Language is an unconscious thing that we use spontaneously — Matt Brooks-Green

Why I Decided to Learn English

(Key lessons from my story)

I have a strange relationship with the English language. Our story began in secondary school where English courses are mandatory in France. I only remember “memorizing” a list of new words every week, each one pushing the previous one out of my brain. What I learned is that I will never learn English at school. The only exception was a brilliant teacher¹ I had during university. She didn’t care about the grammar, the vocabulary, even less the pronunciation. Having a French accent wasn’t a problem, quite the opposite. For the first time, I understood that communication was the goal of learning a new language. I remember one of her classes where we wrote on the whiteboard the fictive word “Puliketi” before asking us to work in pairs to explain what this word means. We decided that our Puliketi has just passed away and it was just too hard for us to talk about him right now. Learning a foreign language was fun for the first time. It’s the first lesson, the most important one.

Lesson #1: If you aren’t having fun learning a new language, you aren’t doing it right.

For as long as I can remember, I have always been bored during my studies, and when I joined university, it was just too much. I started reading books to escape that boredom, the ones lying on my teacher’s desks, the ones they asked us to copy indirectly through their courses. Learning was fun again (Does I told you fun is important?). These books were written in English, and for the first time, I tried to improve my English comprehension not just to learn English, but to immerse myself in an incomparable vast world of literature, especially about programming. This lead to the second lesson.

Lesson #2: Learning a language must never be your main goal. You must care about something bigger (meet a new culture, work in an international environment, travel the world, etc.).

And so began my journey with the English language. I’ve read almost exclusively in English since that moment. I search exclusively on Google in English and I take my notes entirely in English. English has become my thinking language, not that I always think in English in my head, but I consider English as the door to expose myself to the most brillant ideas in the world. I finally fell in love with the language but after two decades, reading more than 1000 English books, I wasn’t fluent.

What it means to learn a language?

Becoming fluent in English (or in any language) means two things:

• Mastering two completely different languages: a written language AND a spoken language.
• Mastering 4 different skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

TODO: picture a quadrant (Read, Listen, Write, Speak) and highlight similar groups (comprehension vs generation, characters vs glyphs, written vs spoken English)

You can try to improve as much as you can a single skill like reading, you will never become fluent.

TODO: picture a circle with “Fluency” written on the path and inside the circle 4 percent lines for the 4 skills. Depict an example of an imbalanced state (e.g. 90% reading, 10% writing, 5% listening, 5% speaking).

❌ My mistake: When I decided to read even more English books instead of introducing podcasts, or when I decided to create even more flashcards for more advanced vocabulary, I failed to balance the four skills.

Lesson #3: Learning a language is about mastering different, yet interdependent skills.

As highlighted by the diagram, everything is interrelated — reading helping acquired the same vocabulary used in writing and writing can help you improve your speaking as you also have to find your own words but at your own pace, what you can’t do when you speak. For that reason, you should definitely not try to master every skill successively.

Lesson #4: Learning a language is practicing different skills at the same time.

Learning a language is like learning any skill, you need practice, and that’s where things become unnecessarily complicated for most of us. There are so many techniques, applications, and conflicting opinions. Billions of people are learning a foreign language which means there are too many helpful resources that aren’t really helping us. This article is no different. It’s just one more opinion, and one more opportunity to be confused. Sorry.

What it means to master a skill

Before introducing the techniques to practice a skill, I want to share two principles that have helped me get back on track when I was losing myself on my way to fluency. These principles are obvious, but when you are focused on learning and when something start to become comfortable, it’s too easy to forget them.

Principle 1: The Goldilocks Principle

Remember the story of Goldilocks and the three bears? She tried the porridge of the big bear and found it too hot. The porridge of the small bear was too cold. But the porridge of the middle bear was just right. That’s the Goldilocks Principle. When learning a new language, you must find the perfect level of difficulty. If it’s too easy, you will get bored. If it’s too hard, you will get frustrated.

