How to learn English effectively (8 principles)

1. To learn English, forget the translation; instead, grab the meaning from the context:

If you’re a dedicated English learner, you should learn the use of translation apps because we normally type the word and search the meaning of it in our mother tongue, which initially benefits you, but in the long run, it hurts you. For example, you type the word “kite” to check the meaning in Hindi “patang”, then every time you see the kite, the first word that comes to your mind is Patang because you have trained your brain patang with kite. Thus, I prefer to find similar words when searching for word meaning. 

Though I hate translating while learning a language because it is a distraction that interrupts my flow of learning by pausing me while listening, reading, and watching. Furthermore, there is no urgency to learn English or to have no way to learn a word on the first attempt. So, I love taking time by skipping the word’s meaning and trying to focus on context and overall understanding because I repeat the same thing many times so that I can grab the meaning over time from my guessing by seeing surrounding words and sentences. So, stick to the process (listening, reading, watching) and take over everything to the language itself.

2. Develop thinking in English:

One of the vital phrase for English learners to understand is “thinking in English” which means whatever you think about things or surroundings, you think them in English; your thoughts transform into English. And this transformation of thought requires training of your brain through following a systematic process of listening, reading, and watching. This systematic process proceeds through transforming the environment and redesigning the environment. 

• Transforming the Environment: Transform your current habits or environment into new ones. More specifically, you have to change every action of your daily habits into English; the mantra is: whatever you do, do it in English. For example, you use Social Media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, etc in French, I mean you watch all the content in the French language, now transform them all into English language, such as follow English vloggers, English channels, or if you search for something specific, search it in English. Thankfully, it takes a little effort to do this due to social media’s algorithm. Furthermore, alter your other habits like reading, daily interactions, etc into English language. 
• Redesigning the environment: redesigning the environment is an intentional change of your entire surroundings by creating new habits. First of all, you have to understand what matters in learning English. For instance, in language learning, listening has the utmost priority and importance followed by reading and watching. You have to spend 70% of your day listening, then 30% to others. Thus, creating listening habits is mandatory for learning English that you have to include in your daily routine. If you are interested in designing the environment check this Article.

3. Always focus on understandable and real communicative English:

We often get advised to do hard things, but I love to ignore these shits of emotional advice by doing easy, lazy and convenient things because universal law favors the effortless things. Our habit of being perfect in everything causes downfall in our lives, not giving us any room to think and realize about our actions. Anyway,  in linguistics it is called “Comprehensible Input” which means understandable insertion/input that is how you have to do it through listening, reading, and watching easy and understandable materials in English. And materials or contents should be engaging and pressure-free because the brain functions appropriately when cognitive loads are low. 

One of the best and most effective ways to learn English or any language is engaging in real English or conversational English. It’s better to engage with real people in a live session who know your level and can talk according to your interest and situation Or listen to English conversation episodes silently on your phone and repeat them as much as you can. Additionally, conversations are great because they contain easy sentences, expressions, simple questions with simple answers, and of course interesting too.

4. Listen and Read Stories to learn english: 

Stories are incredibly powerful tools to learn English. They offer everything you need to learn English, from structures to vocabulary, and comprehension to expressions. Furthermore, they are suitable and fit for everyone; beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners, because of their adaptive nature, you simply find stories for every level to listen to and read in the market. And I like to listen and read 2 types of stories: Question-based and Descriptive Stories. Additionally, I convert the question-based and descriptive stories into perspectives for advancement. If you’re interested in more details, check out this guide + read below: 

• Question-based stories: This type of story is functional and beginner-friendly. These stories are designed with plenty of simple questions with answers, almost like a casual conversation with friends. The core value they will give you is learning, questioning, and responding to questions, which are the central theme/purpose of a language.

• Descriptive stories: Descriptive stories are more like a narration of a story. Such as describing an event in detail. And the main outcome it brings is developing advanced through patterns as well as building your perception and expression of a language.

• Perspective Stories: They are the optimal source of language acquisition in the history of language learning because they not only train our perception to see things from various angles, but also give us enormous benefits to acquire a language subconsciously and effortlessly, which is structurally solid and expressively rich. 

5. Listen, Listen, and Listen:

Our brain has an area called the Neocortex, which is newly evolved into us as a modern human (scientifically named ‘homo sapiens sapiens’), and this Neocortex is responsible for learning, complex thinking, decision making, and language learning. Specifically, it interprets sensory perception; it means it demonstrates what you hear, sight, and touch. Thus, sensory immersion is valued most in language learning. Your job is to input a language through listening, reading, and watching, and then the Neocortex will do the rest to develop a language that we call intuitive or effortless acquisition/learning. 

