Hi all! As a certified teacher and translator with several working foreign languages, over fifteen years of working experience and many dozens of students, I have formed my own vision of the most effective approaches to learning a foreign language, which I will try to present as compactly as possible. Time is the most valuable resource, and it’s a shame to waste it on something that doesn’t bring the maximum effect. I hope it will be useful. I won’t go on and on about how important English is for an IT specialist who wants to work with foreign clients. To save time, let’s imagine that you are already motivated enough to become that rare specialist who has great technical knowledge and good Upper Intermediate, and I don’t need to wave my pipidastras in front of you and chant motivating slogans.
Point 1. The main law of learning.
So, the main engine of any progress (whether in sports, even in Java, even in English) is a slightly lower level of your capabilities compared to the level of what you need to do. You can easily walk for 10 minutes, which means that a ten-minute walk will not help you prepare for an iron man. You are familiar with System.out.println(), which means 500 simple tasks like “display such and such an inscription on the screen” will not bring you any closer to understanding arrays. Progress will happen when you have to work a little harder to achieve your goal. And “a little” is a very important word here. If the task is too difficult, you can stress yourself out, get disappointed and generally give up, assigning to yourself the erroneous meaning “languages are just not my thing.” What does this mean for us? That lazy viewing of videos in English on YouTube has, in terms of efficiency, efficiency close to zero. Don’t console yourself with self-soothing mantras that this is how you increase your level. Your brain simply grabs those words that you already know, and based on your passive knowledge, it constructs what you did not hear/understand, and voila - you seem to have grasped the meaning, but there is no progress. How to fix this and not go crazy? If we are talking about videos, then set yourself the task of understanding EVERYTHING that the speaker says. Just so that you can repeat the entire sentence word for word, and not just convey its meaning. If necessary, slow down the video, listen back several times, listen with headphones. This will immediately activate your listening skills. Plus, look for unfamiliar words in the dictionary, and once you find them, listen again to the sentence where they appeared. The optimal difficulty of a video is where you understand 70% from the first listen. If you understand more, it’s too easy; if you understand less, you’ll waste too much time and get angry out of nowhere. It’s the same with reading - set yourself the goal of understanding all phrases and verbal structures not “intuitively,” but because you know them.
Point 2. The skill that you use is upgraded.
Actually, it’s stupid to expect squats to build your biceps, right? Language proficiency has its own four classes. of which it consists: the ability to speak, the ability to write, the ability to read and the ability to understand by ear. By watching your videos wisely, you will improve the last thing - the ability to listen, hear and understand what you hear (aka the notorious listening comprehension). Incredibly useful skills, but they will practically not improve the ability to speak fluently and competently or write a detailed and understandable letter to a client. An immutable axiom: if you want to learn to speak, practice speaking; if you want to learn to write, write. However, if videos and articles on the Internet are enough for 100,500 years of improving reading and listening, then speaking and writing are more difficult - here we produce the content ourselves. There is a way out: you always have a patient interlocutor in the form of a bottle of shampoo in the shower. Admit it, you often have mental arguments with yourself, coming up with after-the-fact arguments for online holivars with an expired statute of limitations? It's time to do the same, but in English, and always out loud - a bottle of shampoo won't judge you, I promise. Tell her about the last video, what you watched, and what you thought about it. Make it a habit, and your brain will be trained to have certain speech patterns and a reserve of vocabulary in your working memory, so that you won’t have to remember the right word for a long time. Are you writing educational code? Comment on it in detail in English, and at the same time refresh the necessary vocabulary. When I prepare for interpreting, I always think through the lines that I might encounter in advance and rehearse their translation out loud. What haven't I heard about my shampoo...
Point 3. People do not speak with words.
