Quote:
Originally Posted by lovelysunflower
To masaegu:
T-Thank you! ;w;
Both you and cranks are very kind! ( >w>);; bwaah though knowing that I made noticeable errors is kind of depressing. Oh well. They say practice makes perfect, and you'll never learn if you don't make mistakes!
Also, I was wondering, how did you learn English?
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Don't be afraid of making mistakes. It's the only way you can learn anythng. If mistakes were bricks, you could build another Tokyo Tower with the mistakes I have made in my English over the years.
How did I learn English? I don't really know what I did differently from my peers except the following:
1. I used monolingual dictionaries when almost everyone else was using bilingual ones. A huge free tip here, I hope. It helped me quickly get rid of the bad habit of translating everything. If you "translate", your foreign language will never sound natural, especially between two linguistically unrelated languages like Japanese and English.
2. Never used flashcards, not even once. Don't know why those are so common.
3. No PC. But then there was no such thing as a PC back then.
4. Always learned vocab and grammar
in context using paper and pen. (Thus the absence of flashcards. My peers used flashcards and you wouldn't understand their English too well if you met them now.)
5. Always tried to use two kinds of materials, one for fun (joke books and novels) and the other for serious studies (college textbooks).
6. Spoke to myself out loud all the time. Mind you, this is very difficult but incredibly rewarding if you can keep at it for several months. I never even saw an English-speaker up close until I was 19.
So, like yourself, I'm pretty much self-taught.