How to learn English

Almost everyone starts English already knowing some of it, which is both the advantage and the trap. Getting from "I understand a bit" to "I can hold my own" is a different job from starting at zero, and it needs a different plan.

Learn the thousand words that do the work

The first thousand words cover roughly eighty-five per cent of ordinary conversation, and you probably half-know several hundred of them already. Time spent nailing those down beats time spent collecting rare words you will never need to produce.

Listen more than you read

English spelling does not tell you how a word sounds, so reading alone will teach you words you cannot recognise when spoken. Listen daily to something slightly too hard, with subtitles in English rather than your own language - that gap is where the learning happens.

Speak before you are ready

Speak before you feel ready. English has more non-native speakers than native ones, so the person you are talking to is very often learning too and is not judging your grammar. Waiting until you are correct means waiting for ever.

Fix what actually gets noticed

Then fix the few things that actually get noticed: the th sound, which language after language lacks; leaving out a or the, which marks a sentence as foreign faster than any other slip; and stress on the wrong syllable, which causes more misunderstandings than a wrong tense ever will.