How I spent 1000 hours learning English in 2016



    Learning a foreign language can be a real test for an adult if he abandoned this subject at an early age. It is also hard for those to whom languages ​​are poorly given by nature. If a person has at least one of these problems, he usually just does not learn a new language. But I was not one of those, and was able to overcome these two failures.

    While studying at the undergraduate program, I was able to develop a vocabulary of up to 10,000 and break through the barrier of reading fiction. But listening comprehension is a much more difficult task. For a long time I considered it unsolvable , I did not believe in success.

    This article is about how the impossible was made possible, how in the very heart of the magistracy I broke through the impregnable stronghold of listening. This burden fell on 2016. I have tried many different teaching methods and will tell you about them in detail , on what materials I studied and what conclusions I made. This article is a huge stock of experience, and I hope that it will be useful to you.

    School


    Many of my friends who know English well studied it from early childhood , gradually and little by little. I studied at a German school and in grades 1-6 I knew German at a normal level for those years. Then I transferred to a better school, and there was English. A few months with a tutor gave me the most basic basics, such as the ability to write letters, 100 basic words and the basics of grammar. The difference between this level and grade 7 in the new school was too big and I never caught up with it there, just scoring on this subject. The whole course of school English passed me by. Some believe that even if a person does not listen in the lesson, he will still remember some passages. But in my case, even this did not work, since I had the talent to go inside and let the information pass by. Also, I had speech problems that exacerbated the situation.

    Russian language was hardand it was always between two and three. An interesting fact is that I wrote a personal diary, starting in 2006, first on paper, and only then in electronic form. But the grammar there was just awful, and the vocabulary is even worse, down to fictitious words and distortion of meanings. But I wrote, re-read, understood, and this laid an interest in writing, thanks to which I was then able to write decent and successful articles for Habr .

    Undergraduate


    In 2011, I entered the uncomplicated technical undergraduate program at SUAI (computer science and computer engineering). The key word here is uncomplicated - for four years I had a lot of free time. Even when I entered, I set one of the goals for my student years - to learn English. I must admit, even at school I missed books, and in my entire life I read only about 10 books in Russian. I wanted to catch up with English books, and I successfully began to do this from the end of the second year.

    Without going into details, I’ll say that I just started reading simple books (Harry Potter)on the reader and translate obscure words. This technique is not effective, but I got a little pleasure, read it on the subway, on the bus, at home on the bed ... Some words (broom, dorm and so on) were repeated and remembered due to this. Also, the reading skill itself grew, albeit slowly. But I loved reading, and it is very important. If you like something, then you can spend a huge number of hours on it, completely unnoticed.

    Ignorance of grammar made it difficult to translate. She was at zero with me, despite the 4 books I read (3 parts of GP + Star Wars, episode 5). In Harry Potter, I understood about 50-60%, but complex designs, at times, simply killed the desire to read! Especially if there were some important thoughts. In the 4th year, I decided to tighten the grammar, bought and completely resolved Red Murphy, due to which he greatly developed the skill of text recognition and the basics of grammar were obtained. Most of the theory was quickly forgotten (I did not practice it in writing and did not repeat it in any way), but the skill of working with text was very useful.

    Then, in the summer after the undergraduate program (2015), I discovered Anki and compiled about 1 thousand cards with words (after reading and sawing 1.5 books from The Chronicles of Amber series ), using interval repetition to memorize them. These two factors (vocabulary and text analysis skills) allowed me to make a breakthrough in reading and read my first book The Hunger Games without a dictionary, quickly and with burning interest. Also, the site http://testyourvocab.com/showed 13,200 words, which pleased. Although I knew much less.

    In my knowledge of English there was a strong imbalance - my reading and vocabulary skills were well developed, but my listening and speaking skills were completely absent. When I read books, the words in my mind were spoken somehow. For example, I pronounced the letter G at the end of words with an ing-ending. And this was my “comfortable reading zone”, from which, of course, I had to leave.

    Graduation and the beginning of the magistracy (1 semester)


    In May 2015, before the release, I decided to get my first experience in speech recognition. I downloaded podcasts from the voice of America (VOA) and began to listen to them. There was monotonous and adapted in every sense speech. The main technique that I used was listening to the same series repeatedly. For example, there were short stories (15 minutes each), and I listened to each of them 3 times in a row. I was amazed at what my brain is capable of! After all, the first audition gave only general features of the plot (30%), and the second and third reached 50 and 80 percent. In total, I listened to about 23 hours of adapted English speech and it took a month. I did not use transcriptions (the vocabulary was so large) and received information exclusively through the audio channel.

