I’m ashamed to admit it, but I started learning English some twenty-five years ago. At that time, there was no Internet yet and it was very difficult to find a good English book in the small town where I lived. In fact, it was hard to find any foreign language books at all.

Some time ago, my brother and I bought a self teaching English book in Moscow. But this book turned out to be very boring, so I stopped using it right away. Later I had more English books to study, but the same thing happened. Evidently, the reason I stopped studying with certain books wasn’t because of them, but because of me. It occurred to me that I’m just not able to study the same book for a long time.

When the internet came along, learning English became more interesting. A lot of apps such as anki and duolingo popped up. Additionally, it became possible to find lots of language-learning books to read and podcasts to listen to.

I think that my biggest mistake in learning English was my lack of determination to start speaking and writing my own thoughts in English. I was sure that I needed to learn as many new words as possible before starting to speak or write my own essays. However, as I discovered afterwards, knowing or recognizing new words in a text and actually using them are two different things!

I've estimated that I know about 8000 English words. I’m able to read books that aren’t too difficult with almost no help from the dictionary, but I still have trouble expressing my own thoughts.

Recently, I’ve started learning Spanish and I’m sure I won’t make the same mistake again. My advice to anyone learning a foreign language is to start speaking and writing as early as possible because the main objective of any language is to allow communication between people, but without the ability to express our own views and opinions, that's absolutely impossible!