We know the senses are responsible for our language learning so then we have to listen, read, and watch to acquire a language. Now, we have to understand which sense is the most effective or dominant in our learning. Well, each sense is effective, but the most dominant sense is Vision due to its versatile use of sensory receptors (almost 10 million of 11 million sensory receptors are used for sight). Though in language learning, listening is the most effective because it uses vision through imagination and visualization. For example, when you listen to your audio story, you have to see it through your mind as well. Read more about it there.

6. Repeat, Repeat, and Repeat:

Repetition is the backbone of language learning. Our brain doesn’t have any magic tools to learn English at first sight or listen, but it has a process through which we have to go to learn English and the language. And I believe learning a language is a skill to train, not information to gain. For this reason, we need to train our brain constantly to develop a language through completing the cycle of inputting the English language in the neocortex through listening, reading, and watching to perceive them, and then the Hippocampus stores them for future use.

Repetition can be boring if you don’t understand the role of repetition in your learning and its proper use. For example, an action doesn’t repeat if it is not rewarding and pleasurable. Similarly, you can’t repeat your actions (listening, reading, and watching) if the materials or contents are not enjoyable and pressure-free. Thus, making content enjoyable & pressure-free is the first thing we have to fix to learn English. Otherwise, forcing yourself to do an action is a bad idea that lasts short, rather than making the action exciting, which grabs your attention to do it repeatedly in the long run. For example, memorization of grammar rules through reading grammar books VS inputting language structures, vocabularies, and expressive patterns by listening and reading stories. Now, it is your choice which one you feel excited about that is repeatable. 

7. Leverage your emotions to learn English: 

Here, I don’t want to focus broadly on external positive and negative emotions, anxiety, fear of mistakes, or excitement. Instead, I want to dig practical use of emotions for better engagement to learn English. Such as expressing emotions through words and sentences by using body and facial expressions. For instance, you find this sentence in your listening of a story or podcast, “he knocked on the door to enter,” and then you have to express this sentence physically it would be while you’re listening or reading. 

To express things, you’ve to make sure you understand the sentence’s meaning. Initially, your listening to the story requires several repetitions of just listening to enhance your understanding, then continue trying with physical expression of what you’re listening to for mastery. Additionally, you can learn 10-20 types of expressions of various emotions to perform the acting better that you’ll find later.

Emotions: Emotions are an integral part of human beings; we can not escape them. We shouldn’t try to escape them because they are part of our being; we have to experience emotions for our well-being. 

• Negative Emotions: Negative emotions are any kind of feelings that are unpleasant and aversive. More precisely, behaviors that we don’t like to happen to us. Such as nervousness, frustration, fear, etc. 

*The causes of these emotions are your craving for your desired outcomes immediately: 

• Always chasing perfection in English leads to frustration.
•  Proving to others leads to delusions.
• Fulfilling expectations makes you disruptive.
• Excessive result oriented mindset damages creative thinking.
• Etc.

* The remedy is your perceptions and approach toward learning English.

• Accept everything that you’re weak, bad, whatever, then focus on the main thing: learning English.
• Let every emotion and thought come, don’t force them to go away, invite them and appreciate them. 
• Observe and enjoy the process of learning English, and realize to yourself what matters most in your learning.
• Create an English learning environment and fully indulge into it, immerse into it, lose all your senses into it. 
• Don’t waste your time on proving and fulfilling expectations, rather invest your time on exploring the journey of English learning. 
• Etc. Anyway I’ll write about this topic more in future articles. 

8. Take care of your health for better learning:

Our mental and physical health is also a vital tool for learning English. They are internal forces to boost our productivity and proactivity. For example, adequate sleep of 8 to 9 hours will significantly enhance your cognitive functioning for better focus, a healthy diet and exercise will give you a refreshed mood and sharp feelings throughout your day. Thus, we’ve to take care of our health because it’s a source of our learning.

• Meditation: Practicing the Wim Hof”s breathing technique will be better for your deep mental calmness. 
• Jogging: just running for 10-40 minutes would be a nice way to get a refreshing mood.
• Calisthenics/gym exercises: Daily exercise will bring dramatic change in your feelings and mood. 
• Healthy diet: When you feel good inside, outside automatically flourishes. Thus, maintaining a healthy diet is crucial for better performance in daily actions.  
• Gardening: Gardening has excellent benefits like slowing down blood pressure when you play with the pure soil that contributes to your better focus. 
• Combat sports: Combat sporting is playing any sport with a combination of young and old fellow for fun. This is highly recommended because it reduces anxiety, loneliness, and several bad habits by encouraging people to interact with each other through sports. 
• Sleeping: Don’t compromise sleep because it produces energy for your day to perform various activities by using mental and physical energies. 
• Etc. 

Final thoughts: Be yourself, and cut all the external junk (myths, norms, limited beliefs, expectations, impulses, etc) to stick to your learning process. And don’t think too much, just start whatever it is and go through the process that will solve every problem to progress.