Forget everything you've been taught about learning English. The traditional approach of memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary lists has failed countless learners. This article introduces a radical shift in perspective: instead of studying English, absorb it. Like a child learning their first language without textbooks, you'll develop an intuitive understanding that allows you to think, dream, and live in English.
Change your relationship with English, make it feel less like a foreign concept and more like a natural extension of yourself. Here are a few key concepts upon which we focus our whole platform.
Physical over mental - Engage your body in the learning process. Although all the content we provide is digital, we highly recommend engaging your body whenever you master a new segment. You want to store the emotion of a new structure in English using your body, and keep it stored for the long-term. Think about it, whenever you are talking, you are not thinking, you are just talking. That's your body, and mind, being in the flow of the conversation. This is what we want to replicate when learning English.
Phrases over grammar rules - Learn language chunks as natives do. If you are not yet feeling comfortable speaking English at ease, confidently, and you try to deepen yourself in the English grammar, then you are setting yourself up for failure. Grammar is fine, but it's not the foundation of the language. Grammar just represents the rules, but the real English is spoken in real-time, with mistakes, with emotion, with your body, and it just comes out so you can express something, an emotion, an idea, an opinion.
Direct experience over translation - Create neural pathways that bypass your native language. This is the greatest opportunity for language learning. In this modern age, where there is so much English content, you can trick your brain into believing that you are having real English experiences. When you have lived 100+ of experiences in English, your brain will start believing them as real, and help you into feeling confident, whenever you start having new, real conversations in English.
Flow over perfection - Develop fluency through continuous expression. We, humans, have an innate characteristic in trying to be perfect. And the language you are speaking might be the most fundamental trait of that, because the way we use the language is the way we put ourselves out there, in the world. Our reputation is at stake. So achieving perfection in speaking might be one of the most important achievements, but focusing on perfection, when learning a new language can also be an obstacle for real progress.We want to train our brain to connect the dots in our head, and let the words just flow, without us thinking about what to say. We want the words just to come out. We want to think about the ideas, concepts we want to convey, but not on what words to use.Imagine you have mastered English to perfection, what will you be thinking about? Will it be "should I use, get there, or had gotten there?", or will it be about how to structure my story, how to connect with someone, how to express my intention...
We plan to add much more on this topic, this year, and the next, so please, stay tuned. We hope to see you come back, and check out the segments we publish (a few times a week).
Cheers! Sergio
