How I taught myself English

The first thing I realised

An adult native speaker knows roughly 20,000 to 35,000 words. That is before counting the phrases they habitually go with and the small differences in usage. This number and the milestones below come from Paul Nation's research.

Learning that number was discouraging. But it also killed an illusion: there is no trick that memorises all of that.

The only thing that produces that volume is time in contact with the language. Every technique in these pages exists for one purpose: to make that contact time more effective and easier to sustain.

The less discouraging part: you don't need 20,000 words to use English. About 8,000 word families lets you read novels without a dictionary, and 3,000 covers most everyday material — I gave that number its own piece: How many words is enough.

Learning to not understand everything

This was my hardest habit to break.

Early on, an unfamiliar word meant stopping to look it up immediately. Twenty lookups on a single page. Forty minutes for that page — and afterwards I couldn't tell you what it said.

Then I changed approach.

My 80% rule

If I get about 80% of the passage's meaning, I keep reading. No lookup.

The remaining words work themselves out after a few dozen encounters elsewhere. And they genuinely do.

Learning top-down

School teaches bottom-up: pronunciation, then vocabulary, then grammar, then finally putting sentences together.

Immersion runs the other way. I met complete material from day one — a whole episode, a whole chapter — and only then pulled small pieces out to study closely.

It sounds strange, but it is exactly how children learn their first language. They hear whole sentences for a long time before they can say anything.

A realistic route

These are the stages I went through. The timings are estimates — some people are faster, some slower.

Stage	What I did	How I knew I'd moved on
0–3 months	Basic grammar + listening to learner material	Understand learner material by ear
3–12 months	Daily listening and reading + Anki	Read simple stories without constant lookups
1–2 years	Switch to an English–English dictionary, watch native material	Follow most of a film without subtitles
2 years onwards	Start speaking and writing seriously	Speak fluidly, and catch my own mistakes

How much grammar I actually learned

I did it once, quickly, only to the level of recognition.

The goal was never to get exercises right. The goal was that when I meet an unfamiliar structure while reading, I don't stall on it.

Concretely:

About 6 weeks on one basic grammar book.
I did not finish the exercises. Read the explanation, look at the examples, move on.
I only went back to look something up when I met an unfamiliar structure while reading. Never studied ahead just in case.

The four things I do daily

1. Active listening — 20 to 40 minutes

Nothing else. No phone. This is the part that moves me fastest.

2. Reading — 20 to 30 minutes

With Ddict giving me one-second lookups, I don't lose momentum.

3. Anki review — 10 to 15 minutes

Old cards only. I don't create new cards during a review session — that makes the session run forever.

4. Background listening — whenever

Commuting, cooking, cleaning. Far less effective than active listening, but costs almost no extra time.

How I check my routine for gaps

The four items above lean heavily on listening and reading. They were enough for the first year, but later I needed a way to see what my week was missing.

The frame I use is the four pieces — two minutes every Sunday, and it is what showed me that for two years I had barely produced a single English sentence of my own.

Don't optimise too early

I once spent almost three weeks picking apps, picking decks, reading method comparisons. Those three weeks taught me exactly zero.

One mediocre hour of study beats three hours of researching how to study.