Why don't you speak English yet: 6 reasons

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

You studied English for seven years at school, perhaps then you added it at the institute, and after receiving your diploma you tried to enroll in courses, but you still get lost abroad, don't understand what they are singing about on the radio, and shy away from tourists on the streets, they barely have to say, "Excuse me, do you speak English?"

Why was so much effort wasted and you still don't speak English?

1. You didn't know why you need it

Senseless and aimless work does not bring joy and is never productive. You need motivation to learn successfully.

Think about what English can give you personally - freedom to travel? The ability to read books and watch films in the original language? Studying in the USA, a career in London, a hot romance with an Australian surfer, or getting married to a serious Canadian? Once you've set your goals, motivation will spontaneously appear.

123RF / Pavel Ilyukhin

2. You are out of luck with the teacher

Not everyone who knows English can be a good teacher. This is a vocation, not a craft.

Alas, in our schools and universities there are enough teachers who, in general, do not care whether a student learns anything or not. They are not interested in new methods, they are not trying to follow the evolution of the language, they have never seen a living American. They themselves find English neither interesting, nor beautiful, nor elegant, nor useful in everyday life. There is nothing strange that their views were passed on to you.

3. You exaggerated the difficulties

Many beginners think that speaking English is possible only after years of studying grammar.

Nothing of the sort - you don't have to be a Ph. D. in order to chat with a native speaker at a pretty decent level. Those who study according to modern methods notice clear progress within a few months.

To communicate in English, there is no need for perfect pronunciation and a solid knowledge of grammar.

Practice is much more important - it is with practice that you hone your pronunciation and understand the internal logic of grammatical mechanisms.

123RF / David Acosta Allely

It is better to give preference to teaching according to the communicative method - when the teacher and the student communicate a lot, this helps to overcome the language barrier and finally speak.

4. You thought that you did not have the ability to do this

There is no special "linguistic" mindset. Almost every inhabitant of the Earth has easily learned at least one language - his native one.

The division into mathematicians and humanities is also very conditional. "Technicians" may well be engaged in typically humanitarian things - remember the physicist Mikhail Lomonosov, who wrote poetry, or "Alice in Wonderland", the author of which was a mathematician!

Globallookpress.com

And the "humanities" are read by popular science books on astrophysics and quantum mechanics - the works of Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku are sold in millions of copies. “Vasya is a techie, and Lena is a pure humanist” - all these are nothing more than shortcuts.

5. You were uncomfortable

Even those who honestly wanted to regularly attend courses often give up and quickly leave the race.

We are all busy people, we all have a family, children, work and home. Often, it is simply inconvenient to travel somewhere or there is no strength. And until recently it was quite difficult to find a decent teacher online - who knows how good, honest and obligatory a person is who offers lessons via Skype?

Online schools are easier. All classes are held remotely when it is convenient for you (even at night!) And not via Skype, but on a special multifunctional training platform - there you will communicate with the teacher via video link, do exercises and track success statistics.

123RF / georgerudy

Each teacher who gets to these schools is checked and rechecked many times - out of several dozen applicants, only one, the best, gets a job.

6. You were bored

The school system of language learning is ineffective and generally has little to do with the interests of today's children. At school, from year to year, we translate topics that no one needs and do our own work, and in the end we cannot even ask the foreign waiter to bring us fries with a special sauce and are not able to understand what he is answering us.

Previously, many students learned English on their own, trying to translate their favorite songs, and this gave much better results - at least they trained their speech recognition skills by ear and studied really interesting material.

Imagine that the entire English course will be like this - films, songs, discussions on sensitive topics, a minimum of theory, and even a teacher - a person close to you in spirit with whom you have something to talk about. Education of the 21st century goes exactly to this, it remains only to find a modern school or teacher.

Thank you for the help in preparing the material of the specialists of the Skyeng online school of English.