Quote:
Originally Posted by ls99
My original two sources of English grammer learning came from Mr Magoo and the dictionary. Memorization of spelling is not so great, and sententence structure, punctuation etc. is as I damn well feel like it at the moment, as evidenced by many mistakes. BTW I still have a pretty sron accent while speaking, mercifully it is yet to be identified by anyone as a Hungarian accent.
The initial learning curve started with a two page article in what in remember is the the New York Daily News about the FBI. It was a long and painful process.
At the beginninnig had to look up nearly every word in an English/Hungarian dictionary, then after a few paragraphs used mostly an English dictionary. The problem was that in order to understand the explanation (definition) generally had to look up about ten more words, which was true of the newly looked up. So overall roughly for each new word, had to look up between 60 to 120 new words initially, and many had to be looked up in translation as well. Bloody painful.
Anywhoo, it took about two months of several hours a day reading to get to the end of the article. A year and change later got drafted, I enlisted before the draft date, and truly advanced English learning commenced in the form of DI guidance, counseling and directions (look that up on youtube) and southern slang from fellow recruits in the barracks. Also learned in great detail how to describe nearly everything with F.. words and synonyms.
Also learned the Spanish words No Comprende, though those fellows had no trouble with understanding the command Fall Out, or Smoke em if you got them, or chow.
No I did not bother to take the test.
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Persistent?
Thank you for sharing this.
I wrote code for a system that's documentation actually was written in the way you described teaching yourself English. The vendor's directions on how to read the document actually talked to the methods you used.
I worked with a bunch of former Marines and with my background in the logging industry we communicated well.