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English long-term study plan (>C2) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Maapsold Newbie Germany Joined 3452 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: German* | Message 1 of 8 22 April 2015 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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So I would like to bring my english to a high level. It used to be a bit better (8.0 IELTS some years
ago) than it is now. I need to read (more and more also to write) a lot of english academic texts in university (economics), and generally I like to read (all english) scientific papers, blogs and books in various subjects (mainly social sciences). Of course, exact comprehension is very important - guessing the meaning of single unknown words from the context is negligent most of the time - and so I am constantly forced looking up words in a dictionary. Also, I would love to travel more and maybe even live abroad! Shouldn’t be lost time improving my english :-) I am prepared to spend about an hour a day on formal practice for the next 2-3 years. Grammar About 30 minutes on two of three days. For the first months(weeks), I would like to study the „English Grammar“ by Cornelsen. It is made for pupils of ages 15-19 and there are two additional practice books available. This shall serve as a brush-up on my current grammar knowledge. After that, I would like to use the „Practical English Usage“ by Michael Swan, as it was mentioned quite often in this forum. Any material to be learnt will be put in an Anki Deck and repeated appropriately. Pronunciation About an hour a week. I will learn the International Phonetic Alphabet with the help of a private teacher for some lessons. I want to make sure that I am able to hear and speak the different sounds correctly. I am not sure what follows after that, but I think it will be a mix of a pronunciation drills and some online pronunciation courses. Vocabulary About 30 minutes a day. I would like to create two different decks in Anki for learning vocabulary. The first deck will be as following: Front: term Back (basically content of the Cambridge dictionary): phonetic transcription definition 1, example sentences (definition 2, example sentences) etc. Any terms which I read/hear and which I am not able to conclude by context will be added. I know that most people are very skeptic of learning definitions of terms, and even more skeptic of learning terms with more than one meaning. I sure would appreciate to get some feedback on this. The second deck will be a common native language to target language deck. Any vocabulary that I need to look up while writing a text will be added. Thank you for reading - any feedback will be highly appreciated :-) Edited by Maapsold on 22 April 2015 at 7:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4468 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 2 of 8 22 April 2015 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If you are as advanced as you say you were, then I don't think you need to do any more formal grammar study or use flash cards to learn vocabulary. I would read a lot, and try to push yourself a bit to read somewhat more difficult books (so long as they are enjoyable - motivation is important) and watch lots of TV/movies. Netflix or the equivalent will give you lots of English language programming at minimal cost. Also regularly reading an English language newspaper like the Guardian (which is free) will help broaden your vocabulary.
A tutor for speaking be helpful, though I suspect if you are getting lots of input, your level will improve quite quickly and naturally. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Maapsold Newbie Germany Joined 3452 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: German* | Message 3 of 8 24 April 2015 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thank you very much for your feedback! :-)
Reading an English language newspaper is a great tip. I will definitely do that as soon as my current subscription is ending. I am watching movies, reading books (academic books and non-fiction books) and like 90% of my time spent at the internet is on English sites. Though I maybe was advanced at that point (the IELTS test was before my Abitur), I am very unhappy with the current level of my English. There is a huge amount of unknown words I run over every day. My pronunciation is not very good. Neither is my use of grammar. I appreciate your input very much, but I have a strong feeling that I need to do some formal work. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Nieng Zhonghan Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Antarctica Joined 3606 days ago 108 posts - 315 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Japanese*, Spanish, Galician Studies: Finnish, Icelandic, Armenian, Mongolian Studies: Old English, Russian, English, German, Korean, Mandarin | Message 4 of 8 25 April 2015 at 12:47am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Oh, that was a detailed plan.
Reaching a very solid C2 which is your goal means various things. Even the most detailed CEFR definitions leave some wiggle room and there are overlaps between the higher levels (i.e. B2, C1 and C2). While the CEFR scale has got a lot of uses, it is sometimes practical to define one's goals differently. Where do you feel you need to progress more? What do you want to improve? I hope I understood your plans in your post correctly because I think "pronunciation" and "vocabulary" may lead to different interpretations. Maapsold, to bring your English up, you're going to have to work, hard. If you really want it, that means a lot of hard work as anyone would need to do to reach a solid C2. You'll need to read extensively, and, better than watching films, in my opinion, is watching (and finishing) a TV series - or many. Your English is at a high level, but you want to take it higher. I think you should keep this positive attitude if you are sincere about that - and then do that. There are English-speaking German learners here on HTLAL who would be happy to give you English speaking practice if you could help them with your German. You have only to ask for a language exchange with people who share same interests, hobbies etc. You can contact some people through PM or even use some other threads on HTLAL or you can even find people in your country (I assume you are currently living in Germany) or other websites related to language community.Depending on where you live, you might find international students willing to develop their German skills while they can help you to reach C2 level in terms of speaking, at least. Perhaps it might take some time to find out some serious German learners who are at native fluency in English; however, in meanwhile, what you can do without speaking are read, listen, watch and write. Read a lot and read extensively, instead of using your SRS (Anki). Listen to and watch native English media. There is so much (legal and free) English-speaking media on the web that you should have no trouble finding enough TV series to watch in English. TV series are better than films for learners because of repetition, IMHO. You get used to the actors accents, speech and vocabulary. You spend more time in the same situation/locale. After you've watched a couple of native English language television series, along with practicing speaking, writing and reading extensively, plus some focused grammar study (only related to those topics you need to review), you should notice a considerable improvement after those 2/3 years you established. Patrickwilken has