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 difficult for those to whom languages ​​are badly given by nature. If a person has at least one of these problems, he, as a rule, simply does not learn a new language. But I was not one of those, and was able to overcome these two failures.

Studying at the undergraduate level, I was able to develop a vocabulary of up to 10,000 and break through the barrier of reading fiction. But understanding the spoken language by ear is a much more difficult task. For a long time I considered it unsolvable , did not believe in success.
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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 training methods and will tell you about them in detail , what materials I used and what conclusions I made. This article is a huge warehouse of experience, and I hope that it will be useful to you.

School

Many of my friends who know English well have studied it from early childhood , gradually and little by little. I studied in a German school and in grades 1-6 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 the 7th grade in the new school was too big and I did not catch up with her there, just scoring on this subject. The whole course of school English passed by me. Some people think that even if a person does not listen in class, he will still remember some passages. But in my case, even this did not work, since I had the talent to go to myself and let the information pass by. Also, I had problems with speech, which exacerbated the situation.

The Russian language was given hard and for it was always between the two and the 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, right down to fictional words and distortion of meanings. But I wrote, re-read, understood, and this laid the interest in writing, thanks to which I could then write decent and successful articles for Habr .

Undergraduate

In 2011, I entered an uncomplicated technical baccalaureate program in GUAP (for computer science and computer technology). The key word here is simple — for four years I had a lot of free time. Even at admission I set one of the goals for my student years - to learn English. Admittedly, in school I missed books, and in my whole life I read only about 10 books in Russian. I wanted to catch up at the expense of English books, and I successfully started to do it from the end of the second year.

Without going into details, I will say that I began to simply read simple books (Harry Potter) on the reading room and translate incomprehensible words. This technique is not effective, but I got a little pleasure, I read on the subway, on the bus, at home on the bed ... Some words (broom, dorm, etc.) were repeated and remembered for this. Also, the reading skill itself grew, even if it was slow. But I loved reading, and this is very important. If you like something - then you can spend on this huge number of hours, completely unnoticed.

Ignorance of grammar made it difficult to translate. She was at zero with me, despite the 4 books she had read (3 parts of GP + Star Wars, episode 5). In Harry Potter, I understood about 50-60%, but complex structures, sometimes, just killed the desire to read! Especially if there were some important thoughts. At the 4th course, I decided to tighten up the grammar, I bought it and completely resolved the Red Murphy , due to which I strongly developed the text recognition skill 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 at all), but the skill of working with text was very useful.

Then, in the summer after the bachelor's degree (2015), I discovered Anki and made about 1 thousand cards with words (after reading and cutting 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 us. Although I knew much less.

In my knowledge of English there was a strong imbalance - reading and vocabulary were well developed, but there were no skills in listening and speaking. When I read books, the words in my mind were pronounced somehow. For example, I pronounced the letter G at the end of words with an ing-ending. And this was my “comfort reading zone”, from which, of course, I had to go.

Graduation and commencement (1 semester)

In May 2015, before the release, I decided to get my first experience in speech recognition. I downloaded the podcasts from the voice of America (VOA) and listened to them. There was a monotonous and adapted speech in every sense. The main technique that I used - repeated listening to the same series. For example, there were short stories (15 minutes each), and I auditioned 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 the general features of the plot (30%), and the second and third reached 50 and 80 percent. In total, I listened for 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 only through the audio channel.

In the summer, I plunged into reading, but in September I decided to take up listening with a new force. Why not watch some video course on programming? After all, there should be a 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 back, 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 lecture and colloquial speech is simply huge.

In October 2015, I tried to watch the series “Friends” and it was just hell! I understood, at best, 20-30%, and repeated reviews, it seemed, did not give any gain at all . Yes, I really wanted to fasten the technique of repeated viewing without subtitles to the series, but it turned out to be done only in a year (in September 2016). But let's not get ahead. At this stage, I was simply OBLIGED to carry out a complete analysis of each video with subtitles. It is hard and unpleasant. Conversational vocabulary, it turns out, is very different from the book. My vocabulary is not enough. There are 10 unfamiliar words per series and this is too much. I have to completely understand each episode, somehow learn the words (this in itself is not so simple, you have to make cards and organize interval repetition separately), and then also develop the listening. How? The forum recommends rewinding . But my brain was so stupid then that it was necessary to rewind 2-3 times, and sometimes even with 5-6 it was impossible to recognize the speech and compare it with the subtitles. And even with so many rewinds, I almost never remembered! That is, if after a week to revise the same series, then most of these rewound moments simply need to rewind again! I conducted experiments and tested it! There was a feeling that my brain simply DOES NOT know how to memorize speech, or does it EXTREMELY slowly.



