Fair warning up front: this is about "English learning," a topic the world already has in rotting abundance.
After changing jobs, I had to work in English.
I'd thought I was fine for basic communication — but once I actually started working in English, it was still nowhere near enough, and I saw what needed fixing. (Almost fatally...)
For example, I can say what I want to say, but sometimes I don't catch enough of what the other person is saying. They understand my clumsy English, but I can't understand theirs — which is an annoying situation.
Simply put, listening is lacking. Panicking, I rushed to YouTube to search how to train English listening.
They advise: watch foreign dramas (always-correct Friends)! First with subtitles, look up unknown words, then without subtitles, and so on.
At every turning point in life when I've tried to get English and lasted three days, I somehow end up at the same study methods.
The royal road really is best. You just have to spend time and follow it.
Luckily or unluckily, I'm in an environment where English adds almost no bonus (and without it you're in the red) — so if I don't learn, my position dies. I have to do it.
Meaning: motivation isn't part of the package. That makes it oddly easy. Necessity is always the mother of invention.
Which is why people who can work hard at a foreign language — or related exams — even when they don't need to are amazing. My only experience with those is quitting.
Studying English seriously, I notice all kinds of things — "if you can't pronounce it you can't hear it," "the gap between the sounds you recognize and the real ones is the problem," "it comes down to vocabulary" — and I trial-and-error.
In the end there are many methods and tips, but you have to keep improving while holding all that knowledge and insight together.
Better to judge that as high freedom and fun than as "so much I have to do." (It is fun... for now.)
There's no single method; you need both quantity and quality, and only by trying many approaches do you feel you inch to the next step.
Long ago, a foreign comedian fluent in Japanese, asked how to speak a foreign language, said: "Do everything. Read a ton, listen a ton, write a ton, speak a ton." Exactly. That's the essence.
When a non-native Japanese-speaking colleague asked how to study Japanese, I thought hard and could only conclude: "using it a lot is good." (But it isn't a lie.)
I'll keep doing everything, in volume. As long as there's need, I can probably keep going somehow. Short post — that's all. It turned into a blog below even the usual cliché level.
This blog, by the way, is always encouraged by "How to master English in a short ten years" — a useful way of thinking about English study, so please read it if you can.
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