How to learn English for free or almost for free

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Just a month ago, many of us gave ourselves a New Year promise to “finally learn English.” But vague goals without a plan of action usually remain unattainable, and if you do not take up the language right now, next year you will have to write down exactly the same promise in a notebook. Knowing how difficult independent lessons are sometimes given, ForumDaily decided to draw up a plan for you to pull up English, which does not require serious financial investments.

But first you need to figure out what “learn English” means to you? Why do you need the coveted “fluency”? How will you know when you have reached the desired level? In what situations will you use English? For one person this will be successfully passing interviews in English, for another - understanding the stories of a tour guide while traveling, for a third - high scores in the IELTS or TOEFL exams, for a fourth - the ability to read the latest professional literature or take English-language online courses, and for a fifth — the opportunity to talk about your business to an English-speaking audience on social networks.

After you have found your own answer to this question, you need to understand which of the 4 basic skills are key for you - listening, reading, speaking, writing?

If you are at least a little fluent in the language, then you probably know what causes you the greatest difficulty. Write all 4 skills in a column in descending order of priority.

For example, if your goal is to enjoy TV series and films without translation or dubbing, the main skill for you is oral comprehension, second is reading (for example, for subtitles at first), then speaking (for example, to discuss a film with English-speaking friends) and a letter (to do the same on a forum or on social networks). During interviews, your task is to speak fluently and beautifully, as well as understand spoken language, without asking your interlocutor what he actually said. And if English is needed to communicate with foreign colleagues or clients via email, written language comes to the fore.

Base: Grammar and Vocabulary

Regardless of what skills you have identified as key, you will have to work hard on your grammar and vocabulary - passive and active. This is something you will have to pay attention to every day. For the most disciplined and diligent, there are time-tested textbooks by Raymond Murphy - English Grammar in Use and English Vocabulary in Use.

Anyone who can force himself to systematically study the rules, read texts and do exercises for several months is guaranteed to lay a solid foundation for English practice - of course, provided that he selects an option appropriate to his level of preparation: an “advanced” student will not receive any benefit from an Intermediate level textbook, and a beginner will lose faith in himself when faced with tasks of this level.

If you skimmed the previous paragraph with the thought “well, no, I won’t sit over the textbook, let’s do it another way,” there is good news for you. Modern technologies make it possible to study more comfortably - with video and audio materials, with automatic checking of assignments instead of “keys” to exercises at the end of the book, with the opportunity to ask a teacher with a difficult question.

Online School ABA English, which received the 2015 Reimagine Education Award for Best Educational App, is an example of such a program. After registering on the website or application, the student gets access to 6 of the 144 mini-movies - the first lesson for each level, as well as all 144 grammar lessons - these materials will always be available.

A total of ABA English 6 levels: Beginners, Lower Intermediate, Intermediate, Upper Intermediate, Advanced, Business. They correspond to the A1-C1 levels in the Common European Reference Framework (CEFR) classification. At the end of each level the student expects a test, and after passing the test, you can download the official certificate.

The paid version adds tests, tutor support and exercises based on the “listen-record-compare” principle. Subscribers of the free version are constantly offered discounts on the paid version - for a month, three, six months or a year, so it makes sense to first register on the site, find lessons of the required level and make sure that this method of presenting material works for you, and then take advantage of the special offer.

We should also talk about the main tool for expanding vocabulary - the dictionary. Electronic dictionaries, despite their ease of use, make our brains lazy.

If in order to view the translation of a new word, you need to take a thick volume from the table, open it to the desired letter and drag your finger along the lines for a long time, looking for the desired article, the brain will try to remember the word from the first or second time, just not to repeat everything again.

If you just open Multitran, type a word on the keyboard and press “search”, the brain will not waste energy on memorization. So a paper dictionary is needed - if you use it at least 20% of the time, words and expressions will stick more firmly in your memory. And for everyone whose level is above the beginner level, the usual English-Russian dictionary should be replaced with an English encyclopedic dictionary - the additional step of deciphering the explanation of a new word will stimulate memory even better.

