diff --git a/project/README.md b/project/README.md
index a107ad1b..cd7448e3 100644
--- a/project/README.md
+++ b/project/README.md
@@ -16,4 +16,16 @@ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 ```
 
+To verify the effect, you can run the following command end check that it outputs 'utf-8'
+```python
+> python -c 'import locale; print(locale.getpreferredencoding())'
+utf-8
+```
+
 You can find more details in this [article](https://perlgeek.de/en/article/set-up-a-clean-utf8-environment).
+
+If this doesn't work, you can explicitly specify the encoding when opening files:
+```python
+with open(filename, 'r', encoding="utf-8") as file:
+  ...
+```