Looking ahead, I will 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 cool that I will grasp and memorize more than half of the phrases the first time, and 80% of the rest will be easily output 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 15, when my speech memory was terribly weak.

I developed a hell of a technique in which I first just watch the series (I get used to and try to understand the general plot), then I review it with analysis and writing out words, rewind and detailed translation. And only then - I am reviewing the third time and doing it immediately after the previous step, while the rewound fragments are still in memory. This technique fully developed the skill and the rewound fragments really lingered in my memory, but it was just unbearably heavy and tedious . I did not last more than a week.

I ran from season 1 to season 5 of friends, trying different techniques on the first few episodes of the season and hoping that the next technique would do. But all this was inefficient and another solution was needed.

I have friends who were able to quickly learn English and go to Fink (Alexander and Philip). I talked a lot with them on the topic of language learning. They said that podcasts have power and need to listen more. What exactly podcasts are a bridge between lecture and colloquial. But as much as I did not try, the podcasts never got accustomed to me (not counting VOA at the initial stage, but I was very tired of him and I just could not listen to him anymore). Perhaps this is individual and not all podcasts are suitable. Maybe I tried a little and looked from the wrong side at them? I do not know, but the fact remains.

Also these guys claimed that they watched their favorite movies more than 10 times and it was effective. I don’t really like movies and I can’t always see through to the end, what can we say about repeated screenings. But if you like movies - this technique can play in your favor.

On the birthday of classmate Lyokhi, I met Mikhail. As it turned out, the knowledge of English from this person is simply cosmic (better than that of any of my friends), despite the fact that he always lived in St. Petersburg. This interested me. He said that he has been studying English for more than 10 years and that he has been studying a lot with tutors, watching films and reading. He, like those familiar from the Finnish, all passed IELTS to Advanced level many years ago.

I asked Micah - "how much do you understand when you watch a movie?" And he replied, "I understand 100%." I was shocked . I asked - "how so? After all, there are certainly new words there, some harsh lines of characters, and so on! ” And Micah explained to me that there are very few such moments, they are all out of context. Filmmakers and authors of books deliberately think over their works so that the knowledge of rare words is not the key to the plot. They are either clear from the context, or the word synonym is next to it.

In November, together with Mikha and Lyokha, we went to a conference of Java developers (Joker). There was a lecture on the spring in English. I knew the material beforehand, but for Micah it was completely new. So here. I disgraced myself and understood only 40-50%, while Micah understood almost everything . He also said that the lecturer has a very good and understandable speech without an accent, dragging me, unwittingly. And then I promised myself that I would spend the whole of 2016 on the development of listening skills, at any cost. And Michael supervised my training and helped with valuable advice.

I have repeatedly heard that you can listen to anything for the development of listening, as long as it is interesting, but more. For starters, I wanted to find some great course from IT. I really wanted to improve my knowledge of Spring, and I was watching the course at Udemy (28 hours). However, I didn’t really like this course. I don’t remember the exact reason, but it seems to me that it didn’t seem to be very high-quality and not very professional for a number of reasons.

As a result, I concluded that the development of 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), but it was not very interesting.

“It may be worthwhile to develop listening to scientific lectures,” I thought. I always had a dream to study medicine, at least at the level of fundamentals. I chose a college-level lecture course from TTC (How we’ve how we heal) and started to watch it. There are only 24 lectures 30 minutes each, but I spent 78 hours on this course. At first, we 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 it was much easier to recognize speech than in TV shows. I spent about 3 hours for the first lectures each (6 times longer than the lecture itself). But then the speed was increased to 2 hours per lecture due to the addiction to the speech of Dr. Goodman and the replenishment of vocabulary with new words and turns.



Let it be hard in places, but it was interesting! For me, lectures on medicine in English are something new, exciting, unusual. About all sorts of viruses, about prions, cancer, immune response, about worms there all kinds. I still remember a lot of things, though not in details. In general, the very idea of ​​a temporary departure from IT and switching to something from a fundamentally different area turned out to be very good.

