English Learning Tips that Changed My Life

This is the transcript of my video posted on Youtube and Bilibili. If you like it, go check out my videos there!

Learning English has completely changed my life and if you want to hear my journey and tips on how you could level up your game to master a foreign language, and how it’s gonna benefit you in so many aspects in your life, keep watching.

Hey what’s up you guys! If this is the first time you’re watch a video from this channel, my name is Chang, an engineer working in tech. Like the majority of you, I started learning English since day one at school when I was a kid. Even though I had been getting decent grades in English since I was a student, the moment when I embarked on this journey to prepare for studying abroad, I just felt like my English was so far from enough. I can’t understand what people were speaking, my vocabulary desperately needed to be fixed, and I can’t speak what I want.

Now, in the last more than five years of consciously learning and improving on my English, I think I’ve got some tips that I would want to share with you. I really believe that if I knew those tips in the first place, I would be much better off with English now, and I hope it could be of some help, for anybody who’s watching this video.

Tip #1 is to know your “why”

Now this isn’t technically a tip, but I put it as number one because if you want to set up your mind to do something, there has to be a reason.

And that reason better be good, because if not?, let’s admit it, you’re not gonna last.

For me personally, I want to improve my English because I live and work in an English-speaking environment. And being good at English can lead to in general, better quality of my life, and also hugely beneficial to my work career.

For example, I made a lot foreigner friends. I’m much more confident speaking up at work. In the past English was the crucial tool that helped me pass the interview, survive the internship, and land a dream job afterwards.

Now because of my “why”s, I need to practice on all of my listening, reading, speaking and writing. That’s a lot of effort, but people might have different reasons why they want to improve their English. If you want to prepare for an upcoming English exam that doesn’t require speaking, then it’s probably not the highest priority to practice it at the moment. Or, if your goal is to hang out with your foreigner friends, or travel to an English-speaking country, then you strategy would also vary a lot.

All of that being said, I think there’s one great reason of learning English, which is the crazy amount of material shared in English. For example, all of my early years of learning programming, I learned it by simply watching Youtube videos. And I found it to be much higher quality compared to the Chinese tutorials. Nowadays, I’ve been learning video editing and it’s so easy to find out what you need on Youtube. And things like personal finance, investing, vlogging, news, house hunting, video games, music. The list goes on and on.

Tip #2 is to increase your exposure to English

How good your English is, is really a function of your input. And if you’re not able to get exposed to English material that much, it’s hard to imagine how you’ll be good at it.

Try to engage yourself in one or two English social medias like twitter or Youtube. Read news in English. Read a few English books every year. If you want to get book recommendations, make sure to subscribe to this channel for book reviews in both Chinese and English. Go out to see if there’s any local English meetup, try to make a few friends who would like to practice English with you.

From another angle, small habits could go a long way, for example, setting aside at least twenty minutes in a day, to make sure you’re exposed to English material, for example, reading news when you wake up, memorizing vocabulary. Remember, it’s hard at first, but it gets easier every day, if you keep doing it.

Tip #3 is to balance and make it both an entertainment and a chore

Coming back, (above) Learning oftentimes is a chore, but learning English doesn’t have to be this way. You can learn English via watching English dramas, TV shows, local meetup, and those all be fun. And honestly if something is fun, it’s easier for you to stick around with it.

But at the same time I’ve seen a lot of people who also watch a lot of English drama without improving their English along the way. The problem is, they weren’t taking it to heart. Entertainment is fun, but it’s also easy to be forgotten.

If you don’t spend effort in it, and make it a total entertainment, you’re not learning English, you’re just having fun. But this could be easily tweaked, if you change your mindset, to achieve both.

Take watching TV shows for example, when you see a new word or expression that you think is useful, simply pause the video for just a few seconds, look it up on your dictionary, and put some notes either physically or in an app which you could revisit later.

Again, once you form the habit, you’ll begin to notice how easy for you to pick up new words and expressions automatically.

Tip #4 is to build up your vocabulary

If the previous tips don’t sound actionable enough, let’s give ourself a bit of challenge after watching this video.

Now I challenge you to start spending 10 minutes every day, to build up your vocabulary. This is easily done via various mobile apps and you could do it right after you wake up, during your commute, when you take a break during the day, before bed, any time that suits you the best.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to build up your vocabulary because it’s something like an arsenal and is gonna help lay your foundation in all four aspects including reading, listening, speaking, and writing. And compared to picking it up via watching videos and reading, it’s gonna save you so much more time if you do yourself a favor to set aside time every day to learn it.

By investing 10 minutes per day, you’ll be able to memorize more than 10 new words per day, and almost 4,000 at the end of the year. And I guarantee you, this alone would uplevel your English already, regardless of what kind of level you are right now and you’ll thank yourself for what you have done.

Tip #5 is to learn via imitation

Moving on to the last tip, tip number five and this is especially for spoken and written English, is that a lot of it is picked up via imitation. The word imitation means “you’re copying how others people do things”, and in our case, speaking and writing.

Think of yourself more as acting instead of speaking a language. You’ll gonna see a lot of videos from foreign speakers, and I want you to take time and pay attention to every single detail when they speak, like their facial expressions, the words they pick, the intonations, the rhythms between syllables, their hand gestures. And I want you to repeat exactly what they said, the same way that they did. And if you like it, you can even record yourself and compare to know the difference. Remember, you’re imitating and you’re an actor.

This imitation process is gonna help you tremendously to close the gaps and make you sound like an authentic English speaker, because if you think about it, that’s how kids pick up a language from their parents. They don’t know a thing about grammar or vocabulary. All that they’re doing is by watching closely and imitating what other people do.

Okay! That’s all of the five tips I wanted to share. If you’re still sticking around, you’re awesome and thanks so much for watching. I know a lot of these stuff is easier said than done, but you’ve made it all the way through here, and you just need a kick in the butt and start doing it. If you think it’s useful, make sure to like this video, subscribe to this channel and I’ll recommend some concrete English materials that I use on a daily basis.

Stay tuned. Make it happen. Peace.