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:
- The man broke his hand when he punched a wall
- The man punched the wall because he was mad at his girlfriend
- He was mad at his girlfriend because she cheated on him
- She cheated on him because he comes home drunk every night
- The man comes home drunk every night because he doesn’t like how she prepares his lobster soufflé (she uses too much nutmeg)
If only the doctor had known this he could have recommended a good French cooking school and voila – problem solved!
In English, that’s called, “getting to the root of the problem.”
Most solutions deal with surface problems — the broken bone.
Much more effective is to find and fix the root problem.
And that’s what I just did with a very common English problem — translating in your head.
Ideally, you want to think in English.
You hear an English sentence > you speak an English sentence. And your native language never enters your head.
But for a lot of students, it’s a big mess in there: a big mix of words from two or more languages.
But I’ve discovered four root causes of this problem.
I explain them in this video.
And then for a little drama, I call them “diseases.” (Why does English teaching need to be boring?)
Watch it here and then tell me in the comments which disease you have.
Reinaldo