Introduction
At first it seems obvious that the knowledge of a foreign language, especially English, which is extremely widespread nowadays, is essential for everyone. However, when it came to the actual process of learning, I realized that it took a great effort to study the language. Nevertheless, with the help of efficient studying plan and sufficient experience, I managed to prove that learning English is much easier than one might expect.
Main body
One of the issues that made the studying process extremely complicated and bothered me to absorb new knowledge was the fact that English was my second language. Thus, I had no previous experience of learning languages and did not know where or what to start from. In addition, I could not imagine how to switch from my native language to the foreign one. Because of the above-mentioned problem, I could not associate the English words with their meaning, which caused further confusion. In addition, the number of meanings that a single word could have in the English language made me feel quite puzzled, since I could not draw any parallels with the meanings that the given word had in my native language, which also caused quite a problem.
Since at first my success in English was barely noticeable and I made a lot of mistakes, especially when talking in English (for instance, I could easily confuse such words as “affect” and “effect”), I decided to take up a special English class, where I could train my skills in speaking the English language correctly. I must admit that at first I felt quite embarrassed and hesitated to ask questions, but further on, I started making progress.
After several weeks of training, I started realizing that I stopped confusing certain words. Moreover, I figured out the way in which I could learn new words faster and more efficiently. To study the new terms and their meaning in my native language, I put each phrase or word down in my vocabulary list and then tried making at least three sentences with each of the newly learned words.
It is worth mentioning that having an English class was great fun, since all the students were involved in each activity. While some of the tasks were designed for each student specifically, the others demanded the participation of a group of students or even an entire class, which made us learn on each other’s mistakes and remember the material several times faster than we would do in a typical class environment.
Among the rest of the assignments that we were supposed to complete, the one that I remembered best was writing an essay in a group of three. After each of us got a topic to write an essay on, we started figuring out the best way to write the papers to combine them into a single writing. In the end, our team came up with a series of three short essays which combined well and were really fun to write together.
Soon I began to realize that my English skills started to improve even faster, especially the ones concerning the spoken language. I learned a lot of synonyms which helped me to make my speech more eloquent, and a number of standard phrases which people use in certain situations, not to get confused when someone asks what time is it and in the similar situations. Working on my conversational English, I started feeling more certain and stopped fearing to make a mistake. Even though the changes were not instant and it took quite a while for me to learn the basic vocabulary, as well as to understand the spoken language, I realized that I am still able of learning English.
With the help of the classes, I managed to learn a lot about the English grammar and, which is the most important, understand how it actually works. Now that I know the principles of the English grammar, I will be able to deal even with the most complicated assignments and use all kinds of styles, starting with the scholar one and up to the conversational English, which is also quite hard, mostly because of the vocabulary.
However, it is also worth mentioning that the hardest part was the one concerning the stylistic differences. Since English was my second language, it was hard to conceive the difference between seemingly similar words straightaway.
Conclusion
At present, it is obvious that I have not reached my top yet and there is a lot of room for further development. I still have to work hard on my pronunciation, on the grammatical issues and on the vocabulary. In addition, I would like to develop my own writing style. However, with the help of practicing and using various learning methods to train difficult rules, as well as working on the language specifics with the help of various exercises, I hope to speak someday as if English was my naïve tongue.