This is strange to hear for those who at school divided a thick notebook into three columns “word”, “pronunciation” and “translation” and wrote unfamiliar words there. But in reality, people do not speak in individual words, but in context. And I’m not even talking about the case when the phrase “God, you piss me off” was translated by my overly creative translator colleague as “God pissed me off,” but even about the banal RUN. “Run” you say? What about “run a business” then? Run a program? My nose runs when it's cold outside? He ran his hand across the table? Already four meanings. Memorizing a word + translation, as we are used to at school, is wasting time and effort for little benefit. There is one more nuance here. Memory works in such a way that it remembers better in context. A single word that you save to a memory location will be cleared by the garbage collector if there are no references to it from other memory locations. But if you know the word business and remember the phrase “run a business” in connection with it, then you are much less likely to forget it over time. No text without context is the golden rule of a translator, and it will come in handy for you too.
Point 4. If the word has slipped your mind...
This point logically follows from the previous one. Speech in a foreign language is not a literal translation from Russian, but the transmission of information by means of that language. In general, do not focus on translation from one language to another, this is a separate field of activity with its own rules. Forgot your word? It doesn’t matter if you can’t replace it with a synonym, paraphrase it. Example: “My team consists of 5 people.” Let's say you forgot the word "consist of" and all its synonyms. But you can still say "There are 5 people in my team". Even if the replacement option doesn’t seem very attractive to you, it is still better than remaining silent and going into a trance during an interview.
Point 5. Crutches.
Using online translators and subtitles for videos is like Photoshopping a selfie for Instagram. The result may be beautiful, but your appearance will not change. These tools, of course, are not absolute evil; they are simply worth using for a specific purpose. And if your goal is to quickly understand what a video is about or quickly understand an article, then fine, but they are not suitable for improving your language. It will be a hundred times more effective to figure it out yourself. And a small bonus: if you don’t need progress in English, but quickly understand the meaning of the text, then the translator community recommends DeepL, and not good old Google or Yandex.
Point 6. Unloved phonetics.
Here, most often, the Russian-speaking IT specialist does not bother at all and scares the client with words like “automation”, “pihapi”, “archive”, “brocher”, etc. (however, clients who have been working with Russian speakers for a long time perceive this with doomed calm) or they go to a native speaker, practice for 40 minutes pronouncing the word “go” with the correct aspiration and in the end they still say “automation”, because they did not get to this word, being busy with the aspiration in the word “go”. Our school curriculum is somehow more focused on grammar and 50 shades of perfection. The truth is that it is quite possible to live without the ability to construct a phrase like “If you had started learning Java earlier, you would have already become a Senior Software Engineer.” And without the ability to pronounce a key technical term so that the client understands what we are talking about, it’s unlikely. Therefore, do not neglect transcription if you are looking for a word in a dictionary, and if it scares you because of the complexity of the squiggles, then any large online dictionary has voice-overs so you can listen to how the word is pronounced correctly. In oral speech there is a very effective exercise from the arsenal of synchronized swimmers. It's called Shadowing. The idea is that you listen to a short piece of text many times (you can start with 10 seconds), write it down in writing, and then read it out loud from a piece of paper together with a speaker with video/audio, trying to copy completely all the intonations, pauses, pronunciation, etc. etc. Gives a colossal bonus to oral speech, but requires regular training, albeit short.
Point 7. Inability to speak languages.
It's brief here. If you have read the article to this point, it means you have already mastered at least one language. And if you were able to master one, there is no reason not to master the second.
And I’m not even talking about the case when the phrase “God, you piss me off” was translated by my overly creative translator colleague as “God pissed me off,” but even about the banal RUN. “Run” you say? What about “run a business” then? Run a program? My nose runs when it's cold outside? He ran his hand across the table? Already four meanings. Memorizing a word + translation, as we are used to at school, is wasting time and effort for little benefit. There is one more nuance here. Memory works in such a way that it remembers better in context. A single word that you save to a memory location will be cleared by the garbage collector if there are no references to it from other memory locations. But if you know the word business and remember the phrase “run a business” in connection with it, then you are much less likely to forget it over time. No text without context is the golden rule of a translator, and it will come in handy for you too.
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