On the programmer's English learning

As a programmer working in China, not knowing English does not seem to hinder finding a good job and raising a raise. But programmers have a slightly different job, because programs, especially high-level languages, are basically composed of English and digital expressions. English is very important for programmers. All of my college students use English teaching, and often encounter foreigners at work, and they laugh and laugh, and think their English level is a little higher than the average level of the garden. I will learn English according to my own experience in the following way.

Why to learn English

To learn English well, you can read the original version of all kinds of classic books directly. Programmer this industry is special, because it all the technology from Europe and the United States, so the most mainstream, the most fresh, the most correct technical articles are in English, most of them have not translated, some translations are poor. Instead of waiting for someone else's translation, read the original text directly.

To learn English well, you can watch the teaching videos of online courses or programmers from the most famous schools in the world directly. Compared to the Chinese teaching video, do not know where to go, and these videos are usually not any translation to find.

Learn English well you can communicate with programmers all over the world on stack Overflow,reddit and GitHub to get to the code. If you accidentally hooked up with a few buddies, you might have stumbled on a referral to work abroad. As a veteran of many years of work, we naturally know the extent of the push, if you get the company's admission, then what Visa is a cloud.

To learn English well, the name of the variable in your code is not too bad, it is confusing to people (even some variables are named with Hanyu Pinyin).

To learn English well can open a door for your future, you can consider the work and life outside the mainland, taste different from the land of China, feel the Western culture, and even the Chinese and the West, to establish a different family. Even if you stay in the mainland, good English at least will make you competent for some foreign affairs work, can not be able to, this is very important for foreign employees, your superiors will thought highly you, you talk about wages more chips than others.

What is the level of English is better, you can not deliberately continue to learn

If you think you meet the following conditions, then I think you in the English-speaking country can also live very moist, find a yard farm work should be no problem. Of course, you may be planted in a hospital, a street basketball court, a bar, a place where you need to have a difficult English conversation. But if you only deal with the work, you do not have to deliberately improve their English level, just need to keep.

1. Naked Exam (intentionally not prepared) TOEFL 100+, IELTS 7+, oral performance is not among the lowest
2. More than 8000 words
3. Be able to cope with 30 minutes of full English interview, and you speak in the process of the proportion accounted for at least One-third, rather than others say 20 sentence you say
4. Reading general technical articles (such as the MSDN documentation) and technical books is not a big hurdle, specifically, the word frequency is below 1/100 (i.e. 100 consecutive words in any selected article, on average, only one does not know)
5. can use English email and the company's foreign exchange
6. You can talk to foreigners about simple home or familiar topics, support for at least 15 minutes

About Words and reading

Learning English without memorizing words is not good, recite the word is the first step, only to know the word, you can understand it, understand it, finally in the use of oral English. If you just want to work, many words don't need to be memorized, for example, you don't need to know all the words in the picture below (maybe 15th, but you probably should), which doesn't affect the speed at which you read technical books. Basically, you just need to know the more high-frequency words that appear in the Bull blog and the English translation of the concepts you need to work with.

For beginners, there is no need to read other messy prose, or to look at the new concept again, the most important thing is to read your main language of the various terms of Wikipedia, the new concept will not tell you that control reversal of English is Ioc,pumas is large cat-like Animals which is found in America (the first sentence of the third volume of the new concept) can only let old beauty think you have a brain problem. (This class is a subordinate clause, so almost all of the sentences are subordinate clauses) back to the new concept is not as good as the technical documentation, for C #, look directly at MSDN, such as commissioned by: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173171.aspx

The words on this page are probably the most commonly used words in technology, such as type,method,event,instance (example) and so on. If you do not know any of the words, it means that your vocabulary is not cross-border. However, the repetition rate of the words in various MSDN documents is very high, and the more you read, the faster you will read. If you have a basic non-dictionary of MSDN documentation, you can try Google search instead. For example, if you are unsure when a linked list should be used, how much performance you can search for StackOverflow linked list performance/linked list performance comparison, and then click the result link- In this way, the frequency of Chinese appearing in your work is greatly reduced. If you have a large-scale use of Google, stack overflow, and the search out the links are read very smoothly, you do not need to recite the words.

