English for Beginners — An Honest First-Three-Months Plan (A0 to A2)

Tomasz Kowalski

Editor, English content · Published July 27, 2026

Let’s be honest up front: this is the one stage where an immersion app like ours is not the right tool. If you’re starting English from zero, you need structure first — and we’d rather tell you that than sell you the wrong thing. So here’s the plan we’d actually give a friend at A0.

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What a beginner’s job actually is

At the start, your task is small and specific, and that’s good news. You need three things, in this order:

1. The ~800 most common words. These cover a huge share of everyday English. Not 10,000 — 800. That’s a few months of a little each day, not a mountain.
2. Core grammar: present, past, and future; questions and negatives; the basic sentence shape. Enough to say what you did, what you’re doing, and what you’ll do.
3. An ear for the sounds: just enough listening that spoken English stops being an undifferentiated blur.

That’s it. You do not need idioms, phrasal verbs, the subjunctive, or perfect pronunciation. Chasing those now is how beginners burn out.

The three tools that get you to A2

You need surprisingly little. More apps means more switching and less doing.

• A structured course app — Duolingo. This is exactly the stage it’s built for: bite-sized daily practice, the common words, gentle grammar, and a streak to keep you showing up. It’s free, and at A0 the gamification is a feature, not a flaw. (It runs out of usefulness around B1 — but that’s a problem for later you.)
• A grammar reference — Murphy’s Essential Grammar in Use. The red one, for beginners. You don’t read it cover to cover; you open it when a rule confuses you. Clear explanations, one page each.
• Slow listening — BBC Learning English. Short, clear, made for exactly your level. Five minutes a day trains your ear without overwhelming it.

6 Minute EnglishBBC Radio · Podcast

A simple first-three-months routine

Consistency beats intensity, especially now. A day that works:

• 10–15 minutes in your course app (do new lessons, not just easy review).
• 5 minutes of slow listening — repeat what you hear out loud, even if it feels silly. Especially if it feels silly.
• When a rule confuses you, look it up in Murphy’s. Don’t let confusion pile up.

Fifteen to twenty minutes a day. Miss a day, start again the next — the streak is a tool, not a moral test.

The mistakes that stall beginners

• Reaching for content that’s too hard. A podcast for native speakers at A0 isn’t immersion — it’s a wall of sound you can’t climb, and it just wears you down. Stay at your level.
• Collecting apps instead of using one. Five half-finished apps teach less than one finished course.
• Skipping speaking because it’s embarrassing. Say the words out loud from day one. It feels stupid for about a week, then it doesn’t.
• Quitting because progress “stopped.” At the very beginning it never stops — you just stop noticing. Trust the daily habit.

The real skill: not quitting

Here’s the part nobody puts in an ad: going from zero to conversational (around B1) is a months-long build, and it feels slowest right in the middle. The people who get there aren’t the gifted ones — they’re the ones who don’t stop. Three things keep them going:

• Daily and small. Fifteen minutes every day beats two hours once a week — for the habit and for your brain.
• Expect the invisible patch. There’s a stretch where you feel stuck. You’re not; you just can’t see the progress yet. Everyone hits it. Keep going.
• Track something — a streak, a word count, pages read. Watching the number climb carries you on the days motivation doesn’t. (Want a realistic target date? Our free learning-time estimator shows roughly how many hours zero-to-conversational takes.)

On a rough day, do five minutes instead of zero. Protecting the habit matters more than any single session.

When you’re ready to graduate

You’ll know. You can form basic sentences in three tenses. You can follow a slow, clear speaker. You can read a very simple story and mostly get it. That’s around A2 heading into B1 — and it’s the moment everything changes.

Because that’s when structured courses start teaching you less and less, and real content starts teaching you more and more. That’s the handoff. Once you’re there, the plan flips: put down the drills and pick up real podcasts, graded books, and video at your level. We wrote the whole next stage up in English for intermediate learners — that’s where a tool like Hinto (real content, tap-to-translate, spaced review — iOS and Android, free to start) starts to earn its place.

But not yet. Right now, your job is those first 800 words and the confidence to say them out loud. Start there. The rest comes.