TODO make a classic diagram

The goal is to progress along your stretch zone, the zone slightly outside of your comfort zone, but not too far.

TODO make a diagram to visualize the stretch zone over time (x = time, y = mastery, draw a curve to represent the progression, with a band above that curve “Stretch zone”)

There are many interesting resources on that topic². The Goldilocks Principle is essential when trying to learn any complex skill that requires thousand hours of practice like learning a new language. The Goldilocks Principle is about staying motivated so that procrastination doesn’t take the control. Staying in that zone isn’t as complicated as it may seem. It simply means challenging yourself to be slightly better than you were the day before, consistently.

Lesson #5: Learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint. Put a single foot outside your comfort zone consistently to reach what is not even visible at the horizon.

Principle 2: The Directness Principle

Directness means learning by doing the real thing. How you practice a skill must reflect how you will use it. This concept is also known as the transfer problem. Learning in one environment (like a classroom) doesn’t guarantee you will be successful in another one (like a real-world conversation). Directness solves this issue by making sure the learning environment is the same (or as close as possible) as the application environment.

Reading English books will never make you comfortable speaking in English. Listening to English podcasts will never make you comfortable writing in English. Watching English movies will never make you comfortable thinking in English. Those are all violations of the directness principle. So obvious, so hard in practice when your emotions like fear are lurking.

The most obvious approach is to immerse yourself in the language. Place yourself in an environment where the different skills are required. Read books to practice reading. Listen podcasts to practice listening. Write to penpals to practice writing. Speak to yourself to practice speaking. Becoming fluent means mastering all those skills. You can’t avoid practicing the skill you are weak at.

Lesson #6: Learning a language is practicing as you plan to use the language.

In addition, inside your brain are neurons that get sollicited through different neural pathways depending on if you read, write, listen, or speak in English. The more you practice a skill, the more “myelinated” the neural pathways become for that skill, like building a superhighway where information could move really fast. Fluent speakers have used the directness principle to build over time enough myelin in all their neural pathways required to read AND write AND listen AND speak.

Lesson #7: Learning a language is slowly modeling your brain over a very long time.

Accepting that learning a language takes time is essential. It’s a physical process that cannot be compressed more than being consistent in your practice.

How to practice English

There are so many techniques. You don’t need to try them all. The principles and lessons covered in this article will help you understand if some techniques are relevant for you. Learning a new language is like building a house, you will use different tools at different moments depending on the problem at hand. You need a toolbox but you don’t need all your tools at the same time.

In this section, I want to illustrate my iterative process and most of all, how hard the journey was. When watching others talk about learning a second language, people focus on how easy it can be done, mainly to boost their audience and motivate us to try. It wasn’t easy for me at all. I experimented during more than a decade. It doesn’t mean you need that long to succeed. This post will illustrate all my mistakes that made me spend too much time on some plateaus.

Here are the techniques that I tried (and still remember) sorted chronologically. It’s clearly not the most efficient way to learn English. It’s probably one of the most stupid ways (I will not pretend to be the most stupid person, it would be pretentious). But it’s the reality of my journey.

One thing that I often forgot during my journey is the order of the techniques is important. You will hear many times that you should speak from day 1. With AI conversational tools, it’s a good advice but not a hard rule. It’s better to delay some techniques if they feel too overwhelming (remember the Goldilocks Principle) rather than just abandoning learning.

