This time I tell it all...

Believe it or not, it has been almost 15 years since I began learning English in high school. Give it another 15 years, and the whole experience may become just a blur in my memory. So, I have decided to rewrite my story in the Successful English learners section while I still remember what I did and how it worked out. The result is a longer, more honest, and more detailed account of how I learned English.

In 1993, I got into the best high school in Wroclaw. It was a special program with a lot of English classes and certain classes (like math and physics) taught in English. I owe a lot to the people I met there, both students and teachers. My first two years in high school were very important for my English. At first, I thought I would do well without any serious effort. After all, I had gotten the highest score in class on the initial placement test and, until then, had been the top student in every English class that I had attended.

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Last month I wrote about VocabUsage.info, a search engine which gives you example sentences for English words. I have since discovered a few other useful sites in this category. The British National Corpus has nice examples from a wide range of sources (both written and spoken). Unfortunately, the free search is a bit slow and only includes British sources. The Corpus of Contemporary American English is a free, large corpus of American sentences, if you don’t mind the complex interface.

I have posted an updated version of my old article “Learning English with adventure games“. I added some information about recent games (not much, since adventure games are almost dead in the 21st century), some information about playing old games, and some screenshots.

Illustration by Steven Wilson

No, the man on the left is not Charlie Sheen. It is Piotr Wozniak, inventor of the SuperMemo method, who, after years of relative obscurity, recently became the subject of an extensive article in Wired Magazine.

The article has inspired me to write a short, personal essay about the man behind SuperMemo and how I see him after many years of e-mail correspondence:

The list of Piotr’s optimizations (or, if you prefer, eccentricities) is very long indeed. Even though he lives in Poland, he will speak only English to anyone who can understand it, including his Polish wife and closest friends. At university, he would shock his professors by refusing to speak Polish during oral examinations. His SuperMemo collection contains hundreds of thousands of items and he spends many hours a day reviewing them. His day is divided into “time slots” (SuperMemo, creativity, sports, etc.) to which he sticks religiously.

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VocabUsage.info is a new site which wants to help you learn English words. You can type in any English word (including phrasal verbs) and VocabUsage will show you a list of authentic example sentences gathered from the Web.

Are the examples as good as what you’ll find in a learner’s dictionary? Certainly not. Because VocabUsage relies on news sites (rather than, say, discussion forums, which could contain poor English), most examples are written in typical newspaper style, often being more complicated than is necessary to show the usage of a word. By contrast, examples in learner’s dictionaries are hand-picked by editors and usually simplified to remove unnecessary words.

Another issue with VocabUsage is that it sometimes does not give examples for all the major meanings of a word. For example, I couldn’t find any examples for go out in the sense to date someone.

However, VocabUsage excels in the sheer number of sentences (especially for rare words like hirsute or halcyon) and it is certainly better than searching for examples on Google. It wouldn’t be my first choice for learning a new English word, but is a great supplement to a good learner’s dictionary. After all, example sentences program your brain and the more you see, the easier it is for you to write and speak in English.