Listen

Listening to English is a challenging task for beginners, especially given the diversity of accents in the modern English-speaking world. Most often, to develop listening skills, it is recommended to watch British or American films and TV series, combining business with pleasure. Firstly, the “picture” creates a context that helps to understand what is being said, and secondly, in most streaming services, be it Netflix or Amazon, it is possible to turn on subtitles.

The bad news is that the effectiveness of this method is severely limited: you can end up unprepared for simple everyday situations by passively reviewing 3 of the Game of Thrones season, 2 of the House of Cards season and 5 of the Theory of the Big Bang theory.

The unpleasant truth is that materials should be selected not according to tastes, but according to goals. If you are going to attend a master class in English, you should search YouTube for recordings of similar topics (at the same time you will improve your vocabulary); if you want to understand jokes in sitcoms, stand-up comedians perform, and if you have to study in English, Coursera and iTunes University will come in handy, where you can find thousands of lectures at different levels on all sorts of topics.

Speak

Practicing speaking while in an English-speaking country, especially if it is the United States, is not very difficult. Americans love short, non-committal conversations with strangers. A conversation about the weather at a bus stop, a discussion of magazine covers at the supermarket checkout, a nice conversation with the owner of a cute dog - all this does not require much effort and will perfectly “loose the tongue” for those who do not believe in themselves. You yourself will not notice how the level of complexity of conversations will gradually increase.

Those who study English without being in an English-speaking environment have a harder time. In order to come to an English-speaking club or take part in a mitap, it is necessary to at least overcome the inherent constraint of beginners, and in the case of spoken clubs also lay out a tangible amount. In theory, services like Chatroulette are good, allowing you to speak in English with a random interlocutor, but in practice the chances of meaningful conversation are scanty.

An unexpected, but surprisingly convenient place for language practice is voice chats in video games. The flow of the game keeps the conversation going, and the motivation to understand your teammate is very high. The disadvantages include a limited vocabulary and an abundance of slang, understandable only to regulars of voice chats.

And, of course, no one has canceled the ancient recommendation to read aloud. An important component of spoken English is its rhythm, and a person who has learned to hear and reproduce this rhythm will be less likely to make mistakes with articles and stress. Repeat phrases from video bloggers and radio hosts, sing along to your favorite songs while driving, read traffic lights out loud and comment on your actions. There is, of course, a risk of feeling stupid, but it’s better than sitting silently for another year with a serious face, but never making any progress in learning English.

Read more...

Reading more is almost the first piece of advice people hear when they want to improve or learn English. It is often paired with a recommendation to write down unfamiliar words and try to use them throughout the day. It sounds good, but in reality it is quite difficult to get the “malaria incidence rate” and “let me ask you to the next dance” phrases put into place. To answer the question “what to read?”, you need to turn again to your personal goal of learning English.

What are you going to read when you know English? Recipes? News and sharp political columns? Manuals for programmers? Lives of American presidents? All? Start reading it now, as if you already know English, and it does not matter that it takes half an hour to analyze a paragraph with a dictionary.

The complexity of the readable texts should be selected according to the following principle: 20% at the limit, 80% without voltage. This means that every day you read one article, one page, or at least one paragraph of text that is given to you with difficulty and makes you look into the dictionary.

Photos from abaenglish.com

Complicated material should make 20% of the volume of your reading per day, that is, after one difficult paragraph, you can read the 4 paragraph of light entertainment content, whether it is a joke list on Buzzfeed or a children's book about the adventures of a talking cat.

Letter

In written English, you can improve all your life: not every native speaker is able to correctly and coherently formulate thoughts in writing, let alone talk about English learners. Therefore, here your personal goal is important as nowhere else: you need to carefully study the scope of written English.

You can learn how to write standard working emails in 1-2 of the day with knowledge of English at the level of Beginner or Pre-Intermidiate: the correspondence is based on standard formulas.

Student essays have a clear structure, there are lists of useful expressions for written works. The language of news stories has a distinctive syntax. Whatever your goal, find the samples. Write out useful expressions and grammatical structures, use them in your own sentences.

It is useful to keep a diary in English, chat on forums and social networks. This not only makes you carefully recheck your own remarks, but also subconsciously absorb the language from the interlocutor's answers: we read the words addressed to us more carefully than the abstract texts.

See also:

Learn English by song

8 children's YouTube channels for learning English

How to get rid of accent in English

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