TODO: Use expandable list to keep the article length correct? But find a way to display the stupidity slider TODO: Create a custom component with two columns “The Plan” vs “The Reality”

• 📔 Subscribe to Time Magazine
  • Stupidity: High
  • Status: Cancelled after one year
  • Motivation: Time Magazine covers a large range of topics, which seems a great idea to expose myself to new vocabulary.
  • Reflection: The writing style was too complicated (violation of Goldilocks Principle) and didn’t reflect the kind of writing I would like to produce some day. Lesson #N taught me to have a bigger motivation than just learning a new language. As a software developer, English is the language used by pionners of that revolution. The best resources are written in English. Following my interest is what I did.
• 📚 Read English books
  • Stupidity: Low
  • Status: In-progress
  • Motivation: Reading books was great to learn about topics that I care about and at the same time, expand my English vocabulary. I’ve learned English grammar naturally through books like kids learn the grammar of their native language even before knowing how to read, simply by listening the language patterns.
  • Reflection: If you are a occasional reader, books are invaluable.
• 🧑‍🏫 Learn the grammar (at several points)
  • Stupidity: High
  • Status: Done
  • Motivation: Learning grammar seems the logical next step after reading books. It’s one of the first thing we learned in school. And it was comfortable. A few books, a few dozens of flashcards to study on my couch.
  • Reflection: Grammar is important until you realize you have learned most of the grammar of your native language unconsciously. Don’t focus on the grammar until you pretend a C1 level otherwise you can become stuck while speaking fearing to make a grammatical mistake that nobody really care.
• 🧠 Create flashcards for the most 5000 frequent words
  • Stupidity: Low
  • Status: Flashcards continue to resurface in my daily study but their content is perfectly memorized.
  • Motivation: Once you get used to flashcards, learning the most frequent words is the logical next step and a proven solution largely adopted by applications like Memrise. Using Anki helped me to stay in control of what I was learning. It was a great decision.
  • Reflection: Mastering the most frequent words is a great way to quickly increase your comprehension level. This makes it easier to learn more advanced words using the context as you could deduce the meaning of those unknown words.
• 🧠 Create flashcards for all the words (I’m familiar in French)
  • Stupidity: Very High
  • Status: Flashcards are reviewed regurlarly. I delete some of them occasionally.
  • Motivation: I knew so many words in French compared to English and I already knew from the previous point how to memorize words with Anki. It seemed like a smart idea to increase my vocabulary quickly.
  • Reflection: Reaching fluency means mastery a large part of the vocabulary. But it doesn’t have to be done that way. learning more words is less efficient than learning more chunks (words that often go together like make a mistake). Using chunks while speaking help a lot to sound more natural.
• 📺 Watch TV series in English with subtitles (too much focus on subtitles = same neural paths as reading)
  • Stupidity: High
  • Status: Cancelled (after approximatively ~100 episodes, mostly Friends and The Simpsons)
  • Motivation: Watch TV series is similar to reading books. Except it was so much easier to understand a new word in a book (the letters are printed on paper and its definition is just one click away if you read on a e-reader). Spoken English is more challenging, mainly due to connected speech. I failed to understand when a word begins and when it ends and unlike reading, it was impossible to pause and re-listen the word. I enabled subtitles. I was just reading.
  • Reflection: Watching TV series is an important step toward fluency. It’s fun to hear the actual voice of actors and actresses. But you must first get familiar with the sound of the language. Surround yourself with the language through podcasts, music, YouTube videos so that most of what sounded like gibberish now start to make sense.
• 📚 Try to read classics fiction books to expand my vocabulary
  • Stupidity: Medium
  • Status: Abandonned (after one book 😅)
  • Motivation: I was looking (once again) to expand my vocabulary. The true reason is that I was too afraid to the other skills like speaking that felt too difficult for me.
  • Reflection: I don’t really care about reading the classics. My goal to learn English is to use it in my daily life as a software developer. That’s why it’s important to know why you are learning English.
• 🧠 Create flashcards for slangs and idioms (from books in ePub)
  • Stupidity: Medium
  • Status: Still reviewing regurlarly
  • Motivation: Slangs and idioms are part of the spoken language. I wanted to learn them to understand native speakers better but without exposing myself to the difficulties of spoken language.
  • Reflection: Slangs and idioms are part of the language, but they are not essential to communicate. It’s a great example of an unnecessary step in my learning journey.
