АнглийскийIt's funny to write how are you learning English in order to practice learning English Nevertheless, it takes a considerable part of my current activities, and I do not have more meaningful topic to write at this moment.

I was again watching Tech Ladies webinar last Thursday. My ability to understand live american speech disappoints me much. I had to re-watch the recordings of previous two webinars that I listened to, and will do the same this time. The main ideas were clear, especially when looking on the presentation slides, but there were a lot of phrases that slip away from my perception. So, considering it as a audition exercise, I often had to replay recorded fragments, some of them several times, and concentrate, and listen to them attentively. I'm proud of understanding some compound sentences, for example «our ancestors, who thought that the rumbling in the bush was a pretty little bunny and not the the rattlesnake, probably haven't become our ancestors». (Because I didn't known the word «rattlesnake» at that moment and the «rumbling» was a new entry in my vocabulary). But my general inability to perceive the whole speech on the fly upsets me.

Sometimes I think that it would be better not to play into self-education, but join some online English school, or take a personal tutor. It would be displeasing to memorize something wrongly, to "seal" speech mistakes without the control of a literate person. And also my progress seems to be very slow In the article from one English school it was stated that to be improving quickly you have to work with a teacher 2-3 times a week, make homeworks, and additionaly spend 5-10 minutes dayly refreshing words in your vocabulary. I don't think I'm capable of this.
On the other hand I have no immediate need to speak English on the high level right now, so I prefer to postpone the idea of paid lessons for some time. It is hardly possible to learn figure skating without a trainer, as there are not so many opportunities in everyday life to interact with whose who can skate. But there is endless number of sources with English from native speakers, educated and having correct pronunciation. At this moment I prefer to believe that regular practice is more important than having someone tracking your mistakes.

Recently, I've pushed Vova to start learning English too. He installed Duolingo app and now plays with this funny owlet every evening:



However, for me Duolingo lessons seem to be very easy. I've tried exercises even from the last levels, but they looked trivial and stamped for me. Possibly, it is the application for those who learn several languages on the base level, not single English in the deep.
The feature that I greatly liked in the Duolingo was the opportunity to check phrases that you pronounce to the microphone. But, unfortunately, it is again possible only for template sentences.

I'm still using as a main tool the application with another animal, Lingualeo:



Besides this two services I know also about "Puzzle English", but I haven't looked at that closely.

For me, the most useful feature Lingualeo is ability to learn words in dictionary that I've collected by myself. There is opportunity to add words from ready-made sets, but as I read, listen and watch material from real-life sources, I prefer to fill the list with unknown words encountered there. Word excercises in Lingualeo are multilateral: choosing correct english->russian translation, choosing russian->english translation, composing a word out of mixed letters, spelling a heard word, deciding weither the translation is right or not on speed. The main drawback of these training, in my opinion, is that the word is marked as "learned" right after you correctly performed all the exercises with it the first time. Such words do not appear in subsequent learning sessions anymore. At the beginning I used to look through "learned" list and manually transfer unremembered words back, but now I prefer to re-sent for studying only those words that I meet once again in another place. I'm adding new words frequently and it seems unreasonable to thoroughly memorize rarely used terms.

Another training I greatly like in Lingualeo is the "Compose sentence" audition exercise. You have to listen to a phrase and then select words that form this sentence, one by one, from proposed options. I usually fail on mixing up words like "are" and "were", plural form with singular etc.
Similar principle is used in a grammar exercise. You are given a russian sentence and you have to select corresponding English words, one by one, to form grammatical construction of specified type. There are also theoretical grammar courses, with explanation of rules, examples, exercises and tests, but they are included into commercial version only. My subscription has ended recently and I decided to do free exercises for some time.

Lingualeo has also wide range of materials, both textual and video, but I prefer to use resources that I encounter in everyday life. Besides the webinars mentioned in the beginning of the post, I've subscribed to a number of mailing lists about IT, Machine Learning, management, entrepreneurship etc. They provide an endless source of new words and phrases for me. Recently I've started to train speaking skills using the read articles. That mean that I turn on a dictaphone after reading and pronounce my thoughts on the discussed topics, then listen to the recording, notice errors, re-formulate better and speak again. Three such iterations take about ~30 minutes, so I rarely perform more.

And again, I write this posts, with great assistance of Google Translate I use it not only to translate something to English, but also to check the spelling and the correctness of the composed phrases. In addition, the OpenDataScience course that I joined recently is also performed on English, so it adds to my training opportunities.

And I sincerely hope that it all will help. I've heard that getting immersed in language is very useful method to learn it. So, I will go this way for now.

@темы: english writing skills, Жизненное