How to learn English: from scratch and quickly

Foreigners coming to Moscow are surprised at the fact that very few people on the streets can speak English. English is spoken by the inhabitants of all civilized countries, and Russians also need to more actively master this language of international communication. How can I learn English relatively quickly? We will answer this question in detail and thoroughly.

Prerequisites

Before starting classes in English, it is necessary to form some psychological presets. The right psychological attitude will help to master this language more quickly.

First, you need to understand that in the world there are very few people who are not able to learn a foreign language - only a fraction of a percent. Almost everyone is able, in principle, to learn English. To begin to achieve this goal should be with full confidence that "I can." If you doubt your abilities, if you fear that "suddenly I won’t succeed, " the process will go much slower and harder.

Secondly, you need to be clearly aware that mastering the English language in the normal case will require a large amount of personal time and intellectual effort. A “normal case” here refers to the situation of an adult student engaged with a teacher. If you approach the study of English with the expectation that the teacher will take knowledge out of his head and put it into the student’s head without any efforts from the latter, then it’s better not to start learning English.

A young child learns to speak his native language - the language of his parents and other people around him - by about two years old. This term is necessary for the baby to collect a sufficient amount of linguistic information, analyze its components, synthesize these elements and integrate them into the system of linguistic knowledge. And only then, after two years of hard intellectual work, the child can put this knowledge into practice, i.e. start talking.

A teenager or an adult learning English is faced with an even more complex intellectual task. After all, he must master a new system of language knowledge, different from the existing one. English by its nature is fundamentally different from the Russian language, and this fact also needs to be clearly understood. The necessary psychological setup is as follows: when you start to learn English, you need to be prepared for hard intellectual work. Otherwise, nothing will come of it.

To speed up the process of mastering the English language, it is extremely important to be aware of the root differences that exist between English and Russian. Learning English means much more than just remembering a lot of new words. The British have a different perception of the world than ours, they otherwise divide the reality, they see it differently from us. This, of course, is reflected in the internal structure of their language, which is strikingly unlike the structure of our native language.

Differences in the lexical composition of English and Russian

The biggest difficulties for native speakers of Russian studying English are usually caused by an understanding of the nature of words of Anglo-Saxon origin as part of modern English. These are monosyllables such as come, go, bring, take, let, set, say, show, tell, swing, etc. These are words of colloquial speech and it is necessary to master them first of all, since "conversational English" is what students usually require from language courses.

However, Anglo-Saxon words are not at all like the words of the Russian language in nature, in their ways of creating linguistic meanings. Firstly, they do not belong to parts of speech, unlike Russian words. They get part-affiliation only by standing at a certain place in the sentence. The words back or right, for example, can be used as verbs, nouns, adjectives or adverbs (aright also as an interjection). Secondly, Anglo-Saxon words have an extremely vague reference, i.e. they have only a general, vague meaning. None of the above words and the like can be translated into Russian using one or two equivalents. For the word make, for example, a good English-Russian dictionary gives more than a hundred (!) Translation options.

It follows that the traditional vocabulary method of studying a foreign language is absolutely not applicable for memorizing Anglo-Saxon words. With the help of a dictionary and grammar textbook, you can learn Spanish or Italian, for example, but not English. To understand the blurry, difficult to perceive, deeply hidden meanings of words of Anglo-Saxon origin, it is necessary to analyze their use in contexts. There are a great many contexts of these, and ultimately, the understanding of the meaning of such words should go to the level of the subconscious.

Differences in English and Russian syntactic structures

Such a mysterious internal nature of Anglo-Saxon words leaves its mark on how to construct sentences in modern English. You can often hear that the English sentence has a fixed word order, while in Russian it is free. The first part of this statement, in fact, is not entirely true: English poets, for example, put words in any order in their verses. But there is still some truth. Indeed, since monosyllabic English words do not belong to parts of speech, their function depends on their location in the sentence. Want to use the word right, for example, as a noun, put it in the place of the subject or addition. Compare: the right to elect and be elected or You have the right to keep silence. Want to use it as an adjective, put it before the noun: the right side of the road. If you want to use it as an adverb, put it after the verb: Turn right at the corner. Etc.

The allowed sentence structures in English are not at all the same as in Russian. If you simply fill the Russian syntactic constructions with English words, you will get not meaningful English sentences, but all nonsense that does not make sense to a native English speaker.

Complicating the mastery of English syntax is the fact that they have weak verbs, auxiliary verbs, and one strong verb. What is a strong verb / weak verb? We don’t understand, since in Russian all verbs are strong. Those. for us, this difference is simply irrelevant. What is an auxiliary verb? We also have a poor understanding, because we use an auxiliary verb in a single grammatical structure, namely, in constructing the future tense of an imperfect verb: I will do it. “I will” is an auxiliary verb, and “to do” is semantic. They all have sentences, with one exception, that necessarily contain one of four auxiliary verbs that are engaged in precisely what helps weak verbs to build sentences.

The only strong verb in English is the verb to be. He himself, without outside help, copes with the task of constructing sentences when he acts as a verb part of a compound nominal predicate. But we have all the verbs strong, and the English have only one, while the rest are weak. Feel the difference, what's called.

Differences in English and Russian Phonetics

It is equally important to understand that the phonetics of the English language is also fundamentally different from Russian phonetics. They produce very different sounds, not like us. There are only two completely identical sounds in English and Russian: [m] (m) and [ʃ] (u). All other sounds of these languages ​​differ from each other to a greater or lesser extent.

This fact explains the difficulties that arise for native Russian speakers trying to perceive English speech by ear. Their organs of speech do not move at all like ours! They have a completely different "music" of the language! Therefore, starting to study English, you need to be prepared for the fact that you will have to master new, previously unknown methods of articulation. After all, those who understand how their lips and tongue should move when pronouncing a certain English word are much more likely to recognize this word in the sounding speech of a native English speaker.

Differences in the style of English and Russian languages

Linguistic stylistics is a very important thing for someone who wants to learn how to express themselves in English in a natural way, i.e. as a native speaker would put it in a given communicative situation. The stylistic affiliation of English words depends, first of all, on their origin, which is not observed in the Russian language, at least to such a large extent.

English is unique from the point of view that its lexical composition is filled with words of Anglo-Saxon, French and Latin origin. In other words, modern English has incorporated the vocabulary of three national languages. It is this fact that makes the total number of words in English the largest among all languages ​​of the world.

As mentioned above, Anglo-Saxon words stylistically belong to colloquial speech. With their help, people communicate with each other in everyday life. These are “real” English words.

Words of French origin are material from writers and publicists. These are “beautiful” words in modern English. Also, with the help of "French" words, official and administrative documents of any kind are compiled.

Latin words are used in their writings by scientists and philosophers. Unlike Anglo-Saxon words with vague meanings, words of Latin origin in modern English have very narrow, very precise meanings (and in this they are similar to the words of the Russian language). The task of a scientist or philosopher is precisely to convey his thoughts most clearly.

The stylistic affiliation of words may not seem so important. However, if you speak in a way that the "normal" English do not speak, but write, or if you use an inappropriate writing style, you risk at least provoking ridicule.