It is necessary to make an important remark - in October 2015, I wrote a mobile application for total monitoring of learning. It allows you to score the beginning and end of classes, as well as the training course in which I do. Then it displays statistics on how much time was spent, with what number, and so on. Therefore, all watches that are given in this article are highly accurate . All my training industry in 2016 in front of me clearly, in the form of one 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? It is said that listening stimulates speech. Unfortunately, this was not the stage. My speech memory was very weak in 2015. The 100 hours I spent on the hearing that year were extremely poorly remembered. But this is normal, and it should have been.

I googled and stumbled upon the conversational course of Peemsler. It is designed for the very best beginners, and this is just my case. I spent 22 hours on the passage of its first part, then another 5 hours I talked with my girlfriend on Skype in English. But I still did not know how to express my thoughts normally, did not know how to build sentences. In general, I learned some basics, but remained unsatisfied.

Master's Degree (2 semester)

So 2015 is over. At this article is just beginning, all that was written before this - the introduction. I thought I spent a lot of time developing my listening skills, but that was just 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 the speech by more than 90%. And make it ANY price. Everything for the front, everything for victory.

January stood in front of me, all free, since I closed almost the entire session early. Where to go next? I decided to continue the development of the scientific medical route , and study one of the natural sciences. I have long wanted to study chemistry for several reasons, and therefore my choice fell on her. Contrary to popular opinion in Russia, chemistry is a very cool science, in the west it is even called the central science . Also, contrary to another mistaken opinion, it is not at all difficult if you study it consistently and understand why it is for you.

After reviewing 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 a wealth of experience, has recorded a very high quality course, speaks very simply and clearly, where Dr. Goodman is more understandable.

I got carried away, began to study every day for 3 hours, and I learned this course in less than 1.5 months. Recently, I had a tradition of inspecting courses to the end, and I followed it, although in the end he had already bored me. The whole course cost me 119 hours and that's pretty much. At 1 hour of the lecture there were 2-2.5 hours of real tuition, I slowly listened to it, rewound it back 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 problem book of the problem book and pass the AP Chemistry under the simulator, but these plans were not destined to come true. The February depression, which covers me every year, came for my share, and for a while I did not study anything at all.

During the depression I returned to my favorite reading. A year ago, I uploaded a large archive of books on the Star Wars universe to PocketBook, but I did not read any of them. Revising this archive, I came across a series of Jedi Apprentice , which delayed me for a very long time. Not much 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 wondered a long time ago - does the Harry Potter book series have a male counterpart (after all, is it, after all, female)? As it turned out, the “Jedi Apprentice” series is exactly what it is. 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 is just teeming with exciting adventures. Every second book in the series fascinated me greatly.

I read these books for fun. They brought very little benefit to the study of English, and even more did not bring anything to develop speech perception skills. But it was awesome!

Encouraged by success, I decided to spend this semester reading and pumping vocabulary even more. I began to read the book If tomorrow comes from Sidney Sheldon and make Anki cards. This is an adult book, so reading was hard and there were a lot of new words. But I didn’t read it to the end, having read only 40% (in 30 hours), and now I will explain why.

In parallel with the book, I decided to look at some simple cartoon series to develop listening. I took the old school What's with Andy and reviewed each of his series 2-3 times. I was hoping that this time I would be able to fasten the method of repeated viewing without subtitles, but I miscalculated . The time has not come yet. The difference between repetitions was too small. It depressed me and I abandoned both the cartoon and the book. Download vocabulary further - imbalance. You must first tighten the listening skill.

I listened so much, and that year, and in January, but my skill is still weak. I tried to continue watching Friends, and found that I understand them as badly as in November. What did I do wrong? They write on the Internet that people have been learning the language for years and it takes many years before they begin 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, I was told that normally people study 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 do not have so 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 decision. Imagine that you are watching some video with the help of a special program that allows you to cut out all the incomprehensible fragments and work them off 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 be amazing to develop speech memory and listening, as a result. I was looking for such a program, but I did not find it, so I decided to write it myself.

The first working prototype was developed pretty quickly, and I completely cut 1 season from Adventure Time into small clips. I made 1174 clips, 46 for each series. And for each of them, the repetition interval was calculated (as in Anki), so their repetition was pleasant and effective. I saw a lot of progress and very quick getting used to the voices. And it was awesome.



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

I spent a lot of time improving this program and even decided to try to sell it. As a business project, it turned out not very successful, but I did a program for myself, not for sales, and I 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 is removed from open access, because too much effort and time was spent on her accompaniment and they did not pay off.



