Learning Tips - With magazines, DVDs, TV, novels, sound files, Internet, email, and text messaging, learning a language on your own is now easier and more fun than ever. If you have discipline and desire, you'll be able to make incredible progress by yourself before entering into communication with English speakers.

1. Have daily contact with English, with something that interests you. This means on weekends, and before and after your regular course. Remember when you started learning your own language (that was a long time ago!): you practiced it several times a day, every day, over a long period of time. This is how languages are best learned, so try to replicate that environment with English.

Here are some suggestions: read an English magazine that you like; get your news from an English Website; watch the news only in English (or watch it first in your language, and then in English); read novels in English; watch a soap opera or another show in English; watch TV or DVDs in English; chat with English speakers in Web chat rooms; etc.

2. Use subtitles. Watch a movie at the cinema with subtitles, rend a DVD and activate the subtitles, and use the closed captioning feature of your TV. If the movie is hard to understand, you could always watch it in your language first, and watch it a second time and a third time in English with English subtitles: putting them in English allows you to see what you hear.

3. Find a language partner. Laval University students can use our new language partner service. It's an exchange. You offer to practice your language with an English-speaking student who offers to practice his English with you. You must first create a free account. Check it out!

4. Take advantage of the English in your community. Take a night class, go to plays, read local newspapers, play a sport, listen to English radio, or join a club. In Québec City, you could contact organisations like these: APPEAL for conversation activities (www.appealquebec.org) , the Voice of English Québec, an organisation for Québec City anglophones (418-683-2366, www.veq.qc.ca), or the Morrin Centre, an English cultural organisation in Quebec City which offers cultural activities in English, as well as conversation workshops (418-694-9147, www.morrin.org).

5. Use as many of your senses as possible. Don't just read and write - say it out loud! Regularly read out loud (to yourself) your vocabulary, readings, and explanations. This will add pronunciation and listening to your studying, so you will reinforce your memory of the forms, and, consequently learn much more. Don't forget that humans started out speaking languages long before we wrote them.

6. Take notes. Use the margins of your books, magazines, and novels to take notes of observations and definitions. Don't trust your memory: manage it!

7 . Make vocabulary lists and review them. Keep a sheet of paper in your pocket and note down any new or difficult English vocabulary that you encounter. Later, transfer it to a notebook and find the definitions. Practice them a couple of times a week.

8 . Study with strategies. As you do your grammar exercises, identify your future review material: put an x or colorful symbol beside each exercise that your get wrong, and beside each explanation that you found difficult or good to remember. Then, take 15 minutes each time you study, hopefully about 5 times a week, and review your incorrect exercises and preselected explanations. This way, you will break bad habits and form good, new habits.

9 . Review, review, review, review, and review. That's 5 times a week! Don't spend more time; just spend it more wisely . . . Oh, and remember to read out loud to yourself as you go.

Most people agree that if you spend all of your time studying only the night before a test, you will retain about 10%, and if you study different days, you retain more. So, if you divide that study time by 5, you will probably achieve about 90% retention. It's not scientific, just common sense:



10. eLearning. There is a lot of excellent Web-based software available today. Usually you must buy a license that lasts a limited time, and log onto a server in order to use it. One good company is Aurolog: Tell Me More

11. Variety is the spice of life! Supplement your learning with online exercises. It's a great way to learn: they're different exercises and explanations made by many different teachers, you get automatic feedback, and you can pick and choose from a huge selection from various countries of the world. Click around my English Resource Page.