• ✏️ Convert a grammar book into flashcards
  • Stupidity: High
  • Status: Done
  • Motivation: My grammar was already strong, at least compared to most learners. Improving it further mustn’t have be a priority.
  • Reflection: I forgot the Goldilocks Rule. I worked hard but inside my comfort zone, so I didn’t make any progress. I now think grammar is important when you really get serious about the language, not a requirement for fluency.
• 📝 Write book reviews (read other reviews, use Grammarly for instant feedback)
  • Stupidity: Medium
  • Status: In-Progress but I now limit to the books I really enjoyed
  • Motivation: I was finally ready to try to apply “everything” that I learned. Books have helped me a lot in my career. Reviews are important for book authors. It was a win-win strategy. Improved my writing skill and express my gratitude to authors.
  • Reflection: Writing publicly is probably not the best idea to get started. I spend many times to make sure my text was correct, for example using Google Translate or Grammarly. Now that feedback using AI is almost instantaneous, I would say writing reviews is a great activity to get started with writing.
• ✍️ Write blog posts
  • Stupidity: Low
  • Status: In-Progress but not consistent
  • Motivation: Writing is a great way to learn. If you want to learn about a topic, try to write a blog post about it. You cannot write about something you don’t understand. Using my blog as a place to think out loud about various topics has been a great way to learn new things while improving my writing skill. I never shared my posts which removed the fear of judgement and also because I was writing mostly to myself.
  • Reflection: Writing is a solid way to improve. Writing also improve your speaking as it trains you to find the right words to express your thoughts, minus the time pressure when someone is waiting for your response. On the other hand, writing is more time consuming than speaking. Try to balance both at your convenience.
• 📚 Continue to read books.
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: In-progress for the rest of my life
  • Motivation: Books are an inexhaustible source of vocabulary and expressions.
  • Reflection: When an activity enjoyable and useful toward your final goal, there is no point in stop doing it. The mistake I did is to prioritize reading over other activities like speaking.
• 🗣️ Read books aloud during 15 minutes per day
  • Stupidity: Low
  • Status: Occasionally
  • Motivation: Speaking is challenging. You have to think and talk at the same time. It was too much pressure for me. Reading aloud solve this problem as you only have to focus on articulation. It’s a great way to train the muscles used to speak.
  • Reflection: Reading aloud is a great technique. The more you speak aloud, the more it becomes natural to have words in a foreign language coming out of your mouth, and the more you will be confident when you will start to speak in public. Reading aloud let you focus on the pronunciation (instead of articulating your thoughts). You can practice it anywhere.
• 🧠 Learn IPA using flashcards
  • Stupidity: Medium
  • Status: Done, no longer review the flashcards
  • Motivation: Hearing the pronunciation of a word is ideal. Reading the IPA transcription is the second best option if you are in a quiet place or if you e-reader has no loudspeaker to read the word.
  • Reflection: IPA is relatively easy (and fast) to learn. I don’t think it’s a mandatory step, but it helped me apprecite the small, important differences between languages, like the missing phonemes in your native language or how sound are made using your mouth. Learning IPA persuades me that anyone can learn to pronounce a word without an accent.
• 🗣️ Practice pronunciation using ELSA Speak app
  • Stupidity: Medium
  • Status: Abandonned after getting close to 80% accuracy
  • Motivation: The fear to mispronounce words was closely related to my fear of speaking English. Pronunciation is important and it’s important to learn it right from the start to not have to unlearn it later.
  • Reflection: ELSASpeak is a great application to visualize the phonemes causing you difficulty. However, the limited quality of microphone in smartphones makes really hard to progress over 80% of accuracy. I stopped using it before buying a modern headset.
• 🗣️ Read aloud my newsletters
  • Stupidity: Low
  • Status: Regularly when I read them
  • Motivation: I was looking for interesting text to read and I was later on my newsletters.
  • Reflection: Unlike reading aloud books, I was reading the same writing style, the same topics over and over again. It’s still a great idea to try instead of reading them silently.
• 🎧 Listen English songs
  • Stupidity: High
  • Status: Abandonned
  • Motivation: Understanding the lyrics is probably the most challenging listening exercise. I cannot even understand some lyrics in my native language. I found playlists specifically tailored for English learners. It’s was just too hard and relying on the lyrics defeated the purpose.
  • Reflection: Fluency don’t need you to understand everything. It’s okay to not understand songs. You can rarely have to converse with someone who is singing.
