LEARNING ENGLISH. The never ending story.

Learning English. When do you stop learning? 

While recent research claims that you can “learn English” in 2-3 years, some companies may promise you intensive six-month courses where you’d end up being “bilingual”, or they pull methods out of their hat with which you can be able to learn English quickly while only knowing a limited number of words. I still wonder, year after year, if some day I might say that about “I can speak English”. Because if I’ve learned anything over the 5 years that I’ve been studying this language that I love, it is that you never stop learning. And of course there are no magical potions or quick methods, just persistence, motivation and spending lot of hours practising… As much as you can.

Perseverance and tenacity are both important when you don’t live in a non English-speaking country. And it’s really important to be in constant touch with the language. You should look for any excuse to practice, whether listening to it (music, radio, movies, TV…), reading, or even “forcing” to yourself to “think in English” (Yeah, it sounds weird, but it's effective!)
Nowadays it is easy to find hundreds of internet resources and websites for learning English, so there ain’t excuses to find the way to study or improve your level at any time.

My experience tells me that you shouldn’t be in a hurry; the process of learning another language is slow and it’s not the same for everyone. Sometimes you feel like you’re not making any progress; or like if you get stuck in a level that you can’t get through (surpass? pass? improve?). But just when nothing seems to change, suddenly, one day, you realize that there is an English song playing and you can follow the lyrics. Or you can understand a movie without reading subtitles. Perhaps you’ve even had a completely fluid conversation with a native-English speaker. This is all achieved through time and perseverance. But you never stop learning.


Thanks in advance for your corrections :)

Nightmary, this notebook is very good, despite my splattering of pink corrections all over it. I think your approach works well for any language, not just English.