How to Learn English by Yourself

English is everywhere, isn't it? If you feel forced to learn it, there are some things you can do on your own. Reading and listening are two skills that this newsletter can help you with right now.

Self-taught Experts?

We've all heard that every trip starts when the first step is taken, but the traveller does have to decide which way to go. Language learning is no different. To break it down neatly, you need to work on four different skills to successfully learn a new language: reading, listening, writing, and speaking. When you begin to understand the particularities of the English language, you’ll start understanding how to learn English by yourself.

Reading requires you to recognize written words and process them in your mind. Listening requires you to understand words as you hear them. These are both receptive skills because you receive the information that you process.

Writing requires you to organize your ideas into language and put it on paper or in digital format for someone else to read. Speaking requires you to organize your ideas into language and pronounce it audibly for someone else to hear. These are productive skills because you are formulating and producing expressions to communicate to others.

1. Reading to improve

This video highlights two different approaches to reading: intensive reading (when you stop and look up a word you don’t know) and extensive reading (when you try and figure it out from the context).

I did it slightly differently when I was learning Italian. I would read the first few pages of a book with a pencil instead of a highlighter to identify words that I didn’t know. If I underlined so many words thgat I couldn’t understand what the author was trying to say, then I would just choose another book.

By the way, you could do that with this newsletter too. If you don’t understand a word, write it down and look it up later.

2. Energy: 5 Novel Batteries

Cell phones, vacuum cleaners, cars: we use many things that are battery operated. This video highlights five new types of batteries that might find applications in consumer electronics.

The language is relatively simple and the speaker enunciates properly, but he talks a bit fast for some intermediate listeners. If it’s too fast, you can slow it down. However, I think it is important to listen to content made for native speakers because it allows you to experience authentic English.

Turn the subtitles on and make a list of new words (as you would for a book). And don’t forget to answer the question: which battery do you think is the best?

3. The Lottery Conditional

We’ve already looked at the zero conditional (the certainty conditional) and the first conditional (the prediction conditional). Both of those are used when talking about real things - or at least real possibilities - but now we’re going to consider hypothetical situations.

This week, we talked a lot about words and reading. Let me know if you have questions and comments. Stay curious and have fun!

Talk to you soon,

Marsha