suggested you to read newspapers. You surely can read lots of articles taken from newspapers; however, the key to progress is leaving your comfort zone by trying some novels. For instance, Harry Potter is a good start and quite anything else will serve. Basically, quite all the htlalers have found large amounts of input to be beneficial to their progress. Sure, there are various tastes in the genres and in methods to use the books, movies and so on. But the one thing we usually agree on is that "the more you read the better.". From the grammar point of view, I don't think you need to (if you intend to) take a look at specific grammars most of time unless you have some problems with a specific topic and its usage. I mentioned Harry Potter, but there are many other books and genres, especially speaking of books written in English. Another advice might be creating a log on HTLAL. You can easily create it and you may also join the “Advanced Team”. The more you write about (in your log) many things such as what kind of strategies (methods and techniques) you have been using to reach a strong C2 level, plus other things that might be related to your field (economics) or anything you come up with, more readers you will have. The amount of people reading your log depends mostly on the content and how it is written. If it is fun, you will have more readers and therefore, there will be more chances that people will give you different feedback based on their experiences. There are many experienced language enthusiasts and polyglots here as well. You can take a look on them (their log) once in a while and find out someone who has a similar attitude concerning your approaches. I, for instance, get my massive input in a much different way from many language enthusiasts here (reading their logs). I am not sure if you have read about the Super Challenge (SC). If so, ignore what I am going to write here. The HTLAL Super Challenge was designed (as far as I understood) to get people to do that in order to take their language to the next level, no matter which criteria you use, be it CEFR or any other system. You should consider doing a Super Challenge in English- and try not to get bogged down in the minutiae of the rules- watch a hundred hours of a TV series in English (without German subtitles, of course, since you are already at high level) and read a hundred books. I learn vocabulary from exposure. You are quite likely to internalize all you need from books, movies, TV series, speaking with native speakers etc. This is where fiction and stories prove more valuable than documentaries and newspapers, in my opinion. Just an additional comment: As I said, the description of C2 level leaves some room for different interpretations. If you take it literally, I could argue with you that even most educated native speakers (of any language) don't meet it. For instance, I have just googled one topic from CEFR: "Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read". There are a lot of difficult books out there. There are romances, poetry and regional slang to be considered too. Most native speakers have some difficulty with at least some of those things which is associated with sociolect. You could have a vocabulary and reading comprehension far superior to that of a native American (British, Australian etc) college student, and still not be at that level. Even if you lived in the country of your target language for many years and got to the point where you prefer to read in the language, and speak it every day without difficulties of communication, you still wouldn't unambiguously fulfill the requirements necessarily. In addition, if you take C2 as native-like, then the chances to acquire such speaking skills are very low unless you spend years in the country or you use it in your country in your daily basis for professional reasons etc. Many people will disagree with me here saying that they have reached native fluency without having moved to their country of their target languages. I do believe those people might have reached C2 in certain fields of their specialization academic or professionally speaking, but some of them would probably have some “gaps” in between the C2 level. However, the rest of the skills are different. You can reach a very high level (C2) in listening comprehension, reading and even writing. Just as a matter of reference, IELTS’ band scores of 8.5 and higher are recognized as C2 and band 8 is borderline (C1/C2), level which you were assessed according to your post. Anyway, instead of focusing on whether it is C2 or whatever criteria, focus on what you can do to reach the high level you defined on your own. I don't stick to those levels as an evaluation of my language skills. Edited by Nieng Zhonghan on 25 April 2015 at 12:53am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 8 25 April 2015 at 1:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I basically agree with patrickwilken: above a certain level you don't need to do formal grammar or vocabulary training. But you still need once in a while to take time off from reading or listening for content and instead focus on pronunciation, formulations and words. As I once have said: you can skip a word thirty times and still not learn it. But focus on it five times and ask yourself what it means and why it is used, and then you have a new trophy item under your belt. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4468 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 6 of 8 25 April 2015 at 10:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
What I didn't say was that at some point writing with corrections would be very helpful. I guess you can do this for a language tutor, but I think it would be more useful for your to focus on writing essays at university and getting formal feedback. University essays are better because you are really trying to communicate an argument, and you need to get your grammar/vocabuary right to make the best argument possible. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4642 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 7 of 8 25 April 2015 at 11:07am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If you have a tutor that can correct university-level essays, like I did for French, then
it's worth it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6532 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 8 25 April 2015 at 1:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Your style is quite formal. You definitely need some colloquial input as well. Context is a pretty safe tool, as long as you don't feel the need to narrow down the meaning. Are you okay with having only a vague idea in your mind that develops a clear shape as you see the word more times?
Seems like overkill to me. Even at a linguistic lyceum and university, I had separate grammar classes only once a week. (Also separate phonetics and literature classes once a week, and later stylistics etc)
You don't need to learn the whole IPA, just maybe the sounds English has, if even that. Consider recording yourself and either posting that here on HTLAL or sharing with a native speaker you trust.
Have you tried SRS before? In my experience, these kinds of cards can get boring easily. Consider using cloze deletion. Add only the words that are relevant to you. Don't study too many cards from the beginning, as they accumulate quickly. In general I would recommend a combination of input and something like the 20 hour technique. Edited by Serpent on 25 April 2015 at 1:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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