Introduction

I'm Hiếu, a developer like any other. It's just that for a long time I've wanted to write a blog — to share things, to keep notes on what I figure out, or simply to have somewhere to practise new tech.

With AI as strong as it is now, putting this site together really only took a few prompts, so I built it and I'm still filling in the content. The first thing I want to share is how I've been learning English.

I'm not good at English yet, and I'm still working on it. But I've tried a lot of methods and got plenty of them wrong, so maybe what I went through can help someone.

It took me a while to see the actual problem: I had been studying English like a subject on an exam, not like a language.

Where I went wrong#

Looking back, there were three mistakes. I think a lot of people could make the same ones.

One: learning words in isolation. I copied new words into a notebook, one per line, with the Vietnamese meaning next to it, and tried to memorise them. I got hundreds of them down — but when someone said one out loud, it went past me like wind past my ear. All I really knew was what the word looked like. I'd heard it a few times, but at normal speaking speed I couldn't catch it.

Two: trying to go too deep on grammar. Breaking down the passive voice, third conditionals, reduced relative clauses. But in real speech a sentence is gone in a moment; there's no time to analyse anything. Studying that hard and seeing nothing improve is what made it so easy to give up.

Three: forcing myself to speak too early. I went to English speaking practice while my vocabulary was still very thin, because the internet told me this was the best way to improve. I could talk, but I talked wrong — and nobody was there to correct it. Repeat a mistake often enough and it becomes a habit.

What actually changed things#

I looked into an approach called immersion — spending time soaked in the language instead of studying it from the outside.

The idea is simple: instead of learning about English, I use English. The first thing I did was switch every device I own to English — and I've kept it that way for nearly ten years. Whenever I get the chance I try to listen to and read real material — films, podcasts, stories — the same things native speakers consume. I'm not sure whether this counts as lucky or unlucky, but being a dev means I read a lot of English documentation either way.

At first I understood very little, and it was discouraging. I kept reading anyway. After running into the same things enough times, some sentences just clicked — ones I had never sat down and memorised.

That's how people learn languages. It just took me a long time to find that out.

What's in the posts that follow?#

This is my own record: what I did, in what order, with which tools, and where I got stuck.

I wrote them for the version of me from years ago — and for you too, whoever is reading this.

How should you read this?#