Root Affix method

Many technical words have a feature, that is, they are made out of the word. We know that 100 years ago, there is no computer language in the world, so many concepts do not exist, and later, technology developed to today, there are many previously unimaginable concepts, such as asynchronous, multi-threaded this 100 years ago meaningless words. They are all sporogenous out, the previous English does not include these words. There are usually two types of English-language creation: One is to trace, for example, the English algorithm of the algorithm is from an Arabic mathematical book 1000 years ago, and the other is superimposed, For example, multi-threaded English multithreading is more (multi) and threads (thread) two words added up. The word async is a little more complicated to explain, first of all we need to understand the word synchronous: It is synthesized by SYN (simultaneous) + Chron (time) + ous (adjective suffix), and at the same time, it is synchronous. Asynchronous is not synchronous meaning, so in the synchronized English before adding a prefix a-, which represents the negation, the English word has been asynchronous: asynchronous.

Root is a quick extension of English words, such as a few of the roots we saw just now, are more common, I would like to cite a few examples, this time is no longer limited to technical words. Chron (time) evolved the Word also: Chronicle (Chronicle), Chronosphere (time boundary, the word is the DotA in the void mask big strokes of English, should be icefrog in the DotA created words. Sphere represents a hemisphere, and time to fight up, is the space-time hemisphere. We can visualize the counterstrike and imagine a hemisphere covering a place where the time stops.

Covariance and countervariance These two goods, a lot of people look at the word very long to produce fear, but in fact, the longer the word, the greater the likelihood of creation. First tell you vari is a change of meaning, you must know a derivative of its word variable, variable (can change things, see, you by the way you learned a suffix –able, can mean), variance can be seen as the form of its noun, mathematically, we use this word to represent the variance. So if you know that Co is synergistic (like con), counter is reversed, so you probably guessed the meaning of the two words covariance and countervariance: Covariance and contravariance. In addition, counter plus the word strike (blow) became a lot of people are very familiar with a word, abbreviated to CS (Counter-Strike). Of course counterstrike The word itself is only a counterattack, and the terrorists, elites have no relationship, but counter-strike this translation is really good.

Interoperablity, although it is very long, you should also be able to guess, if you know operate, you can see how it came. It means "interoperability," We know that C # some libraries, such as Microsoft.office.interop.word,microsoft.office.interop.excel,interop, are simply interoperablity, and these libraries are designed to deal with COM, It is known as its library. Inter stands for Mutual, interactive, and naturally we all know its two derivatives: the Internet, the interactive web, ie the Internet (the opposite, Intranet is intranets), interview, look at each other, that is interview ( so the interview is not just a company pick you, You also pick the company :), and Intersteller, if I tell you that Stell is the star's meaning, you guess the word (interactive star person) what it means – Chinese translator – Star Trek. Well, you know Stell is a star, and know con is a bunch of meaning, then constellation is what? A bunch of stars – constellations!

Some other examples are:

• Re-factor: Refactoring
• Trans-action: Transaction
• Pre-process-or: The person in front + processing + –〉 Preprocessor

Why is the root affix so powerful? Sometimes, I will make the root affix to the lexical category of Chinese characters in the radicals. Our Chinese characters have many words of the same radical, and some of the radicals themselves are meaningful, such as the rain, the head itself represents rain, the rain is a lot of words and the weather is also related, such as Fei, Ji and so on. English itself is from Latin, many roots themselves are Latin words, such as Aqua, in Latin to represent water, its radical word aquarium (aquarium), aquamarine (water blue) can be likened to three points of water next to the Chinese characters.

