Ask HN: Has anyone else learned English just by reading tech posts (like HN)?
Hi HN, I'm curious if anyone else had a similar journey learning English.
I'm from Ukraine and started reading Hacker News about five years ago. At first, I understood almost nothing. I didn’t use a translator — partly because I was lazy, and partly because I wanted to see how much I could figure out just from context.
So I kept reading. I would see the same words appear in different posts and comments, and slowly, I began to understand their meaning. Sentence structures became clearer, and I started to “feel” the language. Eventually, I stopped being afraid of reading in English altogether.
I didn’t learn from a teacher or a course — just from the internet, and mostly from here.
Now I write posts, share my projects, and even chat with other devs here — all in English. It still feels surreal sometimes.
Have any of you learned English (or another language) in a similar way — just by immersion, without formal study?
Also: thank you, HN. You taught me more than just tech.
When I was in middle school my english skills were terrible, I barely passed my english classes. At some point I was interested to build my own PC, so I did research and watched tons of videos of other people doing it, those were mainly in english and helped me a lot to learn the language. Just like you I did not use a translator, it was not necessary to understand the key messages of the videos. After some time my english skills improved substantially and in school I never had problems with english again
My journey is similar to yours. I am from Turkey and work in the industry for almost 8 years. My english level was B1 at the beginning. By reading and learning everything through articles and documentations I feel very comfortable right now. Especially in writing. Reading was not a concern for me but writing feels way more easy.
I'm on the path of learning English, and I'm a newcomer here. Can you share your experiences? I'm currently viewing this post through a translation plugin.
The key to learning language I think is you have to write a lot.
I'm learning another language by watching videos. The term you want to search for is "comprehensible input."
HN definitely helped me to improve my writing skills
Thank you HN !