Silly myth 1:
“If you live in an English speaking country for just 3 months, you can speak English like a native speaker.”
Can’t tell you how many dreams I’ve seen get shattered and hearts broken. Many seem to believe that it is almost a certain fact if you manage to live in an English speaking country, like the US, Canada, Britain or Australia, among native speakers, just for a few months, you will sound just like one of them.
Of course! How could that not be true. Right? I mean, think about it. You are surrounded by native speakers all day long. You are speaking English from the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you shut them at night. Hell, you’re even speaking English in your dreams. Well, not really! I’m really sorry to be a buzz killer here, but…
You’re not surrounded by native speakers all day long. See? People, including native speakers, have like that thing called “work”? And even those ones with no work, they usually don’t have the patience to stand there and listen to somebody who almost sounds like coming out of a damn textbook, often slow and incomprehensible.
You’re not going to speak English in your dreams either. Even if you DO speak it in your dreams, it won’t mean much apart from the fact that it’s either freaking you out, stressing you out, or driving you crazy (sometimes in a positive way).
The problem is it’s not only you who suffers from these kinds of illusions, it’s also everyone you know including your family and friends. They usually have extremely high expectations of you, which puts more pressure on you. 3 months after your arrival, you start to get nervous and then depressed as reality hits you hard.
What happens next as a result is that you lose interest and your motivation, so you start to hang out with other students who speak YOUR native language. You start to think to yourself “Ah to hell with it, if no one wants to speak English with me, then I don’t want to speak with THEM”. One year passes and unfortunately, you haven’t done much, now it’s time to return home and live with the fact that your trip was a complete failure (that is if English was the reason you left in the first place).
Silly myth 2:
“Playing some sort of an English CD over and over while sleeping will improve your English rapidly.”
Wouldn’t be the first or last lie we hear from those bloodsucking mobs. That is the power of marketing though. Learners eat it all up. They completely buy into it and keep pouring money down the drain. Silly myth 2 is just an example, I’m referring to all these self-study books and CDs makers who claim they have found the secret “the winning formula”.
Here’s what they do. They buy testimonials. They find a celebrity, pay him/her a bucket of bucks to promote the product. Just like with that golf player in Japan, who, ironically sounds ridiculous in English, but Japanese don’t know any better. I mean their English is so messed up that they wouldn’t even notice that guy’s English sucks, as long as it doesn’t suck more than theirs.
Silly myth 3:
“If you score high in some English test, you must speak English quite well.”
Really? How come I keep running into learners with TOEIC score over 850 and IELTS band 8, who still can’t carry on a conversation then? They’re also boring, dull and incomprehensible most of the times. Look, it’s a test. It has a certain structure, which if you study and familiarize yourself with becomes predictable.
Achieving a high score in some test does not say much about how good you are in English, it simply means you are good at that test. Period. Ask all the Koreans and Japanese, they’ll tell ya.
Silly myth 4:
“The quickest way to improve your English is by attending English courses at English schools.”
I taught at several English schools in Australia for many years and the truth is, it’s a rip-off. You spend thousands of dollars to sit in a classroom with 15 and sometimes 18 other students whose English is just as bad as yours (or worse). You are stuck there for 4 to 5 hours listening to classroom English, which has no connection to the real natural English spoken in the streets or on TV.
What else do you do in there? You learn grammar rules from a $50 textbook which you can buy and study from by yourself. You also play games under the big banner of “we learn best when we’re having fun”! Let me see! What else? Oh yeah sure, let’s not forget watching movies for a couple of hours.
I’m not saying all schools are that bad, but the majority of them are. Trust me, they ARE!
Conclusion
So, look, I’m not saying that all self-study books and CDs don’t work, because some of them do. They still won’t do miracles, but they do help in some ways. Some schools, particularly some teachers, are also great and can really teach you quite a lot, but that too alone is not enough. Living in an English speaking country without working hard at your English skills won’t mean a thing either. You want me to prove it to you?
There are some immigrants in Australia who have lived in the country for over 2 decades and they still can’t speak the language properly. Why? Because they just don’t want to. They don’t want it bad enough to learn it. They don’t need it either, because they live in their own communities, so they speak their native language. There is no incentive, no motivation.
The only winning formula or “missing link” or whatever you want to call it, is motivation. You’ve got to want it.
How much do you want it PUNK? 😉
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