• 🤔 Try to think in English
  • Stupidity: Low
  • Status: In-Progress
  • Motivation: We are thinking machine. It’s hard to stop thinking. So, instead of thinking in my native language, I trained myself to think in English, mostly when facing technical problems at work.
  • Reflection: It’s a safe way to “speak”. You can do it anywhere, even when you are not alone or while commuting.
• 🏃 The Speaker application: Like futsal increases the opportunities to touch the ball. The application speed up your exposure to the vast English vocabulary.
• 🤖 Practice using AI tools like ChatGPT/Gemini
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: Regularly but has being too comfortable
  • Motivation: AI was a game changer. It gives me the opportunity to practice speaking with “someone” on demand, without being afraid to make mistakes. It’s stupid but I was not comfortable at first. I played games like Taboo, simulate job interviews, answer “Would You Rather…”, or ask for advices about tasks, or any questions I (or my kid) have like “Why is pigeon poop white?“.
  • Reflection: Using AI conversational tools is a great way to build the minimum confidence required to speak with English speakers. You cannot stop here. Talking with a real person will still feel overwhelming at first but AI will have shown you that you were understandable. Which is already a big win.
• ✍️ Send digital postcards using Slowly
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: Occasionally
  • Motivation: I was considered language exchange applications like HelloTalk or Tandem but it was too much initially. And I discovered Slowly. It’s the same idea, using exclusively writing. I write my first open letter to share some of my actual challenges in life and receive a few letters back.
  • Reflection: Slowly is a great way to write long letters to interesting people and engage in deep conversations over time. Writing blog posts require a minimum of preparation and research. Using Slowly encourages to write more, make more mistakes, and learn more.
• 🤝 Physical Language Exchange Meetup
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: On Hold
  • Motivation: I installed Tandem on my phone but wasn’t still ready to communicate with real people using my phone. I joined a physical meetup instead. I don’t know why, butIt felt less stressful to speak with people in real life than in a chat app.
  • Reflection: Events are often organized in cafes in large cities which is not practical if you don’t live in a large city. I tried that format only twice, enough to finally have the configence to try an online application.
• 🤝 Communicate with Language Partners on Tandem
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: In-Progress
  • Motivation: I cannot stop freightening every time I had to speaking in English with a new person. Using an application like Tandem was a great way to overcome this fear.
  • Reflection: Depending on your age and your interests, finding the right partners can be difficult as finding someone with a similar level is appreciable.
• 🗣️ Speak to myself in English when I am alone
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: Often
  • Motivation: Similarly to thinking in English, but when I was alone, I used to talk to myself in English. Usually when I was driving, I would describe what I was seeing or what I has done the day before.
• 📺 Watch YouTube videos (without subtitles)
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: Every day
  • Motivation: To improve my listening comprehension.
  • Reflection: You can find many videos from non-native speakers like TED or videos from English teachers that will make sure to speak slow. I discovered many interesting ideas.
• 📺 Watch TV series (without subtitles)
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: Occasionally
  • Motivation: After being confortable watching YouTube videos at 1.5x speed, I wanted to test myself with TV series. I made the same mistake and try an episode of the British comedy The Black Adder, which is excellent, but the characters are joking continually at full speed with their special British accent. I remediated by trying American series like Shrinking, far more accessible.
  • Reflection: It’s definitely one of the funniest activities in the list. Being able to follow a TV series without subtitles is a memorable milestone.
• 🗣️ Shadowing
  • Stupidity: Very low
  • Status: Occasionally
  • Motivation: Learn to speak like native speakers by repeating sentences and phrases from YouTube videos.
  • Reflection: It’s a technique I discovered lately during my journey and is one of the most acclaimed techniques, used by language interpreters since a very long time.
• 🗣️ Prepare interviews with a former colleague
  • Stupidity: Low
  • Status: During a few months
  • Motivation: We were both looking for a job. We had to prepare. The job market was seriously more complicated than before. So, we decided to practice together. She was already fluent, so she was really nice to accept.
  • Reflection: Finding close people who are ready to help you in your journey is such a great advantage. Everyone is easier when you are more relaxed.

