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Hi Sisters in the Mirror

A student failed by school English learns to talk by retelling vlogs and explaining her makeup to her own reflection.

An editorial illustration of a bathroom mirror fogged at the edges, makeup on the sink, and a phone playing a vlog.

In 2021 a medical student with a Japanese father and a Turkish schooling posted a video titled *How I learned English by myself for free without studying*. She had learned English on her own. The description under that first video has since been overwritten, so the method is no longer on the page. What remains from 2021 and 2022 is her account of being a student in a room, trying to understand a YouTuber she liked.

In the 2022 video, which still has a full transcript, she says she studied English as her main foreign language until high school, then switched to German. Most of the fluent friends she knew had been taught every subject in English; she had not, and she did not attend an international school. The classrooms she describes required a lot of input and left little time for output. Students listened and read. In a crowded hour, they could not all talk. She says she understands why the class was run that way, and also why she left school still unable to follow the English videos she wanted to watch.

She was following James Charles, who greets viewers with "Hi sisters." She wanted to understand his videos, and that was the only reason. Formal talking and grammar did not matter to her. She was not planning to use English for a profession.

She later said the practice was not for absolute beginners: reach something like A2 first, she says in 2022. Her method leans on output more than school did. She names Kawasaki's *Input Dictionary* and *Output Dictionary* and agrees with their ratio: more output than input once you can output at all. At the very beginning, she says, input still has to come first. She puts that disclaimer at the start of the video because she has already seen people copy her too early.

She chose what to watch: daily speech, the kind that happens in vlogs when someone talks about being sore on a rest day or a light workout. She looked for lifestyle vlogs by native speakers. If vlogs were not a person's taste, she says, then Netflix, series, films, or songs, whatever they could enjoy, because the main goal was that it would not feel like studying. She watched at normal speed with subtitles and tried to understand the speech, not only the images. She wanted an hour a day, as a habit.

Later she watched without subtitles, still keeping that hour. After a video, a movie, or a podcast she tried to explain it back to herself in English, in her own words, without a translator. If she could not find a word after a real attempt, she looked it up. She talked to herself in daily life: doing her makeup, she pretended she was a beauty creator and explained the steps in English, alone in her room. That is how she learned, she says.

She later added reading. She teases people who do not read, then softens: children's books count. After a chapter, the same rule as after a video: say it back in your own words. When she could follow the audio, she sped the videos to 1.25 or 1.50, because native speakers do not speak slowly. She suggests continuing for more than a year. School had already taken years and had not left her able to understand James Charles.

Learning alone, she could not always hear her own mistakes. She said *foreigner* when she meant *foreign*, and *propose* when she meant *purpose*, and she only found out because people in the comments told her. Without a channel and without native-speaker friends, she does not think she would have noticed. Doing something wrong at the beginning, she says, makes it hard to undo. The 2022 video is sponsored by italki, which she discloses. She also says she wishes she had known such a place existed when she started.

By the time she filmed the 2022 update, she was using English at university, in emails and meetings, for books, and in a weekly conversation with friends. She still does not sound, to herself, like a native speaker.

Story details

  • Series: *multi-lingual and their ways of learning*
  • Article date: 2026-08-16
  • Keywords: language learning; multilingual learning; polyglot; self-taught English; output practice; learning from vlogs

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