ESL Blogs

Learning English. When do you stop learning?.

While recent research claim that you can “learn english” in 2-3 years, other companies may promise you intensive six-month courses where you’d end up being “bilingual”, or they pull methods out of their hat in which you can be able to learn english quickly and just knowing a limited amount of words, I still wonder, year after year, if some day I’d say that about “I can speak english”. Because if I’ve learned something over the 5 years that I’ve been studing this language that I love, is that you never stop learning. And of course there aren’t magical potions or quick methods, but persistence, motivation and spend lot of hours practising… As much as you can.

Perseverance and tenacity are both important when you don’t live in an english-speaking country. And it’s really important to be in constant touch with the language. You should look for any excuse to practice, whether listening to it (music, radio, movies, TV…), reading, or even “forcing” to yourself to “think in english” (Yeah, it sounds weird, but effective!). Nowadays is really easy to find hundreds of internet resources and websites to learn english, so there ain’t excuses to find the way to study or improve your level at any time.

My experience tells that you shouldn’t be in a hurry: The process of learning another language is slow and it’s not the same for everyone. Sometimes you feel like you’re not making any progress; or like if you get stuck in a level that you can’t overcome; but just when nothing seems to change, suddenly, one day, you realize that there is playing an english song and you can follow the lyrics. Or you can understand a movie without reading subtitles. Or even you’ve a completely fluid conversation with a native-english speaker. This is all achieved through time and perseverance. But never stop learning.

(Comments and corrections are welcome. Thanks for reading!)