After Adventure Time, I decided to switch to friends and took up the matter very thoroughly. For two and a half months I worked with the program and looked at it on Friends. The fifth season was a mess. 74 hours were spent on it (41 - viewing and cutting clips, 33 - their working out and repetition). The sixth season took less - 50 hours. Seventh - 34, Eighth - 29. Ninth - also 29. Tenth - 5 (I did not see it through to the end).

With each new season (except for the last one) I saw progress, the speech became more and more clear, the classes themselves were generally enjoyable. And I continued to study. I considered the interval repetitions separately and they took 44 hours (clips from all seasons gradually flowed in there). As a result, I made about 5,000 clips . They contained 1000 cards with purely colloquial vocabulary. I will recognize this lexical base later in all other TV shows and films.



In total, the project “Friends” took occupied 265 training hours, and it was here that I DROPPED the “impossible” listening skill. The whole complex of interval listening (development of a program and training in it) cost me more than 500 hours !!! But it was worth it, it was here that I amazingly developed speech memory, which was so lacking, and made tens of thousands of attempts to “draw out” speech, which is in memory, to that speech, which I hear.



I haven't watched the tenth season of friends.Back in the ninth regress began, and then I realized that I hate Friends and I was very sick of it all. I was too fixated on my friends and on one teaching method. In the middle of the summer of 2016, I closed this monstrous project and rested for several weeks.

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

I also noticed that I can speak, even if it is very crooked. A huge set of patterned phrases in the head plays a positive role. I remembered a lot of replicas of Chandler, Joey, Rachel and other characters and repeated them in the ear, imitating the actors.

I decided to look at something new and discovered Avatar the last airbender . I was recommended to him on the forum as a very light animated series. Although it is designed for children, but he has a lot of adult fans. The magic world itself is very fascinating, the idea of ​​magic duels is also good. Avatar the last airbender is a good, high-quality American anime. The graphics there are much nicer to the eye than in Futurama or in Adventure Time. You can note it. This is the first animated series, which I watched without subtitles from the first time. He became one of the symbols of this year.



Then I freely looked at 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 Spiderman, reviewing each episode 2-3 times. And she came here just right! The first time I understood about 30 percent, and the second and third times - 50 and 70. At the end of the series, I pumped up to 40-60-80%!

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

Master's Degree (3 semester)

In September, I had a very interesting idea about vocabulary replenishment. What if to write down words not in the form of “word” → “translation” , but in the form of “Sentence with highlighted word” → “translation” . This idea was just super! Words in context are remembered several times faster! The experiment showed that if you remember the word with the sentence, then you can easily recall it in another sentence or separately. If you make 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. Admittedly, 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 have never learned how to read complicated ones. I think you need to bring the grammar to a new level and learn to write texts yourself, and only then can I read complex books.

Then I decided to rest and work on the web (spending 31 hours reading the HTML specification and 34 hours reading chapters from a book on CSS). But it was a passing distraction, and I don’t even include it in the total amount, because it gave my English nothing 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 chosen. He is more modern and I saw in him the very continuation of Friends, quickly falling in love with the actors. And here the technique of repeated viewing without subtitles showed all its strength! I reached 90% of the understanding from the 3rd time (in rare cases, I revised the series 4 times). And I saw a speech recognition skill pumping fast and efficient! How cool it was.



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

Lily's smile instilled hope, I loved her even more than Rachel. For the first season HIMYM took 29 hours. I almost never rewound and did not include subtitles at all. New words were either skipped or out of context. In some cases, when I heard the new word very well, I scored it in Google and translated it.

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

1. Speech is easier than in Friends and HIMYM. Some attribute ALF to Upper-Interdemate, and Friends to Advanced level.
2. Good quality pictures (despite the fact that the series is old)
3. Nice looking interior scenes. Their concentration is even greater than in friends. Sometimes I had a feeling of immersion in the 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 non-stop viewing

In November, I was covered with another depression and I decided to play games. Do you like games? Is it possible to develop English using games? Opinions diverge. Let's try to figure out what's what.

All childhood I played, like many guys my age. I will even say this - computer games were my greatest happiness in junior and high school. But when I began to study mathematics and programming a lot, I began to think a lot - interest in games began to fall noticeably (grade 9). And only in the second year I finally accepted the fact that I could not regain my old love for games, and that something happy, gaming future, which I dreamed of, would never come. Since then, I have played a little, and only in the old games, to refresh the pleasant memories of the past.