Of course, not all English words are created, such as the simplest get,set,have verbs. More than hundreds of years ago, the number of words in English was much smaller than the present, when there were no words to be created with the root affix. According to the root affix guess the word meaning is not necessarily all right (as the scholar literacy read half, not necessarily all the same), but generally guess the meaning is sorta, and a lot of technical words are created, which makes us look at technical articles, can be less back word.

Master A word not only to see the word know the meaning, but also to read it, otherwise, foreigners still do not know what you are talking about. You can use Google to find words, get the phonetic transcription of words, and usually have play keys behind them. If you're on a beauty course, do some rolling. To know the position of the stress in a long word (some in the front, some in the middle), try to minimize the traces of Chinese pronunciation (some crash books in English transliteration into Chinese to achieve a quick effect, such as how is the pronunciation of good ah oil, it must be put an end to this way, the farther away from this book, the better).

About listening

When enough words are known, the next more natural goal is to understand them. It's harder than reading, but it's much easier than using it in spoken English. Practice listening In addition to the dialogue with foreigners, is to watch the video, watching video is also a major purpose of our practice of English. Here are a few video sites that I often watch, some of which require a fee:

Pluralsight: All of these are technical teaching videos. Some videos are from Daniel, such as Jon Skeet. Some videos come with English subtitles. The video content is informative and very time-consuming, with an instructional video about it in just one weeks from the ASP. Recent website revision, for some topics also added learning path features, such as the following video is about C # learning path, divided into simple, medium and advanced.

A fee is required, but you can enjoy a 10-day trial first. The cost is 300 dollars per year, the price is not expensive, but also not cheap, if you are very well-off, but also to ensure that a certain time to watch the video every week, you can consider the purchase.

Coursea: This famous website contains online courses from the world's top universities. The benefits are free, the downside is not very specific courses, most of the courses are relatively general, such as algorithm courses: Https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithm-design-analysis.

This site includes courses on a variety of topics, not just computer technology. This link outlines the features of the Coursea course: https://www.zhihu.com/question/20722223

You can also find some favorite movies to see, but when you look at the time to take off the subtitles, and then try to put all the words to write on the paper, and then against the subtitles to see where they are wrong. This is a very hard process, but if you look at just a few movies, you'll find your ears understand everything.

About oral

Generally speaking, you will only use oral English during the interview. Although, some foreign companies you need to deal with foreigners, but the mainland's foreign companies are usually Chinese-dominated, foreigners can only endure a lot of Chinese people's plight of English and can't extricate themselves. If you do not have the plan to study abroad, then you can not practise speaking. If you plan to work abroad after a few years and experience a different life, your oral English is at least as good as getting the foreigner interviewer to know what you're talking about when they talk to you about technology. In this regard, it is difficult to practise spoken English on the mainland: you cannot practise speaking with a continental person, especially one who is about the same level as you, so your pronunciation will be hopeless. But a lot of foreigners doing things in the mainland are not yards farmers, do not know the technology. So, only through the way of the curve to the salvation Practice: chatting with foreigners, but do not talk about technology, on the one hand to find self-confidence, correct pronunciation, on the one hand familiar with daily English communication. As for technical English, it is somewhat easier than everyday English, so long as you have known enough technical words (hundreds of commonly used) and watched a lot of videos, you can understand them. If you can't find a foreigner, you can look for a set of American dramas and then recite all of its lines to the point where you can dub at any time. You can listen to your commute and listen to it as many times as you can. I do not recommend to listen to the new concept, because it is a lot of sentences are very deliberate, not in line with the current speech habits (it is written in many sentences so that you learn some kind of grammar, such as the third book has a lesson, all the sentences are attributive clauses).

I have to stress that pronunciation is very important. Even if your sentence has no grammar, the words are simple, but as long as the pronunciation is right, the foreigner can understand what you are saying. And as long as the foreigner understand, the other is not important. I know a number of investment bank jobs at this level in Morgan Stanley, the English level is a sum of food, IELTS oral visual inspection will not exceed 7.

