1. Learn grammar, not words
“Kalusha dribbled on the fluff and honored the bottle.” Why is the story of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya understandable to the reader – perhaps at the expense of vocabulary? No: the whole point is that, knowing the basis of the language – grammar – you begin to understand the meaning of even not the most understandable words.
When learning English, save time on memorizing new vocabulary – it’s better to spend it on taking another look at the time alignment table. When reading in English, you will be able to understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word from the context, but the grammatical meaning of a sentence without in-depth knowledge you will not be able to guess so easily.
2. Do not rush to look in the dictionary
When reading and translating from English, many are faced with a kind of Google addiction, when every new or questionable word is immediately driven into an online dictionary. But think about it: if you are distracted by the dictionary on each phrase, are you too tough with the selected reading? After all, unfortunately, the words scanned by the “express” method are forgotten the very moment you close the dictionary page, and useful information is not deposited in your head. At the same time, the text that you read, “stumbling” every second, is absorbed much worse. Try to choose materials for yourself, most of the words in which you are familiar or guessed from the context.
3. Turn off subtitles
Watching a movie in English with English subtitles is an effective way to improve your vocabulary. However, if you look at the subtitles all the time, the brain prefers to read rather than listen – and the point of a video in English is precisely to learn to perceive the language by ear. Try watching a movie in English without any transcript, listening carefully to the dialogues. Incomprehensible moments can then be reviewed with subtitles – the main thing is to learn to listen to the speech!
4. Translate “blindly”
Try to convey the meaning of a paragraph or several sentences without looking at the text. To do this, read the text once or twice, grasp the meaning and rearrange its content as you see fit. Then, if necessary, the translation can be corrected. So you will quickly learn to convey the meaning (and not individual words) and avoid tracing paper from English.
5. Love the Russian language
Do you want to correctly translate from English? Love Russian! Read more works of Russian classics or good journalism. To develop stylistics, you can try to manually rewrite individual paragraphs of your favorite works. Your vocabulary will be enriched, and your syllable and language sense will develop to a higher level.
