Master Fluent English
As you may know, I taught English in Prague for many years.
Whenever I met a Czech or Slovak who had really good English, usually it was because they had lived in the US or UK or Australia.
Usually, they didn’t need my lessons. So my conclusion was, living abroad is a great way to master English.
Have you ever paid for English classes at a language school?
What was it like?
Did you improve? A little? A lot? Not at all?
Change is in the air.
Here in Virginia, the temperature is a little cooler and the days are a little shorter.
This weekend I drove across the mountains to meet a friend in West Virginia for a canoe trip down the Potomac River.
Could you speak a foreign language — for example, English — for one year?
And NEVER speak your native language until the year ended?
That’s what Scott Young did.
Yesterday I saw and spoke with students from the Philippines, Mexico, Bangladesh, Macedonia, the Congo….
And I never left my desk!
Isn’t technology amazing?
Do you translate in your head?
When you’re speaking English…
When you’re listening to English…
A man walks into a doctor’s office with a broken hand.
The doctor fixes the hand.
But the man will be back because the doctor did not discover the cause of the problem.
If the doctor had asked questions he would have discovered:
Do you translate English words in your head?
Before you speak, do you think in your native language first, then translate
to English?
Or when you’re listening to English, do you try to translate the English
words into your native language?
If you do that’s a problem.
It will hurt your fluency, drain your brain power, and cause mistakes.
But there is a cure.
Four, actually.
But first, you have to understand the reason why…
Why do you translate in your head?
Watch this short video to discover which translation “disease” you have.
“And he said, you’re not going crazy, you’re just a bit sad
‘Cause there’s a man in ya, gnawing ya, tearing ya into two”
-lyrics from “Destroyer” by the Kinks
I remember the first time I met The Translator.
It was the winter of 2005 and I was a new teacher.
Preeti A. writes:
“I gave an interview for an online teaching job. I got nervous, and because of it I made many grammatical mistakes while speaking. Now I have no courage to give another interview. What should I do?”
As we say in English, you need to get back on the horse.
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