I’m sure you are reading this article and struggling to improve your English reading ability, but your feeling is that your English reading has not improved, with little or no change. With globalization, we programmers should also consider learning English well and be more competitive in obtaining information. Sometimes I look up English technical documents to get the most original information, but my English reading ability is not enough. I have the same experience.

After 6 years of code life, I picked up English again and began to teach myself English at the end of 2018. During this period, I experienced giving up, starting over, writing vocabulary learning tools, etc. So far, my English reading ability has improved a lot, and I have become a peaceful attitude towards English learning. Now I prefer to read English content. The following are my feelings and practical experiences in improving English reading in the past year and a half, which can help you improve your English reading ability and make reading English easier in the future.

In the heart to prepare

Language learning is a process, not as a test, psychological give yourself time to 2 ~ 3 years, that is to say, in 2 to 3 years, from time to time you want to read some English content, although very slowly at first, but when you read you like technical articles, pay attention to the things you like after the access to information, you will get useful information, gain confidence, so as to continue reading, Then make English reading a habit. From May to July in 2019, I read about 5 long English technical documents on Medium. I read them very slowly, but I learned a lot after I finished reading one of them, and later I shared the information in depth in the group. The information I learned from the articles increased my confidence in English reading. In short, do not rush for success, accumulate over a long period of time, mentally have a long time to prepare.

2/8 rule

With a vocabulary of 2500-3000, you can understand 90% of everyday English conversation, English newspaper and magazine articles, and English used in the workplace. That means knowing those 3,000 words can get you 90% of the information you normally get. This is the 2/8 rule of vocabulary learning, learning 20% of the vocabulary used in 80% of the situations, that is the most commonly used 3000 words; This is an effective method I use in the process of memorizing words. This method will get half the result with twice the effort. Therefore, if you feel that you have forgotten the vocabulary App such as Le Ci App and Baici Chop after a long time, you will give up the useless method and do not waste your time and energy. If you take a closer look at the graph below, 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results.

Improve your Vocabulary with Burning Vocabulary

Burning Vocabulary is a Chrome extension that allows you to tag words that you do not know when you are looking at technical documents in English or browsing Twitter. The tagged words will be automatically flagged if they appear on other pages. So you’re inadvertently reviewing (which is useful when we’re looking at technical documentation); These words form a vocabulary calendar, showing the words you mark each day; Sentence snapshots can also be used to recall. So if you’re reading the React developer documentation and you see the word reuse and you don’t know it, put a label on it and see what the reuse is. If you use this tool for a long time, you’ll notice that the number of words marked increases and the number of words you don’t know decreases.

“Learning by doing”

Don’t read “learning by doing” as “learning by doing.” Read it as learning by doing. Learn English vocabulary while you’re checking Technical documents, checking StackOverflow, or scrolling through tweets. Because our brains are more impressed with what we’re doing, learning English vocabulary while we’re doing it is a very effective way to do it. Think back to when we first went to college to learn programming, did we write code while reading books? Yes, that’s learning by doing. A lot of learning is practical and English learning is no exception. The English translation of “Learn by doing” is “Learn by doing”.

English environment

To immerse yourself in an English environment, the most basic thing is to set the language of your computer and mobile phone system to English. Sometimes when you use it, you may switch to Chinese because you can’t understand it. It doesn’t matter.

Use Google search, search keywords in English, read answers or documents in English.

You can watch Youtube from time to time. Youtube will recommend you some videos you like. For example, if you watch the English version of “Remote Job”, Youtube will recommend you some videos related to remote Job.

Follow people on Twitter in the direction you’re interested in. For example, if you’re a front-end developer, you can follow Josh, the developer of GatsbyJS, who has a lot of cutting-edge articles coming out this year, and tweets from time to time. You can read his tweets and articles. If you’re in machine learning, you can follow Hardmaru, who works at Google Brain, who forwards papers, reviews, and recommendations. If you’re a back-end engineer… ; Their tweets are very interesting and you can learn vocabulary from them.

conclusion

If you know a little bit about model training in deep learning, you can easily see that what we learn is to train the neural network in our brain to remember what you see and make inferences by repeating and reinforcing what we know. I believe that by training the neural network of your brain in the above methods, repeated in use, after one or two years your English reading will have a qualitative improvement, reading will be more smooth.

Thank you for your reading, it took two days to summarize, it is not easy to create, if you feel inspired or valuable to you, like, favorites, forwarding is my biggest support! This article is original in accordance with the CC agreement, anyone can reprint and spread, need to retain the integrity of the original text and author information (author: You Shaohua).