    In the summer I plunged into reading, but in September I decided to take up the listening process with renewed vigor. Why not watch some programming video course? After all, there should be simple speech and it should be interesting! I found a good 6-hour video course on AngularJS from Tony Alicea and in just a week I mastered the first version of this wonderful framework. I rarely rewound, the author did not speak quickly and clearly. I have long dreamed of learning to watch video courses in English on programming - and here it is! But I was happy early, because the difference between a lecture and colloquial speech is simply enormous.

    In October 2015, I tried to watch the series "Friends" and it was just HELL! I understood, at best, 20-30%, and repeated views, it seemed, did not give any increase at all. Yes, I really wanted to fasten the method of multiple viewing without subtitles to the series, but it turned out to be done only after a year (in September 2016). But let's not get ahead of ourselves. At this stage, I was simply obligated to carry out a complete analysis of each video with subtitles. It is hard and unpleasant. Spoken vocabulary, it turns out, is very different from the book. My vocabulary is NOT enough. There are 10 unfamiliar words for 1 series, and this is too much. I have to completely make out each series, somehow learn the words (this is not so simple, you have to draw up cards and organize the interval repetition separately), and then also develop listening. How? Forum recommend rewinding. But my brain was so dull then that it was necessary to rewind 2-3 times, and sometimes even at 5-6 it was not possible to recognize speech and compare it with subtitles. And even with so many rewinds, I almost didn’t remember anything! That is, if in a week to revise the same series, then most of these rewound moments simply need to rewind again! I experimented and tested it! There was a feeling that my brain just CANNOT remember speech, or does it EXTREMELY slowly.



    Looking ahead, I’ll say that you just need to spend a lot of effort and train your speech memory. After a year of hard training, my speech memory will develop so abruptly that I will grasp and memorize more than half of the phrases the first time, and 80% of the remaining words will be easily displayed without subtitles from the second or third viewing. And all this will remain in memory for a very long time, and not disappear in a week. But back to the end of the year 15, when my speech memory was terribly weak.

    I developed a hellish technique in which at first I just watch the series (I get used to it and try to understand the general plot), then I revise it with the analysis and writing out of words, rewinding and detailed translation. And only then - I review it a third time and do it immediately after the previous step, while the rewound fragments still lie in memory. This technique completely developed the skill and the rewound fragments really lingered in my memory,however, she was simply unbearably heavy and tedious . I did not hold out for more than a week.

    I ran from Season 1 to Season 5 of Friends, trying different techniques in the first few episodes of the season and hoping that the next technique would work. But all this was inefficient and a different solution to the problem was needed.

    I have friends who managed to quickly learn English and leave for Finka (Alexander and Philip). I talked a lot with them on the topic of language learning. They said that podcasts are powerful and that you need to listen to them more. What exactly podcasts are a bridge between lecture speech and colloquial. But no matter how hard I tried, the podcasts never stuck with me (apart from VOA at the initial stage, but I got tired of it and I just couldn't listen to it anymore). Perhaps this is an individual and not everyone podcasts are suitable. Maybe I tried a little and looked on the wrong side at them? I don’t know, but the fact remains.

    Also, these guys claimed that they watched their favorite films more than 10 times and it was effective. I don’t really like films and can’t always sit to the end, let alone re-watch. But if you like movies - this technique can play in your favor.

    At the birthday of my classmate Lyokha, I met Mikhail. As it turned out, this person’s knowledge of English is just cosmic (better than any of my friends), despite the fact that he always lived in St. Petersburg. It interested me. He said that he has been studying English for more than 10 years and that he studied very much with tutors, watched films and read. He, like those friends from Finland, all passed IELTS to the Advanced level many years ago.

    I asked Miha - “how much do you understand when you watch a movie?”And he answered- "I understand 100%." It shocked me . I asked - “how so? After all, for sure there are new words there, some sharp remarks of the characters, and so on! ” And Micah explained to me that there are very few such moments, they are all inferred from the context. Filmmakers and book authors deliberately think through their works so that knowledge of rare words is not the key to the plot. They are either clear from the context, or there is a synonym word nearby.

