ESL Blogs

My eureka moment with learning English came when I'd been learning it on a daily basis for several months. It was back when paper books were still big and the Internet was slow and mostly empty. I went into this book store and saw a textbook titled Progressive English for Adult Learners by A.S. Hornby. It consisted of three volumes and it was relatively cheap so I bought it.

What made this specific textbook different from all the others I had used up to that point was that it was all in English. There was not a single word of Russian in it, no translations, no nothing. All new words that were introduced in the topics were 'explained' in the footnotes. 

So I started working through it. It starts out really slow, with the conjugation of the to be verb and then builds everything else on that. Before long I was hooked in the sense I found myself actually enjoying working with this textbook. Most of the other textbooks I had used before that I had gotten tired of and ditched after working through the first few lessons. With Progressive English for Adult Learners, however, I actually was able to work through the whole thing. And, more importantly, it completely changed my ideas about what is the best way to learn English and my attitude to English.

Like most people, at first I viewed English as a kind of annex to be added on top of my Russian. Like I think in Russian and English is just this weird that you get when you replace all the Russian words with their English 'equivalents.' A kind of an extension to my Russian. Thus, whenever I came across a new word in English my gut instinct was always to look up the Russian translation for it. The fact that oftentimes a word would have a very long list of possible translation did bother me at the back of my mind but I honestly didn't know what to make of it. It clashed with my view that English was just an extension of Russian for me but it wasn't really causing me that much of a problem, at least not at first. 

And here was a book that taught English first through pictures and then through English. I mean it was mind boggling at first, a complete paradigm shift. It presented English not as an extension on top of Russian but as a completely independent and self-sufficient linguistic system that didn't depend on Russian in any way. Once this realisation dawned on me there was no going back: suddenly all those other text books chock full of Russian translations and explanations in Russia were no longer any good. Suddenly, Russian was distracting, it's like a switch was thrown in my head and saw with uncanny clarity that when there was Russian in a textbook and translations were offered all over the place it actually meant I had to make double the effort than was needed when I only worked in English: think about it how much time and effort gets spent, well essentially wasted, when you are constantly having to go back and forth between English and your native language. 

And that was that, from that moment on I've always kept Russian and English in separate compartments in my brain and never looked back. And it actually helped me achieve a quantum leap in my English proficiency. You change your attitude, you begin to regard English as an independent self sufficient language that you can use for 'anything' and something changes in your brain. It goes from treating it as a subject of study to treating it as a full blown language and that is when, in my opinion, language acquisition proper begins.