
Ask HN: How to Perfect Your English - qnsi
I guess my english level is pretty ok. I read most of the information on the Internet &#x2F; books in english.<p>But I don&#x27;t talk&#x2F;write that much. Sometimes I don&#x27;t feel that confident in my english knowledge.<p>Any good tips on how to be better at this? What I would ideally want is some kind of feedback mechanism that tells me when I made a mistake, for example in grammar.<p>What I can think of:
1) Grammarly - try to write notes in english and check text in Grammarly. But I don&#x27;t like them having access to all keystrokes
2) Try to add a lot of stuff to Anki - I think a little bit to tedious<p>Ideally, I would have something like Clozemasters (by HN User) [1] but the database they use for english is pretty bad.<p>I am sure there are a lot of you for example from Europe or China that came up with some good solution to the problem of perfecting English<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13676105
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gigatexal
Have you looked into finding English language YouTubers you could watch/listen
to to get a better ear for the language? It might make your skills more native
sounding. Same idea with English podcasts. I find having to study the banality
of a language tedious but if I’m listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast, for
example, and I like tech and am trying to hear English spoken by native
speakers, then it’s like I am learning without the tedium.

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qnsi
For anyone browsing HN in the future, when they try to get answers to
interesting questions this is what I found after an hour of googling:

[https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/3399/is...](https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/3399/is-
it-possible-to-learn-grammar-through-spaced-repetition-and-if-yes-how)

this is probably the best "forum" to browse and find tactical and strategic
information.

I link to the specific question, because I think I will go with autogenerated
cloze Anki flashcards as adviced in the second answer.

~~~
yorwba
Note that the blog post about autogenerating Anki cards linked in the second
answer ( [https://sookocheff.com/post/language/bulk-generating-
cloze-d...](https://sookocheff.com/post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-
deletions-for-learning-a-language-with-anki/) ) uses Tatoeba (
[https://tatoeba.org](https://tatoeba.org) ) as the data source, which is also
where Clozemaster gets its sentences from. You already said that those are bad
for learning English, so Tatoeba may not be the solution for you. But that
depends on what exactly you think is wrong with those sentences. I contribute
to Tatoeba, mostly translating Mandarin into German, so I'm quite interested
in hearing from end users.

~~~
qnsi
Ok, I guess my problem with clozemaster is - I am only really proficient in
two languages - polish and english. There is no way to practice English to
English with Clozemaster, and I guess Polish-English pair on Tatoeba is not
that perfect.

I will check Tatoeba

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downerending
Hmm. The English in this post is probably already above the average level of
English as written in the US.

I suppose one thing you could do is to simply encourage your correspondents to
point out your errors. A little humbling, perhaps, but there's a lot to be
said for rapid feedback.

You didn't ask, but here's a little:

 _English_ in the sense of the language is invariably capitalized.

 _okay_ is perhaps a more correct spelling, though many use _OK_ or _ok_
informally.

 _most of the information_ sounds a bit odd. Maybe just _most things_.

Probably _when I have made_.

You're missing a couple of periods at the end of sentences.

This is all rather trivial, though. Your (written) English is essentially at a
native level.

~~~
qnsi
Thank you so much for pointing out the mistakes.

I guess at the end of the day I will have to pay for a teacher to point out
mistakes in my speech / writing, then ankify what she points out and try to
improve in this way.

I still think there might be a NLP based solution that could be of good use
for people for example at reddit /r/grammar. They seem to recommend grammarly
a lot

