The resources I use
The tools and sources I actually use — not a list padded out for length.
⏱ About 3 min read
This list is deliberately short.
My problem early on was not a shortage of resources. It was the opposite: I saved far too many things and never used any of them properly.
Pick few, go deep
Pick one listening source and one reading source for this month. Only change when the old one has become too easy for you.
It took me about a year to learn this.
Tools
| Tool | What I use it for |
|---|---|
| Anki | Reviewing the sentences I collected myself |
| Ddict | Looking words up on the page while reading the web |
| asbplayer | Syncing subtitles to video: replay the exact sentence you missed, and clip the audio |
These three are everything I use regularly. I have tried dozens of other apps and dropped them all.
Listening
Beginner — material made for learners, slow-speech podcasts, video channels explaining things in simple English with visuals.
The three free sources I used most at this stage: BBC Learning English (graded by level, every piece has a transcript), VOA Learning English (news read slowly, with a vocabulary capped at about 1,500 words), and ELLLO (short conversations, many accents, transcripts included).
Intermediate — interview podcasts, long-running animated series, explainer videos on a topic you already know well in your own language.
Advanced — anything native speakers watch. I favour material with a lot of natural conversation over scripted narration, because real life sounds more like the former.
Reading
- Graded readers — vocabulary capped by design. This is the safest way in. There are lists by level at the Extensive Reading Foundation.
- Long web serials — nearly endless, everyday language, free. The downside is uneven prose.
- LitRPG and progression fiction — this genre repeats a lot of vocabulary about stats, skills and combat. All that repetition makes it easier to get into than I expected.
- News and non-fiction — useful, but a narrower vocabulary than fiction.
Not sure whether a book is within reach?
Paste a passage into Lextutor to see what frequency band its vocabulary sits in. Or do it the crude way: open a page at random and count the unfamiliar words. More than 15 per page is too hard — I explain that number in How many words is enough.
Community
Self-study does not mean studying alone.
I'd suggest finding a group to ask when you are stuck and, more importantly, to see other people struggling the same way. There were stretches where the only thing that kept me going was knowing that plateaus are normal.
A fuller list
This page only lists what I use regularly. If you want everything I drew ideas from — books, research, dictionaries, reference tools — I collected it all in What I read.
But read that after you have started, not before. I spent three weeks reading method comparisons before my first study session, and those three weeks were completely wasted.