    In November, together with Micah and Lyokha, we went to a conference of Java developers (Joker). There was a spring lecture in English. I knew the material in advance, and for Micah it was completely new. So here. I was disgraced and understood only 40-50%, while Micah understood almost everything. He also said that the lecturer had very good and clear speech without an accent, trolling me, not wanting it. And then I promised myself that I would spend the whole of 2016 on the development of listening skills, at all costs. And Michael oversaw my training and helped with valuable advice.

    I have repeatedly heard that for the development of listening, you can listen to anything, if only it would be interesting, but more. For starters, I wanted to find some great IT course. I really wanted to tighten my knowledge of Spring and I looked closely at the course on Udemy (28 hours). However, I did not really like this course. I don’t remember the exact reason, but it seems to me that he seemed not very high quality and not very professional for a number of reasons.

    As a result, I came to the conclusion that developing listening to IT lectures is not very effective. Programmers learn more from books or documentation. I was thinking about lectures from Comuter Science (about some kind of graph theory there), but it was not very interesting.

    “Maybe it’s worth developing listening to scientific lectures,” I thought. I always had a dream to study medicine, at least at the basic level. I chose a college level lecture course from TTC (How we fail how we heal) and started watching it. There are only 24 lectures for 30 minutes, but I spent as much as 78 hours on this course. At first, I had to google a lot, lacked knowledge of the natural sciences (biology, chemistry). Also, poor speech recognition skills slowed down the process and I often rewound. But recognizing speech was much easier than in the series. In the first lectures, I spent about 3 hours each (6 times longer than the lecture itself). But then the speed was increased to 2 hours per lecture due to getting used to Dr. Goodman’s speech and replenishing the vocabulary with new words and turns.



    Let it be hard in places, but it was interesting! For me, medical lectures in English are something new, exciting, unusual. About all sorts of viruses, about prions, cancer, the immune response, about all kinds of worms. I still remember a lot of things, although not in detail. In general, the very idea of ​​temporarily moving away from IT and switching to something from a fundamentally different field turned out to be very good.

    An important point to make - in October 2015, I wrote a mobile application for total monitoring of training. It allows you to score the beginning and end of the lesson, as well as the training course in which I am engaged. Then it displays statistics on how much time has been spent, from what date, to what date, and so on. Therefore, all the watches that are given in this article are highly accurate. My entire educational industry in 2016 is in front of me in the palm of my hand, in the form of a single tablet.

    I have repeatedly heard that it is necessary to develop listening and speaking in parallel. My speech was still at zero, how to develop it? Listening is said to stimulate speech. Unfortunately, this was not the stage. My speech memory was very weak in 2015. Those 100 hours that I spent listening that year were remembered extremely badly. But that’s normal, it should be so.

    I googled and stumbled upon Pimsler's conversational course. It is intended for the very, most beginners, and this is just my case. I spent 22 hours completing its first part, then another 5 hours talking with a friend on Skype in English. But I still did not know how to express my thoughts normally, I did not know how to build sentences. In general, I learned some basics, but remained unsatisfied.



    Master (2 semester)


    So 2015 is over. This is just the beginning of the article; all that was written before is an introduction. I thought I spent a lot of time developing the listening skill, but that was only the beginning. The very beginning. When the chimes struck, I made a wish - by the end of 2016 I would learn to watch movies and TV shows and understand speech by more than 90%. And do it at ANY price. Everything for the front, everything for the victory.

    Before me stood January, all free, as I had closed almost the entire session early. Where to go next? I decided to continue the development of the scientific and medical path , and to study one of the natural sciences. I have long wanted to study chemistry for a number of reasons, and therefore my choice fell on it. Contrary to popular belief in Russia, chemistry is a very cool science, in the West it is even calledthe central science . Also, contrary to another erroneous opinion, it is not at all complicated if you study it sequentially and understand why it is for you.

    After reading the different courses, I chose a very voluminous and interesting course on Educator.com (General Chemistry) and bought an inexpensive subscription. The author (Dr. Harold Goldwhite) is a Briton with vast experience, has written a very high-quality course, speaks very simply and clearly, much more understandable than Dr. Goodman.

