Something different today.
Instead of my usual email, you’re getting the latest from my next book.
The title: “How to Talk to Strangers in English; And make them think you’re amazing even if your English is so bad it makes rugby players cry and starts earthquakes.”
If you have any feedback for me — if something is confusing, if there’s a word you don’t know, if you disagree with something, or if you think I should add something — please write. And for everyone who emails advice, I’ll put his/her name on a list to send a free copy to when it’s done.
My first year of teaching I got lucky.
It was January, 2005. I had almost no experience, I just got a job at a new language agency, and when Renata in the front office gave me the list of companies I was going to teach at, I saw there was one on the list called Lonza.
I don’t know, maybe Renata liked me.
Why was Lonza so great?
- It was a block of classes. This meant more teaching time and less unpaid time running around town on the metro.
- They were group classes. This meant they wouldn’t cancel. It’s common for individual students to cancel when they get sick or busy or go on vacation. And that means you don’t get paid.
- It was outside of Prague. This meant I got paid to sit on the train and read.
So basically, more money for less time. And when you’re only making $9 an hour and it costs over $700 to go home, that’s a good thing.
But something was odd about this company. The students were… let’s say, not very chatty.
Sure, they were scientists. And yes, most of them lived in nearby villages and had little contact with foreigners.
But it went a little deeper than just being shy.
Here’s an example.
My first day there, as usual, I asked my students about their past experience with English. I wanted to know how many years they had been at it, what they wanted to work on, and I wanted to know what they had done with the previous teacher, a guy named Gregor from Scotland whom I had just met in the teachers’ room at the language agency.
They told me everything I wanted to know, but strangely, none of them could remember the teacher’s name.
They had spent an entire year with him, sitting for one or two hours a week in his classes, which were mostly conversation, and they couldn’t remember his unusual name, or any details about his interesting life, (he was travelling the world with his girlfriend teaching English).
It was the same in every class I had that first day.
At the time, I didn’t know what to think of it.
Now I do: it was symptom.
Like a cough is a symptom which tells you you have a bigger problem, maybe a cold or the flu, not knowing about the person you’re talking to shows that you’re not good at having a conversation.
They, like most students, thought their problem was the language.
They believed, If I learn more words and memorize more rules, I will be better at conversation.
But over the next few years as I helped students’ English improve, I saw that wasn’t always true: while some learned more grammar, that didn’t always mean their conversation improved.
What do I mean by conversation? For me, it’s the ability to meet a new person, to make a good impression, and to start a relationship (business, sales, friendship, whatever). And that’s really what most of my students wanted.
That’s also something you’ll never learn in a grammar book or from a grammar teacher.
But that is something you’re going to discover now.
What you’re going to learn in this short book is the lesson I should have taught at Lonza. More than conditionals and pronunciation, what they needed was this simple method. If I had known then what I know now, I’m sure by the time I got on the train for the last time they would have been conversation masters. That’s my wish for you.
And the good news is, it’s a lot easier than you think. And you don’t have to learn even one grammar rule!