I participated in a number of English interview, some interviewers are Hong Kong people, English is very novice, such an interview basically with his support first change to speak Cantonese as the outcome. But it's complicated and interesting to meet the Zhu ER:

American accent: This is the easiest to deal with because it is now the mainstream accent of English. Usually your accent will also be an American accent, unless you're pretending to be a better English voice.

Indian accent: This accent is horrible, you're not used to listening to the basics. Many of the big investment banks are now Indians, and they are still on the same side, so if you go to an investment bank, you're likely to hit a three-man interviewer. Indians who compare the cow nose, English speed is super fast, and thinking is relatively fast, the technical level is more than good. And Abe interview singled out the intensity is very big.

Japanese accent: Dora a dream English word Doraemon is the pronunciation of the word "dream" in English by the Japanese.

English accent: When you listen to too many egg-sore accents, you will feel like a spring breeze. The great advantage of English accent is that it is too standard. It makes you can't help but have this sigh: this is English ah! Of course, if you have not experienced three O, Hong Kong, the Japanese style of the experience of this wonderful accent, may not have too deep feelings. If you spend too much time in an American accent, you may not get used to it, but it will not be as difficult as it is to listen to Indian speakers.

About Grammar and writing

The grammar of this thing is very few people care. When talking about technology, basically you just need to be present. You don't need the passive voice, the various clauses, the subjunctive tone besides if I were you, many Americans don't know what it is. Only when you talk about life, you may need to be in the past or in the future. The basic grammar is not difficult, the English grammar is one of the simplest, as simple as you do not need to learn. For the fixed collocation, many Americans themselves do not understand.

There is no shortcut to writing. A faster way to improve is to copy down the good sentences you see when you read them and then reuse them with your brains.

Immerse yourself in an English environment

You can change your operating system, all kinds of software into English, QQ use international version. Then make some material, every day without the ear, they include but not limited to: English songs, English drama video, technical teaching video, etc. (you can not see the light listening). In addition to Gossip Girl this season has a number of passionate interaction of the drama, resulting in you can not concentrate on the English play, most of the play can be, such as jailbreak, friends. You can also write a small English diary every day. If you feel like you can't write a Chinese diary, you can find the TOEFL essay, write an essay every day, and then exchange the corrections with your friends.

You can also consider playing English games, but the experience is very painful, especially if you have a small vocabulary. Different English games are also different for your vocabulary, such as Diablo, which basically allows you to master a lot of weapons armor of English words. As a Diablo enthusiast, I can estimate the approximate price of any white outfit and glance at it in English, but it doesn't help me to read technical books and interviews. The RPG-class English game may be better because it contains some everyday conversations, always a bit of words and small fragments to get used.

You can take part in the subtitle group and try to pull the dialogue out of the English drama with others. You can also try to translate some of the topics you are interested in, such as the latest blog from foreign Daniel. Many foreigners like to communicate with people of different cultures, you can actively interact with them in various communities, not only practice writing, but also solve the technical doubts in your mind. If there is a foreigner and you hit it off, chat to stop, you can even through him to the whole country. For example, you might want to think about how many foreign companies in the stack overflow (by commenting on their answers, or asking questions directly), which is much easier than having a woman to talk to in person.

If you think your technical books are almost there, there is no obstacle, you can also look at Quora, accumulate your fame on it, or watch other bestselling novels, such as the Song of Ice and Fire, it is not very difficult, and Harry Potter equivalent. I personally feel that if you have already probably know the plot, you go to see the original text of the probability of seeing is much higher than what do not know the situation directly to see the original, so try not to choose unfamiliar tome. But even so, overly advanced English will greatly reduce your interest in the story itself. In the period of my two, I had a love of the dream of the Red Mansions, Chinese saw at least eight times, the various plots recite. But even so, it failed to read its English version, and died on the fifth of endless judgments.

In general, learning English is still a lot of channels, especially now this internet developed era. I wish you have fun learning English and discover the charm of English.

On the programmer's English learning