English Audio Request

I started to study English about four years ago. In fact before that time, I was trying to learn German. But unfortunately it turned out that I wasn't very good at German. The reason was probably that I simply didn't like that language. And I decided to start learning English purely as a hobby. That was when I was about eighteen or nineteen years old. At that time, I was already a student at the University of Oaxaca in Mexico. Well, I decided that that hobby could be useful at some point in time.

And so I decided to start learning English on my own. The first book that I bought was a self-study book. It consisted of a number of lessons. I was supposed to read the material and repeat it to learn the words and so on. It was supposed to take about a year to complete. Through doing this, I discovered that the English language was much more attractive to me. Another especially interesting point was that English grammar simply did not exist for me after having studied German. This is because the German language has a very complex grammar. It has something like seven tenses. And there's a lot of very difficult stuff for a learner. That's why English attracted me at first. Then I simply liked it.

As a beginning learner, I decided to use some very interesting techniques for learning words. For example, I didn't learn words in pairs, which means that I did not take a word and its translation and try to learn the pair of words. Instead, I was reading texts. I was trying to read some simple passages, some basic texts, some elementary information and so on. And when I encountered words that I did not know yet, I looked them up in the dictionary. And I was trying to put those words into context to learn their meaning, instead of learning the words themselves, to try to feel what they meant in the particular text. I think that technique was pretty useful for me because the whole thing worked pretty quickly.

After studying English for a year, I started to talk a little bit. I also started to read some fairly complicated texts. And what really helped me with English was the possibility of communicating with English speakers. Approximately three years ago, I got a chance to talk to American students who were visiting Oaxaca. They were on a business trip to Mexico and I helped them by being their interpreter. At that time I had a pretty good knowledge of English, but I did not have much practice speaking. This is why speaking English with the American students helped me a lot at that point in time. As a coincidence, the day after those students left for the United States, I was supposed to take my TOEFL test in order to apply for a graduate program in the United States. So that was particularly helpful.

That experience led me to believe that communication with English speakers is definitely very useful for learning English. Absolutely nothing can replace that in the process of learning English. It was particularly true in my case. I think that it really helped me to learn this language because I've only been studying it for four years. and I think I've made good progress.