Now is a great time to learn English. If you have an internet connection, knowing English permits you to learn nearly anything you want to know in life. Soon there will be a Spotify for Books which will open up a college library's worth of information for just $15 a month, allowing you access to knowledge for which you formerly had to pay a hefty tuition fee. Software developers have created a licensing practice called "open source" and it allows for infinite reuse and redistribution of creative materials. Free and Libre licensing permits things to be free (as in speech) and free (as in beer) at the same time. The free as in beer is important because it means with just the cost of an internet connection and a raspberry pi, you can teach yourself anything in the world that catches your fancy. Because open source licensing is mostly a western invention, things that are free and open source are more likely to be in English. So even though learning English is difficult and takes many years, it has a high return on investment since us computer scientists are always finding novel ways to deliver free content on the internet.

I learned to read by checking out books on tape from my public library. They can in transparent plastic bags with chunky plastic handles that snapped together to make a seal. Inside was a book and a tape. I would check out five or so of these books on tapes, then go home and put my tape into a small casette player. I would follow along with the book while someone narrated the story. Each page turn was signified by a beep.

Now, I'm pretty sure all "books on tapes" are on YouTube. This makes sense, because no longer can you lose your page when the video is bound to the audio as in a movie. Tablets allow you to hold a YouTube video as if it were a book, and that same tablet can serve as a translation tool for every vocab word you come across.

Here are some tips from me for learning English:

• Start with audiobooks ("books on tapes") of baby books. The English will be very simple. Pause the story when there is a word you don't know. Write it down on paper or in a digital notepad. Find a translation on a website. Put the vocab word and translation into an Anki deck and every time your deck gets to around 100 words, don't read anymore until you memorize all 100 vocab words. Then clear the deck and start reading again, filling up your deck (keep your old decks, obviously, for review). This will happen frustratingly rapidly while you're starting learning a language. But as long as you're reading baby books, you won't be wasting your time on vocabulary too advanced for your level. If you don't like digital flash cards, make physical ones by chopping up small stacks of index cards into four parts and punching a hole in one end, putting it on a clip ring for safe keeping.

• After a good long time, you can advanced from baby books to toddler books. Then advance to kid books. Then advanced to YA books on tapes. Then when you're at about a fourth grade reading level, you should be able to just read books on their own.

• It is worth noting that Apple iPads now have a very advanced English voice synthesizer for reading epubs in iBooks. You almost don't even need an audiobook since Apple's advanced voice (it's like a 500 meg download) is so realistic. Just find epubs whereever and whenever and have iBooks synthesize the book to you. You probably don't want to do this when starting out, since pronounciation is so important, but once you're on the level when you can handle a few mispronounced words, an iPad is a great way to find yourself with an infinite amount of free Audiobooks.