A native speaker can teach you bad things: 7 myths about learning English

Not all media are created equal, and it’s normal to doubt yourself. Lifehacker debunks 7 myths about the English language.

Natalya Kopylova has been living outside Russia for almost two years, and for more than a year in Malaysia, a former colony of Great Britain. She says that English is still widely spoken in the country and almost everyone knows it. In addition, many of the locals studied in Australia or New Zealand. And here, she noted, there are quite a lot of expats.

Natalya had never lived abroad for such a long time before. English it was more useful for passive reception. She read books, watched videos and TV series.

“To communicate a lot, and even with real people - I had not had such practice for many years at the time of moving,” Natalya emphasized. – I, like many, am traumatized by the Russian education system, where making mistakes is unbearable, and you can do something only if you know how to do it perfectly. That's why I didn't even encounter language barrier, but with a language swamp in which I got stuck every time I tried to talk, although my English is far from terrible. It was scary."

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But in the process, the Russian woman discovered that some of her attitudes turned out to be myths. Perhaps they are obvious to some, but for her they were a revelation.

1. Everyone around you knows the language better than you

“Apologizing for not knowing the language well and being humble about your level is like our national pastime. Hello, school education! – Natalya is convinced. – Of course, I’m taking part in it. Moreover, I have always assessed my knowledge of English based on my knowledge of Russian, and my Russian is very good. Not in terms of the fact that I never mix up letters and always place commas correctly, but in terms of vocabulary, understanding the context, switching between styles, and so on. And it always seemed to me that as long as I can’t do the same in English, then I’m some kind of sucker who is not able to learn basic things.”

Natalia spoke with people with very different levels of English proficiency. And this seditious thought that you are definitely worse than everyone periodically pops into many people’s heads. Even those who work for a foreign company translate professionally and generally know the language at a high level. Because the point is not in the language at all, but in this question: “Why four, why not five? What did everyone else in the class get?”

People from other countries are much less picky about themselves. Most of them believe that they speak a language if they can explain themselves in it. And they are absolutely right.

The goal of any communication is for it to take place, that is, for the interlocutors to understand each other. If this happens, it is a success. You can, of course, lament that you don’t use enough phraseological units or forgot a word at a crucial moment.

It’s just worth remembering: even if you are not confident in your language level, there will always be those who know it worse. You’ve already done well—keep that in mind and don’t be afraid of anything.

2. You can learn universal English, which works the same everywhere

You can laugh endlessly at videos where the British and Americans laugh at how differently foreigners pronounce “a bottle of water,” but reality will throw up much more problems. Because the difference will be not only in pronunciation, or rather in it too.

In some countries, familiar words like A1 level words will be pronounced in such a way that you won’t recognize them the first time. For example, Australians say something like “naur” instead of the usual “no” (no), and “nice” (cute) turns into “noice”. But it happens that the same thing is called different words, and these are not the usual “lift” and “elevator” (elevator) or “eggplant” and “aubergine” (eggplant), but a bunch of everything.

Because English is not appropriated by the UK or the USA, it exists and develops in other countries, often according to their own laws.

So it takes time to get used to, for example, the fact that for people from some Asian countries, R sounds closer to L, because they don’t have their own R. Or, let’s say, you learned to write business letters day and night, but it turns out that any issues in the country are resolved through WhatsApp. Everyone from a realtor to a bank employee, instead of all sorts of “We shall appreciate your cooperation in this matter” (We will be grateful for your cooperation in this matter) and “Looking forward to hearing from you” (I’m looking forward to hearing from you) will throw stickers of varying degrees of creepiness at you .

3. In a language environment, you quickly begin to speak English

This is a lottery, and even then only if you already have a good base. An incredible leap from scratch will most likely not happen. Plus, a lot depends on what your environment is like. If you go to work in an international office, make friends and communicate in English from morning to night, your vocabulary will most likely increase.

If you don't have friends with a rich language, finding an environment where you can discuss topics ranging from gossip to the impact of global warming on the lives of farmers will take time and effort.

Everyday conversations are usually extremely monotonous. You won't grow much on them.

That is, nothing will happen by itself. Even in a language environment, you need to push yourself in any case. In what way - by studying textbooks or acquiring highly intellectual connections - this is the second question.

4. It’s best to learn from native speakers

“Native speaker” is a phrase that, when uttered, rings bells and angels sing in the background. After all, he knows the language perfectly. Or not?

Let's take Russian. The MSU professor is a native speaker. The participants of the TV show on the “Yu” channel, whose speech is often subtitled because not a word can be understood with their “evon”, “eeshny” and “ichniy”, are also native speakers.

You and I, people for whom Russian is a native language, are generally able to distinguish competent, rich speech from its opposite. But for a person who does not know the peculiarities and is simply trying to adopt vocabulary and some rules from the interlocutor’s speech, this will not be intuitive. So there is a risk of learning something bad.

But even competent speech and a rich vocabulary of the native speaker mean nothing. Because any language is a system of signs with its own laws. It’s much easier to dive into it if you know how everything works and you just put the words in some kind of frame, rather than reinventing the structure every time.

For the rules to become clear, someone needs to explain them, and you need to be able to do this. This is why not every native speaker can be an English teacher. Sometimes, if you need a tutor, it's better to choose a non-native speaker who specializes in teaching than a native speaker who just knows the language.

“A simple example. My job is to write in Russian. I have a diploma from the Faculty of Philology. But it’s not that I won’t be able to explain to a foreigner all the rules of the Russian language. It seems to me that I can’t even help a fifth grader with his homework. Because this is my native language, I move in it literally according to the precepts of Oleg Tinkov: I feel so. And since it works, why should I think about the rules,” Natalya explained.

“But my friends from the classical philology department know how it all functions. They had special courses that made it possible to deeply study the processes of language formation, its internal laws, and so on. And, importantly, they were trained in teaching methods. And this works with any language,” she clarified.

5. People who interfere with their tongues are either stupid or show-offs.

Most of Natalya's acquaintances were not spared this misfortune. There are many reasons. Firstly, there is no point in translating some phenomena into Russian. You encountered them in another country; they will not be of use to you when you return. Secondly, you will immediately learn about some things in another language. The need for translation arises only when you talk about them to someone who does not speak the language.

“I once told my mother about local fruits while hugging a dictionary (an online dictionary, of course, this is a metaphor),” Natalya laughs.

Thirdly, words jump out of memory automatically. If you talk about something more often in another language, your brain carefully substitutes those words for you instead of Russian ones. Fourthly, sometimes a word or phrase in English expresses an idea more accurately than in its native language.

6. Every day, confidence in your own abilities will become stronger.

This generally works with any area you are progressing in. It looks like you are climbing a mountain and you can already see the top, but it turns out that there is an even steeper climb behind it. That is, the more you learn, the more you realize how much you still don’t know. It's frustrating. Because you seem to be trying, but every time you find yourself in a situation where, compared to the volume of the unknown, but already visible, you know less and less.

But here’s some reassuring information for you: we also don’t know a lot of things in our native language, we still have to learn and learn. And this brings us to the next point.

7. You can master English perfectly

For example, the Big Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language contains more than 150 thousand words. And this is only literary vocabulary used since the XNUMXth century. And there is also slang, jargon and all sorts of other words and phrases that do not fit into the norm.

The Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 500 thousand lexical items. And it alone is also not enough. Because Urban Dictionary, which contains informal words and expressions, is growing in volume every day.

So there is no end to learning, but it’s not scary.