A friend of mine kept saying that he would never ever like English. Everything about English was a closed book to him. Do you ever feel so?

To me, the very beginning does matter in terms of preference. One might not like spinach because he or she had a terrible experience involving vegetable in their meals. This is what happened to him. At school, his teacher always gave tasks on tenses and had all students memorize a list of vocabularies from the dictionary on a daily basis. If you think this works, then that’s for you. But he already lost interest in English just before he even liked it.

I have a different story. Everything about English always successfully drew my curiosity. I buried myself in the countless pages of a dictionary (the conventional dictionary, of course) to find the meaning of words like it meant a lot to my life. Words in magazines, newspapers, TV advertisements, and billboards never missed my attention. My classmates even made numerous jokes on me just because I always noticed some grammatical mistakes on magazine covers or billboards. Maybe this was the reason why I chose English as my major.

There is always a beginning

My interest in English did not come without a bad start though. Living in a rural area did not give me a lot of choices to learn English--no English magazines or newspapers to read, movies to watch, or music cassettes to listen to. I found this one book with a washed up cover entitled “Literature on Psychology”--if I remember correctly. I tried to make sense every sentence that I read in the first few pages, translate every word in a sentence, but no luck.

However, I did not stop there. There was this very famous boy band at that time. Their songs turned on my fascination in music. I bought the cassettes, playing the songs over and over everyday. Trying to sing along, I also had to know how to pronounce the words in the lyrics. Moreover, learning pronunciation is one thing, knowing the meaning is a different thing. I tried to figure out words that I was not familiar with, using the dictionary. This time, it took less effort than it did last time.

Sing it!

Learning English from a hobby--in my case it is music--has its own merits. First, you can increase vocabularies and learn new expressions from the lyrics. Countless songs contain different expressions. Love songs, sad songs, or satire songs provide a lot of different vocabulary that are perhaps new to you. Second, you do not have to look up in the dictionary on how to pronounce each word in the songs. Listen carefully, follow the lyrics, and sing along. It has never been so simple. Third, you do not have to make notes to memorize new words. Singing is a better way to memorize words. Your vocabulary bank will increase before you know it.

Watching movies works the same. You can learn new expressions and understand them better since the dialogues are supported by the context. On the other hand, if you are a fan of sport and movies are not your thing, you can begin reading an English article or watching news on your favorite player.

Nowadays, there are unlimited sources on the internet that you can use at no cost, really. Thus, there is no more excuses for not finding the right one for you. Happy browsing!