    I got carried away, began to study every day for 3 hours, and mastered this course in less than 1.5 months. Recently, I have a tradition - to inspect the courses to the end, and I followed her, although in the end he already bored me. The whole course cost me 119 hours and that is pretty much. At 1 hour of the lecture there were 2-2.5 hours of real training, I listened slowly to it, rewound it when it was not clear, solved problems in parallel with the lecturer, and some lectures were simply unforgettable. True, I also wanted to solve the problems in the problem book and pass the AP Chemistry under the simulator, but these plans were not destined to materialize. The February depression, which covers me every year, came for its share, and for some time I did not study anything at all.

    During the depression, I returned to my favorite reading. A year ago, I downloaded a large archive of books on the Star Wars universe onto PocketBook, but I didn’t read any of them. Reviewing this archive, I came across a series of Jedi Apprentice , which dragged me on for a very long time. Not noticeably for myself, I spent 80 hours on it and read for two months. It was really interesting and fascinating, I read 13 parts with a total of about 1,100 pages of simple English text.



    I’ve been wondering for a long time - does the Harry Potter series of books have a male analogue (after all, she’s, after all, female)? As it turned out, the Jedi Apprentice series is just that. The Jedi Temple on Coruscant is very much like Hogwarts, the plot is tied to the adventure of his students. This series of books is also designed for children and adolescents, written in simple language. And she's just riddled with exciting adventures. Every second book in the series fascinated me greatly.

    I read these books for fun. They brought very little benefit for learning English, and even more so did nothing for the development of listening skills. But that was awesome!

    Inspired by the success, I decided to spend this semester reading and pumping up my vocabulary even more. I started reading the book If tomorrow comesfrom Sydney Sheldon and compile Anki cards. This is an adult book, so it was hard to read and there were many new words. But I still didn’t finish it, having read only 40% (in 30 hours), and now I will explain why.

    In parallel with the book, I decided to watch some uncomplicated animated series in order to develop listening. I took an old-school What's with Andy and reviewed every series of it 2-3 times. I was hoping that this time I will be able to fasten the technique of multiple viewing without subtitles, but I miscalculated . The time has not come yet. The difference between repetitions was too small. This led me into depression and I abandoned both the cartoon and the book. Downloading vocabulary further is an imbalance. You must first tighten the listening skill.

    I listened so much, both that year and in January, and my skill is still weak. I tried to continue browsing the Friends, and found that I understood them just as poorly as in November. What have I done wrong? They write on the Internet that people have been studying the language for years and many years pass before they start to watch movies freely. If you remove the months of rest and reading, then I spent on listening ... 4 months . At the EFL.ru forum, they told me that normally people work for 2-3 years to achieve free viewing of films (and this is after the English school), and if you study from scratch, it may take 4-5 years! I don’t have that much time. I decided to use programming skills to speed up the process.

    I thought for a very long time, and came to a very original solution. Imagine that you are watching some video using a special program that allows you to cut out all incomprehensible fragments and work them out separately from the video itself. Moreover, it uses interval repetitions and you can be 100% sure that you remember all these fragments. The program should simply amazingly develop speech memory and listening, as a result. I was looking for such a program, but could not find it, so I decided to write it myself.

    The first working prototype was developed quite quickly, and I completely saw 1 season from Adventure Timeon small clips. I made 1174 videos, 46 for each episode. And for each of them, the repetition interval was calculated (as in Anki), so that their repetition was pleasant and effective. I saw great progress and very quick getting used to the voices. And that was cool.



    It may seem to you that cutting clips while watching a video is tedious, but it’s not. I automated cutting to the maximum and 1 clip was cut in a few clicks of the mouse. Cutting clips and practicing them separately from viewing was many times more pleasant than rewinding with the mouse. Remember, I mentioned at the beginning of the article about the hellish technique with rewinds and revisions? So, the technique of cutting a clip and its individual development was many times more effective than it.