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

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

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

Online games can perfectly develop all 4 aspects of a language (reading, writing, listening and speaking). I even have a few friends who have learned English from games and still know him better than me. But I can't do that.. I have a number of problems with games. For example, entering the virtual world and getting out of it are very unpleasant for the psyche. After the games, I am very distracted, reduced attention, disturbed perception of real space-time. Educational performance is reduced by 2 times. There are also a number of abnormalities, such as very weak, but painful sensations throughout the body (especially in the back area). I did not observe any of the above problems while watching TV shows or programming. I am in the same physical position (at the table in front of the PC, sitting straight). Apparently, these problems are unsolvable.

Why am I all this? You have to decide for yourself whether you like games.. Learning the language of games will be effective only 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 the games.



Each person has his feminine and masculine. Admittedly, the series "Friends" and "How I Met Your Mother" are tuned to a female audience. If you are a man, you can easily watch them, have fun and develop your feminine principle, but from time to time it will seem to you that you got a little wrong. Do friends have a masculine counterpart? This question did not give me rest from the very beginning. When I came across the series “It's always sunny in Philadelphia,” I realized that this is it.

Let's give an example. In the series "Friends" the girls are the most successful and all fall to their feet. All run for Rachel and admire her beauty. Monica, albeit not the most beautiful in the group, but receives a lot of attention. A millionaire man wants to be with her, but she removes him. Caring Chandler is ready to create a family with her and cave in to her interests. And what about men? Dumb Joey can not find a job and make a career, makes stupid mistakes. Ross is still a henpecked. And they all love kids, even Joey.

Another thing - 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. Each episode she makes feil and everything turns out unsuccessful for her. All the characters constantly repeat Dee, how she is flawed, even relatives and friends. And the other two girls? One is a terrible alcoholic waitress, the other is a fat and nasty actress-loser (Artemis). But take a look at the men. Denis and Mack constantly argue which one is more beautiful and they both look great. They have fun, tease each other and live a very fun life.



I decided that I would watch this series without any repetitions or 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 watched and understood almost everything! And so - it ranged from about 60 to 70 percent. It was a huge success. My skill has grown noticeably. When I tried to watch the third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender , the insight on some episodes was off the scale by over 90%!

I would like to make an important point. Understanding of speech strongly depends on the mood and how much you are interested in it. 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 prefer movies than TV shows. But I confess honestly - I don’t really like movies. For all my life, I looked only about 20 of them. There are exceptions - films that I really liked. But they are few. Why I don't like movies is a mystery, still not guessed. Everything is much simpler with games - I grew out of them. But the movies then? Full of adults who are just crazy about movies.

Just before the new year, a friend threw off the film “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 squad of suicides, but I did not like it, and it was also not very clear. I turned off at 20 minutes.

Did I achieve the goal I set for this year (90% of my understanding of speaking)? Nearly.I can understand 80% at the peak (when I got used to the actors and it’s interesting), and 50-60 in a randomly taken video. Can I watch movies freely? With restrictions. Can I attend lectures and study in English? Definitely.But the most important thing is that now I know how to develop the speech recognition skill itself. And I know exactly what method (2-3x view), what material (HIMYM) and in what volume (2-3 months) I will be engaged in 2017, in order to switch to the desired 90% . And the further, the easier. In general, at this stage, you can just watch many, all sorts of TV shows freely and achieve the same 90%, but it will be 6-12 months.

During this year, my skill of recognizing English speech has improved, probably 100 times. Some of my unfortunate acquaintances believe that 22 years is too late to learn a language, but I proved the opposite. There is a stereotype that an adult is less educated than a child. But it starts to seem to me that in practice everything is 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 even do without them, 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 grammar and writing. For 2 months I spent a huge number of experiments in order to develop an effective method of stitching grammatical theory into practice. And he punished Blue Murphy by about 30%. But this is a topic for a separate article, which I will definitely write closer to summer. Without going into details, I will say that I spent more than 100 hours and picked up a letter by about 1.5 levels.

In 2013, I spent 200 hours on a high-quality, in-depth study of Java SE 7 from a book. Studying English in 2016 alone cost more than 1000 hours. I spent 5 times more time, despite the fact that I finished learning Java, and I will be studying English very, very long time ...