<p>Readers often send questions about the best way to learn English. What can I say, guys, it's too late to learn English, the future is with Chinese. However, here are two methods and one observation that helped me.</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>One of the best methods I know is to create an English-speaking environment around you.</strong> This means that everything you do, you start doing in English.</li>
</ol>
<p>What I tried:</p>
<ul>
<li>I've been watching all movies in English for the last 5 years. Although with subtitles, I still struggle without them. Except for those movies that were originally shot in Russian, of course.</li>
<li>I regularly read new books on my Kindle in English.</li>
<li>I won't even mention websites/blogs/news/TED, everyone seems to do that anyway.</li>
<li>I occasionally think in English. We all talk to ourselves inside — so try to switch your internal dialogue and talk to yourself in English.</li>
</ul>
<p>By the way, here’s a great post about this method of learning a language: <a href="https://t.me/za_bugrom/123">https://t.me/za_bugrom/123</a>;. In general, @za_bugrom is one of my favorite channels. Beautifully written notes about the life of a Russian-speaking emigrant in the USA, the peculiarities of American culture, and the English language. Everything is very similar in Ireland.</p>
<ol start="2">
<li><strong>The next method may not work for everyone, but it worked for me.</strong> Find a TED lecture, a podcast episode, an interview, or something conversational in English that you really, really like. Like, you admire the person or the topic is incredibly interesting. Then, listen to that specific episode regularly for several weeks.</li>
</ol>
<p>Yes, it sounds very questionable. But this method helped me a lot at the time. Phrases and intonations are quickly memorized, you start to hear pronunciation nuances that you didn't notice before, and they even start to appear in your own pronunciation. In general, despite its seeming strangeness, for me, just plain repetition works surprisingly well. You just need to listen to the same recording a lot, literally dozens of times. Two or three times won't cut it.</p>
<ol start="3">
<li><strong>Finally, when speaking English, don’t be shy about it.</strong> I really only got better at this after six months of living in Ireland. A very common situation: I say something, a colleague asks, “say it again?” I think to myself: “I’m a loser, no matter how hard I try, they don’t understand me. I’ll never speak like the locals.”</li>
</ol>
<p>Of course, you shouldn’t think like that. Now I get asked to repeat myself a little less often, but it still happens, yet I’ve completely stopped worrying about it. Two observations helped me:</p>
<ul>
<li>In English, _nobody_ speaks without an accent. Even native speakers have a bunch of different accents — British, American, Irish, Australian, Indian, South African. And how many more accents of non-native speakers exist, I probably don’t need to list. In any international company, it’s long been accepted that everyone speaks with accents. It’s hard for us to imagine this because different pronunciations of the Russian language are not that common. But with English, it’s the norm.</li>
<li>Even locals constantly ask each other to “repeat that again.” When I noticed this, I finally calmed down.</li>
</ul>
<p>Have a nice day!</p>