    I spent a lot of time improving this program and even decided to try selling it. As a business project, it turned out to be not very successful, but I did the program for myself, and not for sales, and got a lot of experience (the client part is written entirely in AngularJS, Groovy on the server, experiments with Jetty and H2). Now the program has been removed from open access, as too much time and energy was spent on her support and they did not pay off.

    image

    After Adventure TimeI decided to switch to friends and took up this matter very thoroughly. For two and a half months I studied with the program and watched Friends on it. Fifth season - it was a mess. 74 hours were spent on it (41 - viewing and cutting clips, 33 - working out and repeating them). The sixth season took less - 50 hours. The seventh is 34, the eighth is 29. The ninth is also 29. The tenth is 5 (I did not watch it to the end).

    With each new season (except the last), I saw progress, speech became more and more clear, classes themselves as a whole brought pleasure. And I continued to practice. I counted the interval reps separately and they took 44 hours (clips from all seasons gradually poured into it). As a result, I made about 5000 clips. They contained 1000 cards with purely colloquial vocabulary. I will then recognize this lexical base in all other series and films.



    In total, the project “Friends” took 265 training hours, and it was here that I broke through the “impossible” listening skill. The whole range of interval listening (program development and training on it) cost me more than 500 hours !!! But it was worth it, it was here that I tremendously developed the speech memory, which was so lacking, and made tens of thousands of attempts to “stretch” the speech, which is in my memory, to the speech that I hear.



    I have not watched my friends' tenth season yet. Back in the ninth, regression began, and then I realized that I hate Friends and I’m really tired of all this. I was too fixated on friends and on one teaching methodology. In the middle of summer 2016, I closed this monster-like project and rested for several weeks.

    In August, I decided to try free viewing. I still got used to new voices for a long time, but further - after getting used to it - miracles began. I decided to review one of my childhood cartoons (Megas XLR), and found that I understand more than half the first time! Moreover, about 30% was heard amazingly clearly, my brain learned to catch and highlight words, even if they were spoken somehow and with missing letters. And this heard speech accompanied the video so well and corresponded to my memories from the past that I shed a tear. For me it was a huge event and I realized that the summer was not spent in vain.

    I also noticed that I can speak, albeit very crookedly. A huge set of template phrases in the head plays a positive role. I remembered a lot of replicas of Chandler, Joey, Rachel and other characters and repeated them loudly, imitating the actors.

    I decided to see something new and discovered Avatar the last airbender . They recommended it to me on the forum as a very easy animated series. Although it is designed for children, but it has many adult fans. The magical world itself is very captivating, the idea of ​​magic duels is also good. Avatar the last airbender is a good, high-quality American anime. The graphics there are much more pleasing to the eye than in Futurama or in Adventure Time. You can take note of it. This is the first animated series that I watched without subtitles the first time. He became one of the symbols of this year.



    Then I freely watched some more cartoons from childhood and decided to conduct an experiment. Probably now is the time to introduce the very technique of multiple views without subtitles! I watched season 1 of the old Spider-Man, looking at each episode 2-3 times. And she came here just right! The first time I understood about 30 percent, and the second and third time - 50 and 70. At the end of the series, I pumped up to 40-60-80%!

    Now I realized that I could pump the listening further by multiple views. What is the most difficult and impossible behind. I decided to rest before the final offensive and read books. I read Catcher in the Rye freely (18 hours) and almost read the third part of the hunger games.

    Master (3 semester)


    In September, I had a very interesting idea regarding vocabulary replenishment. What if you write down the words not in the form of “word” → “translation” , but in the form of “Sentence with a highlighted word” → “translation” . This idea was just super! Words in the context are remembered several times faster! The experiment showed that if you remember a word with a sentence, then you can easily remember it in another sentence or separately. If you make up Anki-cards with words, DO NOT use bare words in any case!

    I completely read the famous book "I, Robot" and wrote out 512 Anki-cards of a new format. I must admit, the book is very abstruse and it was hard for me to read it (spent 41 hours). Yes, despite the fact that I read a huge number of simple books, I never learned to read complex ones. I think we need to take grammar to a new level and learn how to write texts myself, and only then can I read complex books.

    Then I decided to relax and work on the web (spending 31 hours reading the HTML specification and 34 hours reading chapters from the CSS book). But it was a fleeting distraction, and I don’t even include it in the total amount, because it did not give my English anything at all.

    And now - back to the master plan. I decided to continue the course of watching comedies with American speaking. The series “How I Met Your Mother” (HIMYM) was selected. It is more modern and I saw in it that very continuation of Friends, quickly falling in love with the actors. And here the technique of multiple viewing without subtitles showed all its strength! I reached 90% understanding from the 3rd time (in rare cases, I reviewed the series 4 times). And I saw the pumping of the speech recognition skill, fast and effective! How cool it was.



