Personal experience: how to speak English competently and confidently if you moved to the USA as an adult

I won’t lie, I didn’t learn French, German or Japanese. But English entered my life almost from birth, or rather, from the age of three. Our frebelichka (as a kindergarten teacher was called in Odessa) led us, three-five-year-old blockheads, through the streets. We held hands and loudly recited poems in English.

Then - a school with English from the first to the last grade. Institute - with English. Then - special two-way courses, and, for a snack, for two years, living in a miners' paradise (the city of Donetsk), I regularly studied with a private teacher who had lived in the USA for 50 years before (obviously in the position of a spy) and knew the language very well.

Why am I listing all this? Probably, I am trying to say that it was impossible to prepare better (diplomats, graduates of foreign languages, born in America and translators do not count). So, after a lot of ordeals, having reached the promised USA, I enthusiastically turned on the TV, listened to it for about ten minutes, and ... got ready to go back. Believe it or not, I caught ten words in ten minutes. Armed with a calculator, I quickly calculated that, at this pace, I would reach a partial understanding of the language in some 860 incomplete years.

But swimming against the current was not new to me. They beat us (physically and according to the passport) and trained us from childhood. We were also no strangers to breeding in difficult conditions of heat/cold/dirt/inconvenience and total surveillance of the population buzzing in the kitchens, and I ... developed my own personal system for learning a foreign language, which I will share with pleasure right now.

1. Talk

I had to spend two hours a day on the subway train (in those years (1980s) it was still a relatively safe form of transportation). Entering the car, I quickly found a suitable “interlocutor” and addressed an innocent question: how to get there, where to get off, what to see in the country ... etc. In nine cases out of ten, having heard an accent (and what else could be heard there, except for an accent, I don’t know), they asked me where I was from. And off we go. I spat out on the mountain the entire stock of long-rusted (lying in my head for years idle) words. I was asked questions. I told. Then I asked and they told me. And so two hours a day (minimum) six days a week. Plus - a school where everything is in English. And work - any where only the local population works to plunge into the language.

That is, rule number 1 - plunge into the language. Those who have not plunged still speak badly, and it is audible. They settled in Russian-speaking areas, taking the path of least resistance. But they also survived, put down roots, although they try not to go to America without urgent need. They watch their own TV, visit their own shops and concerts. They don’t get acquainted with “foreigners”, although they can already explain themselves in the store, and even Mexicans and Koreans understand them, who managed to learn Russian well enough to explain themselves to any grandmother on the topic “a kilogram of potatoes and two carrots for soup”.

2. English always and everywhere

I organized my life in such a way that every free minute (and I had few of them at two schools and two jobs) competent English sounded in my ears. Not music, not chanson, not jokes, but news or any programs where they spoke quickly, competently, although, for the most part, it was not clear ... because quickly.

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3. Read (preferably out loud)

Every day I picked up a newspaper or magazine thrown away by someone and read aloud what was written. Many language learning gurus will disagree, but I developed my own system and do not claim a patent. I read aloud no more than 15 minutes, not understanding at the beginning about 95% of what I read. Yes, I understand your confusion. I myself was surprised: what have they taught me all these years in the Soviet Union? .. But after some three months, the percentage of incomprehensible dropped to seventy. By the end of the year, he was already at fifty. And this was a victory, especially considering that I did not open the dictionary at all (although everyone advised me to do this).

4. Talk in English, and do not translate Russian words

One of the problems of language learners (our fellow citizens, for sure) is that they ... speak Russian, substituting the English words they know. And it doesn't work. That is, you can understand, but it's all clumsy and not in English. Fortunately, having figured it out quickly enough, I bought a book of English idioms and learned one a day. Like a little. But having saddled one, all this day I was only preoccupied with the need to insert it into sentences more often and use it in conversation in order to “run in”. There were, for example:

• not my cup of tea
• when it rains it pours
• a hard nut to crack
• I am all ears

These phrases, if not known, are meaningless. A year later, I'll tell you for sure, I was already chatting quite smartly (listening carefully to myself and correcting myself on the go), inserting idioms where it was necessary and where it was not necessary.

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5. Write

И last thing my invention - I wrote essays every day. He did this: he took a piece of paper (then everyone wrote on paper), wrote a topic, for example, “My cat”, and wrote something about a cat.

My cat. I love my cat. He is black. He likes to jump here and there. He eats a lot. Here, in the US, you can find many variations of foods for cats…

Something like this. BUT as soon as I thought about what to write further, for longer than two or three seconds, for me it meant the end of the composition. Wrote even if two sentences; turned the page and wrote the number one. The next day - another sheet, another topic, I write until I think - number two. Having written essay number one hundred, I pulled the first one out of the pile and compared it with the hundredth. The difference was incredible. As if written by two different people. Not only from different countries - from different galaxies.

So the system is simple but effective. It has been tested on hundreds of my followers over the past thirty-five years. And although it may not seem effective to someone, it helped me. Two years after the start, I, almost without stuttering, spoke at the invitation of various institutions and talked about life in the USSR and about the life of immigrants in the USA (for an English-speaking audience, of course).

No, don't think, my accent remained, like most who came as adults. But I had no intention of losing him. The task was to learn to speak, express one's thoughts and understand what was said. And I fulfilled it.

Until today, I find an hour a day to talk and listen to English in order to keep myself in relatively good shape. And I consider the time spent on its development to be the most reasonable use of this most underestimated and, unfortunately, non-renewable resource of life running far away - our time.

And to you, dear readers, I wish you good luck on the path of learning the language in any way that seems convenient and reasonable to you!