
Every language has skills. Listening, reading, which are comprehension of spoken and written language, speaking, writing are skills that you need to build in a daily basis. Every day we have to build those skills, little by little, improving them constantly. That’s how one learns a language. Do you want to understand spoken English? You need to listen to tons of English material, TV shows, movies, YouTube, basically anything you want, especially things you like, because one of the principals of language acquisition is to appreciate what you are doing, and listing to what you like is really important, it helps you on the road — if you do something you like, you are more likely to do it again. Do want to read real English books? You need to read books made for natives and increase your vocabulary as you do so. If you do that for a long time, you are going to be able to read books, thus improving your comprehension, as you’ll learn lots of words daily. Once more, you need to do it daily. As for speaking and writing, same thing, in order to improve them, you need to do them every single day.
I’m putting too much emphasize on doing things every day because that’s how the process of learning languages — acquiring it, if you will — works, it is progressive. You can’t do it sporadically. It will work, sure, it will. But won’t be as good as doing it every single day. Actually, you will be learning English, and your native language, for ever — you never stop learning. I believe that everybody can study at least 30 minutes per day. It’s not that difficult. We can find time, as we make it. We control our time. Perhaps, instead of expending one hour scrolling down and up through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or whatever social media you use, which most of the time are time-killers, you could be spending your time into learning English, it's time that really pays off. You see, it’s a matter of choices.
Learning English is not a grammar-based process.
I'll try to write something every day.
You're totally right, every day we can learn a little bit more and due to this lockdown situation, we can take advantage of that :)
Great piece!!! It’s true the key is practice, practice, and a little more practice. Looking forward to reading more from you :)
Very well written and very well thought through. I agree with everything you have said and also, at the minimum, at least read German for 30 minutes every day. The only thing that I would add, from my experience now of learning German, is that some study of grammar is useful to make sense of what I am reading. So I do not learn endless grammar rules, but rather learn them incrementally. I also look for the grammar explanation of something that I am not understanding, so I learn the rule immediately in context. There are a few foundational rules, for example the use of gender in German, that one needs to start with and then build on incrementally. Finally, I was attracted to reading your piece because of the mind-map picture. I love mind-maps for complex topics and wondered if they would help language learning? You seem to imply not?