    Let us dwell in more detail on how the speech recognition skill nevertheless develops. It finally came to me. You can know thousands of words and their different sound options, but this is knowledge, not skill.The skill is that your brain “bends” this knowledge to a specific speed or emphasis . Speaking speed is always different. Words can be spoken in different voices and accents, with missing letters. In some cases, an actor may even skip a word or say it in one sound. You need to keep as many phrases as possible (the more developed the speech memory, the better) and train your brain to compare these patterns with what you heard.

    Lily's smile inspired hope, I loved her even more than Rachel. The first season of HIMYM took 29 hours. I almost never rewound and didn't turn on subtitles at all. New words were either omitted or taken out of context. In some cases, when I heard a new word very well, I hammered it into Google and translated it.

    In parallel with the first HIMYM season, I was watching the first ALF season (an old film from the 90s about a shaggy alien). And I want to tell you - it is super-great for learners of a foreign language:

    1. Speech is easier than with Friends and HIMYM. Some classify ALF as Upper-Interdemate, and Friends as Advanced.
    2. Good picture quality (despite the fact that the series is old)
    3. Pleasant looking interior scenes. Their concentration is even greater than in friends. Sometimes I had the feeling of being immersed in an American family, as if I were living with them
    4. Large volume (4 seasons), but at the same time a series of 20 minutes, which allows us to use 3-4 times without stopping



    In November, another depression came over me and I decided to play games. Do you like games? Is it possible to develop English using games? Opinions differ. Let's try to figure out what's what.

    All my childhood I played, like many guys of my age. I will even say this - computer games were my greatest happiness in elementary and high school. But when I started to do a lot of mathematics and programming, I began to think a lot - interest in games began to fall noticeably (grade 9). And only in the second year I finally came to terms with the fact that the old love of games cannot be returned, and that the happy, gaming future that I had dreamed about would never come. Since then I have been playing a little, and only in old games, to refresh the pleasant memories of the past.

    I always played in Russian like a sucker, and dreamed of switching to the original language. Repeated attempts were unsuccessful, the words and text were incomprehensible, and the speech just passed me by and there was nothing to understand at all. But most importantly - the game in English then aroused great disgust for me . Theoretically, I could invest a lot of effort and force myself to play a lot of English, but it would probably take at least half a year or a year to get used to new words and speech. But I did not want to waste my efforts and play at a loss.

    In mid-2016, thanks to the series and the focused development of listening, I was able to easily switch to English games and fulfill my former dream. This year I spent 186 hours playing games, but most of the time I played the same old, single games, and this almost did not benefit the language. Unless, Diablo III really developed my listening and vocabulary a bit (there are a lot of subjects, someone constantly says something and these remarks are repeated). In general, approximately 20 hours was really useful for learning the language.

    What kind of games do you like? It is important. Only MMO RPGs are well suited for language learning, there is even a scientific dissertation about this. Frankly, I hate online games and their communities. I always played singles, it was a means of solitude and reunion with childhood. No matter how much I try to play with friends on the network, this did not take root.

    Online games can perfectly develop all 4 aspects of the language (reading, writing, listening and speaking). I even have a few friends who have learned English from games and still know it better than me. But I can’t do that. I have a number of problems related to games. For example, entering and leaving the virtual world is very unpleasant for the psyche. After the games, I am very distracted, my attention is reduced, and the perception of real space-time is disturbed. Training productivity reduced by 2 times. A number of abnormalities are also observed, such as very weak, but painful sensations throughout the body (especially in the back). None of the above problems I observed while watching TV shows or programming. I am in the same physical position (at the table in front of the PC, I'm sitting straight). Apparently, these problems are unsolvable.

    Why am I all this? You must decide for yourself whether you like the games.. Learning a language from games will only be effective if you really like to play and you play a hundred hours each month. Otherwise, there are many other, much more pleasant and effective approaches. I decided for myself that someday I will completely get rid of games.



