How to learn English in 2027: methods backed by research

In 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus measured how fast he forgot lists of syllables he had learned. In 2015 Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros repeated the experiment and got almost the same curve: a large part of new material fades within the first day unless you come back to it.

Each return makes the memory last longer, and returns that take some effort work best. So the methods that hold up in research share one idea: meet a word again, at the right moment, and make yourself use it.

1. 1

   Space your reviews

   Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues pooled more than 300 experiments in 2006: studying the same material in spaced sessions beat cramming it into one, and the longer you need to remember something, the wider the gaps should be. A day later, then a few days, then a week is a good start.

2. 2

   Test yourself instead of rereading

   In a 2006 study by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students who reread a text did better on a test five minutes later, but students who practised recalling it remembered more a week later. Covering the translation and saying the word works the same way.

3. 3

   Read and listen to English you mostly understand

   Hu and Nation found in 2000 that readers needed to know about 98% of the words in a text to follow it comfortably; at 95% many struggled. A 2023 replication found the line less sharp, but the advice holds: choose texts with a few new words, and those words will stick from the context.

4. 4

   Speak, a lot

   Understanding and speaking are separate skills, and speaking only grows with practice. The obstacle for most adults is the fear of sounding wrong, which we cover in the article on the language barrier. The more you speak where a mistake costs nothing, the sooner that fear fades.

5. 5

   Get your mistakes corrected

   A 2010 meta-analysis by Shaofeng Li, covering 33 studies, found that correcting learners' mistakes has a medium effect on accuracy, and the effect lasts over time. A correction sticks best when it's about something you just tried to say.

AI makes the hardest part of practice easier. A voice assistant listens as long as you like, at three in the morning, about any topic, and a mistake in front of it embarrasses nobody. You can speak far more than in a weekly lesson, and how much you speak matters.

General assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude are patient partners and good explainers. They don't plan your learning, though. They won't bring back last week's words when you're about to forget them, they may let small mistakes slide to keep the conversation going, and what you learned stays in a chat you won't reopen.

Ami Speak is our app, built around these five habits. The words you save come back for review with growing gaps (a day, three days, a week, a month) in quick games that make you recall them and in talks with Ami. When one turns up in something you read in the app, it's highlighted.

You talk with Ami by voice, and the conversation pulls in your own words. Afterwards each mistake becomes a short grammar lesson built from your sentences, with a test, so what you got wrong comes back until you get it right. A daily plan decides what to do next, so you don't have to.

Talk to Ami

See the mistakes you actually make.

Talk to Ami

• Murre & Dros (2015) Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve. PLOS ONE
• Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer (2006) Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3)
• Roediger & Karpicke (2006) Test-enhanced learning. Psychological Science, 17(3)
• Hu & Nation (2000) Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1)
• Li (2010) The effectiveness of corrective feedback in SLA: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 60(2)