Here is a summary of the main mistakes that slow me down in my journey:

• Failed to learn written AND spoken language at the same time: I was motivated to read books but failing to listen podcasts or watch TV series in English was a huge mistake. I learned the vocabulary by reading except my little voice in my head was inventing new pronunciations for words that I haven’t heard before. I had to unlearn many “fake” pronunciations later.
• Failed to read/listen AND write/speak at the same time: Reading improves my comprehension but understanding is not the same thing as applying. It’s well known in programming. There is always inputs AND output. Don’t wait to start using English. You can write in a personal dairy, speak with yourself if you feel not confident.
• Failed to proceed step by step: Fluency is so easy to visualize that we can have the end goal in mind and immediately try to use the most advanced techniques. If I have moved slowly but more consistently, I would have reach the same level in much less time and with much less frustration, compared to having struggled with advanced techniques hoping to reach fluency faster.

Therefore, if I had to embark on the journey of learning English again, I would proceed differently. I think that using only a limited number of techniques introduced at the right time would be the key to success. Here are the techniques that I consider as essential in an order that makes each technique more enjoyable:

• 📚 Read books BUT focus on books that you really enjoy reading.
• 🧠 Use flashcards BUT focus on the most 5000 frequent words and enrich your deck after fluency, for example, when trying to reach a C2 level.
• 👂 Listen podcasts BUT don’t wait for “good” moments where you can focus your attention on it. Use podcasts to immerse yourself with the spoken language without leaving your daily routine.
• 🗣️ Read aloud BUT only after getting used to the sound of English to not improvise or pause after every word to check its pronunciation. The pronunciation of English words is not always obvious. For example, “cough” and “though” have “ough” in them but it’s pronounced differently.
• 🗣️ Shadowing BUT don’t limit yourself to native speakers, especially at the beginning. Non-native speakers who have practiced shadowing in your target accent are great candidates to learn from if you’re still struggling to understand native speakers.
• ✍️ Writing/Journaling BUT there is no but here. From my experience, there are so many more opportunities to practice writing compared to speaking. Take your notes in English, write your prompts in English, etc.
• 📺 Watch TV series BUT choose them carefully to not have to enable subtitles. You must not feel comfortable at first but still not too far from understanding.

Summary

I started this article with language teacher Matt Brooks-Green telling us that language is an unconscious thing that we use spontaneously. Language is something that has become natural for our brain due to human evolution process. Most of the principles about learning a skill are applicable but at the same time, learning a new language is radically different. It’s unlike the numerous skills I learned so easily in my career and that I apply consciously at work. Learning a language is like ridding a bike, it’s something that your body needs to learn. It’s something everyone could do.

I hope this article helped you learn more about learning a new language. I hope you’ll not repeat the stupid mistakes I made but make your own while having fun on the way!

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Footnotes

1. My professor passed away since at an age that was well too young to die. I continue to think about her regularly. I didn’t make huge progress in English during that period because I wasn’t really motivated by the language itself, but she teached me lessons that are so much more precious that I continue to carry with me. ↩

2. James Clear wrote an interesting article about the Goldilocks Principle. This YouTube short by Mark Manson is also great. ↩