Learn English from scratch: a three-month plan for an adult starting at zero

A1 on the Council of Europe scale as the first finish line

To learn english from scratch as an adult, name the finish line before the first lesson. The Council of Europe’s framework of reference, the CEFR, has six levels from A1 to C2, as Wikipedia’s article on it sets out. In its wording, a learner at A1 can use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases for concrete needs, introduce themselves and answer questions about where they live, people they know and things they have. They can also interact simply, provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.

So A1 is not independence: it is the level at which a patient listener understands you. The European Union’s Europass site publishes the CEFR self-assessment grid as first-person statements, which make a better plan than a textbook contents page. At A1 they include recognising familiar words about yourself, your family and your surroundings when people speak slowly, reading very simple sentences on notices and posters, and filling in a form with your name, nationality and address.

Sounds, letters and transcription in the first two weeks

Modern English is written with 26 letters, five of them vowel letters, as Wikipedia’s article on the English alphabet notes. The sounds do not line up with the letters. The article on English phonology puts the consonant phonemes at about 24, while the vowel count depends on the accent: 20–25 in British Received Pronunciation and 14–16 in General American. That is why reading English words as they are spelt so often goes wrong.

Learn the alphabet by letter names, since you will spell your name aloud early, and learn to read the transcription that dictionaries print next to each word. Pick one model accent, British or American, and keep to it. Every new word comes with its sound: listen, repeat aloud, then look at the spelling. Speaking starts here, not in month three: saying numbers and a short self-introduction aloud daily trains the mouth for sounds such as the th in think and this, and a weekly phone recording shows which sounds still need work.

The verb to be, personal pronouns and the present simple

Grammar should start with what English uses most. In the list of the most common English words that Wikipedia draws from the Oxford English Corpus, a collection of more than two billion words, be is the second most frequent lemma, right after the. It carries the first sentences anyone needs: I am Anna, she is a doctor, we are from Kazan. Its present forms am, is and are, with the pronouns I, you, he, she, it, we and they, are enough to describe yourself, your family and your work.

The second block is the present simple, the tense for routines and facts. According to Wikipedia’s article on the simple present, for nearly all verbs it is the base form, with -s or -es added after he, she and it: I work, she works. Questions and negatives with ordinary verbs take do or does, as in do you work here and she does not drive, while be does without it: are you busy, he is not here. Other tenses can wait; in month one, make short true sentences about your life with these two patterns, aloud and in writing.

The most frequent English words before themed word lists

At the start, frequency is a better guide than themed lists of fruit or colours. The same Wikipedia list reports that the 100 most common lemmas account for half of all the words in the Oxford English Corpus. The top ten are the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have and I, and the most frequent verbs include have, do, say, get, make, go, know, take and see. Time spent on these small words pays back in every text you read later.

Frequency alone is not enough, because the A1 statements are about your own life. Add the words you need to talk about yourself: your job, your city, your family, your day, food and numbers. Learn each word inside a phrase, such as get up at seven or go to work, and keep it with its transcription, an example and a translation, so that grammar and vocabulary grow together.

How many minutes a day an adult beginner can keep up

How long does each level take? Wikipedia’s CEFR article lists the estimates that Cambridge Assessment gives for English: 90–100 hours of guided learning to reach A1 and 180–200 cumulative hours to reach A2. The article notes that such estimates assume a learner whose native language is European, and that they count hours of instruction. They are a yardstick, not a promise.

Now the arithmetic for an adult with a job. Thirty minutes a day for 90 days gives 45 hours, about half of the Cambridge estimate for A1. So three months of half-hour sessions will not finish A1, but they can cover its core: the sounds, basic sentences, words for daily life and first talks with a patient partner. The realistic daily amount is the one you can keep on a bad day; for a working adult that may be 20–40 minutes of review, new material and listening.

Why short daily sessions beat a weekend English marathon

The reason has a name: the spacing effect. Wikipedia’s article on it gives a plain definition: learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out, and it credits Hermann Ebbinghaus, who described it in 1885. In 2006 Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues published a review in Psychological Bulletin that pooled 839 assessments from 317 experiments in 184 articles. In Wikipedia’s summary of that review, spaced practice beat massed practice in 259 of 271 cases.

The review adds a detail that matters for planning: the gap between sessions that gives the best retention grows as the time you need to remember grows. For a beginner who wants words to stay for months, not until Monday, this means meeting them again over days and weeks. Two hours on Sunday feel serious, yet the words are met once, while fifteen minutes on each of seven days brings them back seven times.

A second study shows how to use those minutes. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke reported in Psychological Science in 2006 that students who took recall tests on prose passages kept substantially more two days and a week later than students who restudied them, although restudying won when the final test came after five minutes. Restudying also made students more confident. The lesson for a beginner: close the notebook and try to say the word before checking it.

Checking English progress after months one, two and three

Early progress is hard to feel, so check it against fixed tasks, most of them taken from the Europass grid. After the first month, see whether you can spell your name aloud, give a phone number, say in five or six sentences who you are, where you live and what you do, and recognise those words when someone says them slowly. After the second, take a simple notice or poster and see how much you understand, fill in a hotel registration form, and ask and answer simple questions about your day.

After the third month, check the spoken production line of the grid: describe where you live and people you know in simple phrases, and write a short postcard with holiday greetings. A two-minute recording of the same self-introduction at the end of every month shows progress better than any score, because you hear the change in sounds and pace. Make what still fails the main material of the next month.

Practising English alone or following a structured course

Most of this plan works alone, with a dictionary that has audio, flashcards with sound, recordings and the A1 statements. What a beginner on their own usually lacks is not material but order: which rule comes next, which words to review today, whether a sentence is right. Anyone who can keep that order and has a patient person to talk to can learn english from scratch without a course.

The English in 113 Days course of VITON13 SCHOOL takes the planning off your hands: it has 113 levels, one a day, each with 13 new words given with sound, transcription and an example, a short grammar rule, a short text with three questions, dictation, phrase building, a piece of your own writing with a model answer and a mini-game. Words return on a spaced-repetition schedule, lessons make you recall rather than reread, and where the browser recognises speech the course checks pronunciation. The levels follow the CEFR scale, covering the core of A1 to B2 with a bridge to C1.

One thing to know before choosing it: the course is written for Russian speakers, every explanation is in Russian, and the grammar notes point to the typical mistakes Russian speakers make. If you read Russian, the first three levels are free even without signing in, and a free placement test shows where to start. Whichever path you take, prepare the same things: a daily slot you can keep, one model accent and a monthly recording.