My summary of "4 things to study EVERY DAY to become fluent in English", from Lucy Bella Simkins.

20 Feb, 2023

I'm using a video from Lucy as a baseline for making a new plan to become fluent in English. As usual, these are notes for me, or a sample «TL;DR» at best; I encourage you to watch the full video to really understand each topic and design what to do for yourself.

“There are so many YouTube videos, but I don't know which order to follow.”

Four things that you need to study every single day if you want to improve your English quickly, in a short period of time:

Study every day
Lessons with teachers
Grammar
Vocabulary

Notes on each thing

Study every day

...and learn pronunciation from the beginning. Meaning, do not begin with something else and leave pronunciation for later.

My plan: I set up an alert with a daily word from the Google dictionary app¹. When clicking pops up the meaning, a button to get pronounced, and a link to learn how to pronounce it (by recording your voice). That's one of the actions, also I execute this for every word from plan 4 as much as I can.

Lessons with teachers

If you can or can afford it. There's clearly a promo in the video (to a strong source), so the tip could sound naive or too evident to you. As an alternative, I select one free online source and stick to it for a while or through all the content.

My plan: Mine is for now the Lucy website, more precisely going through the free lessons as a relative grouping of her Youtube videos with textual explanations on the posts. After that, I'll go through the rest of the videos on her channel. In this case, as a refresher, she publishes short videos with tips.

You can choose another good source. Check the quality of the source with the references you can find and make your plan with it like this.

Grammar

“Sometimes following a strict order isn't the best way to learn a language.” “Test yourself at every single level” (she provides links) “and then write down all the topics that you need to do” (you found yourself with difficulties). “And then study them in order of level and that is the order in which you need to study grammar.”

My plan: Make the tests in the links section below and collect all issues to make a checklist. Not sure at this point how to search for the grammar lessons covering the found issues, but thinking about using the services of a friend if can't find any literature easily.

Vocabulary

Learn vocabulary that you come across in your daily life. Use a Word diary, and try to practice in conversations.

My plan: I'm already making the word diary in my current note app, which is accessible and in sync through all my devices. To study every word I don't start by translating it (unless I actually need it at the moment across my daily life context) but I make sure to open the full record of each word in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, which includes all the meanings, samples, etymology, conjugations, tenses, etc.² After that, most times before, I make the plan steps of section 1 with the word.

Nils' notes