Sergey Gorkovets' Personal Blog

WELL

As they say “Every beginning is hard”, whatever you start to do you need a straight answer to the question – What do I need to do to start? Nevertheless every person could choose his or her own path saying this or that learning course is better, or this or that teach-yourself book is the best. I only want to share with you my experience of what the learning steps should be.

First of all, when you do not know language at all, you have to learn grammar and simultaneously words, phrases and phonetics. Usually every course starts with it. You could ask why I tell you obvious things – I met different “teachers” who told me that it is better to start with translating easy short texts or practicing with ones who know the language. Nonsense I tell you. When you don’t know anything about it is obliged to get to know basics or even better level to have the possibility for translating and speaking.

Then, when you acquire approximately almost a half of language course (I hope it will take 2-3 months), you need to begin search someone to talk. Firstly it will keep your motivation to learn up – it is very hard to study for such long. Secondly, you will get your first experience of communication – because if you want to speak the language you have to speak the language. Finally, it is very important to have a friend who wants to learn language like you. Also that is the time when you need to think about translating texts that could eventually become book reading. Like when we were young enough and our parents made us to read a lot – this is really useful.

Actually from the half of language course you could start from translating only and postpone speaking with someone. Or vice versa. It is up to you.

But if you still have the question what language course you need to choose, I can share my experience of what I decided to pick – from different courses and teach-yourself books I preferred Duolingo and Tinycards. The first is to learn grammar, words, phonetics and phrases (mind to use it only from PC to have access to grammar) and the second to consolidate my learning efforts (I use it generally from my phone whenever I have five minutes). There are several another good options for study language which I will describe in my next articles.