    Each person has his own feminine and masculine principles. I must admit, the series "Friends" and "How I Met Your Mother" are set for a female audience. If you are a man, you can well watch them, have fun and develop your feminine, but from time to time it will seem to you that you got a little in the wrong place. Do Friends have a male counterpart? This question haunted me from the very beginning. When I came across the series "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," I realized that this was it.

    We give an example. In the series Friends, the most successful are girls and everyone falls at their feet. Everyone runs after Rachel and admire her beauty. Monica, albeit not the most beautiful in the group, but gets a lot of attention. A millionaire man wants to be with her, but she pisses him off. A caring Chandler is ready to create a family with her and cave in under her interests. And what about men? Dumb Joey can’t find a job and build a career, makes stupid mistakes. Ross is also henpecked. And they all love children, even Joey.

    Another thing is the series Sunny. There are all losers, but the girls are clearly worse than men. It seems that the plot is built on the trolling of the only girl in the company (Diandra). Her appearance is disgusting, and she behaves even worse. She makes fails every episode and everything turns out to be unsuccessful for her. All the characters constantly repeat Dee, how flawed she is, even relatives and friends. And the other two girls? One is a terrible alcoholic waitress, the other is a fat and nasty loser actress (Artemis). But look at the men. Denis and Mack constantly argue which of them is prettier and they both look great. They have fun, teasing each other and living a very fun life.



    I decided that I would watch this series without any repetition and without subtitles. I watched 5 seasons in 22 hours and was pleasantly surprised by the result. At the beginning of the first season, I got used to the actors and could easily understand the main storyline. And by the middle of the third season I was so carried away that at the peak there was an understanding of 80% in one of the series! I looked and understood almost everything! And so - it ranged from about 60 to 70 percent. It was a huge success. My skill has grown markedly. When I tried to watch the third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender , the understanding on some episodes went over 90%!

    I would like to make an important point. Understanding speech is highly dependent on your mood and how interesting you are. For example, at the end of the 5th season I was tired of watching Sunny and my understanding dropped below 50% (!!!).

    Do you like movies? Some people prefer movies rather than TV shows. But honestly, I don’t really like films. For all my life I watched just about 20 pieces. There are exceptions - movies that I really liked. But there are few of them. Why I don’t like films is a mystery, which has not yet been guessed. With games, everything is much simpler - I grew out of them. But movies then? Full of adults who are just crazy about movies.

    Before the very new year, my friend threw off the movie “Clowerfield lane 10” and I watched it in English, understanding more than 60%. It was interesting, but this is a rare case. I tried to see the suicide squad, but I did not like him, and it was also not very clear. I turned off in 20 minutes.

    Could I achieve the goal I set for this year (90% understanding of spoken language)? Nearly. I can understand 80% at the peak (when I'm used to the actors and interesting), and 50-60 in a randomly taken video. Can I watch movies freely? With restrictions. Can I watch lectures and study in English? Definitely. But the most important thing - now I know how to develop the speech recognition skill itself.And I know for sure by what methodology (2-3x viewing), what material (HIMYM) and to what extent (2-3 months) I will be engaged in 2017 in order to transfer the desired 90% . And the farther, the easier. In general, at this stage, you can just watch a lot of all sorts of TV shows freely and achieve the same 90%, but it will be 6-12 months.

    Over this year, my skill in recognizing English has probably improved every 100 times. Some of my loser acquaintances believe that 22 years is too late to learn the language, but I have proved the opposite. There is a stereotype that an adult learns worse than a child. But it starts to seem to me that in practice it's quite the opposite!

    I see two keys to self-education - the ability to force oneself and the correct, individual selection of teaching methods and materials. An adult is free and independent of teachers or school, he can change tutors or do without them at all, he can take time off from work and devote himself to learning the language if he wants. All in your hands.

    December and plans for the 4th semester of the magistracy


    I decided to end the year with the development of grammar and writing. For 2 months I spent a huge number of experiments on developing an effective technique for embedding grammatical theory into practice. And he solved the Blue Murphy by about 30%. But this is a topic for a separate article, which I will definitely write closer to the summer. Without going into details, I will say that I spent more than 100 hours and raised the letter by about 1.5 levels.

    In 2013, I spent 200 hours on a quality, in-depth study of Java SE 7 from a book. Learning English in 2016 alone cost more than 1,000 hours. I spent 5 times more time, despite the fact that I completed Java training, and I will study English for a very, very long time ...

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