مهم ترین سوال پرسیده شده توسط انگلیسی آموزان

The #1 Most Important English Question for Learners of English!

Hello everyone and welcome back to English with Lucy.

Today I’ve got a little video for you that is not about grammar, it’s not about vocabulary. It’s actually a question for you. And hopefully this little question is going to really motivate you and help you progress with your English learning process.

So today’s lesson, I’m not gonna teach you any grammar. I’m not gonna teach you any vocabulary and I’m not going to teach you any pronunciation. What I’m going to talk to you about is a really, really important question if you’re learning another language.

I have asked myself this question with my learning experience in Spanish and my learning experience in Italian. Many of you know, I am fluent in Spanish. I have a video about how I became fluent and you can click on it right here. And I’m actively learning Italian. The question I’m going to ask you is which is more important to you, fluency or accuracy? You’re probably thinking that’s the most important question Lucy. No seriously think about it. It’s a seriously important question.

Do you want to be fluent first or do you want to be completely accurate first? What’s more important to you sounding perfect or being able to communicate freely? I know what my answer is when I’m learning another language. I want to be able to be fluent. I want to be able to communicate.

I make mistakes but I then learn from them. I’m not somebody who wants to read all of the irregular verbs and all of the grammar tenses. And wait until I know them all before I can then go on to speak with a native speaker. Not everyone is like me. Some people want to be perfect first. Now as an English language teacher I never ever recommend striving for perfection. It is largely unachievable. I want you to think about this question and weigh up the pros and cons of each side.

Let’s talk about fluency first. The big pro about going for fluency and making little mistakes here and there is that you get to talk to people. You swallow your pride. You admit that you’re going to make mistakes. You know that you’re okay with it. What you want to do is to be able to converse and communicate but perhaps if nobody is correcting you you might start to get little errors ingrained into your brain. You might start repeating the same errors over and over again. There are a couple of ways to overcome this. The first way is to have somebody correct you and make a list of every correction and really, really work on it. Now if you go for accuracy and try and speak perfect English which is largely impossible, I don’t speak perfect English. I make mistakes all the time. Sometimes you can hear them in my videos and that’s normal, that’s natural.

But if you’re going to go for perfection first that’s great, that’s great. The big pro is that if or when you finish your English learning journey, if it can finish, but when you get to an advanced level, you will be speaking an extremely high level of English. It will be extremely high quality. However, its going to take you much, much longer to get there and you might not have practised actually communicating with people so much. So you might be able to write a perfect letter but a spontaneous conversation might be a bit more difficult. It will take you longer to achieve fluent communication.

Now I’m not going to tell you which side you should go for. I’ve already told you my preference but that’s because I understand the way my brain works and I know that I want to get stuck in and practise from the very beginning and I accept that my way of learning will mean that I repeat some mistakes over and over again. I mean you can hear it in Spanish.

I confuse (speaks foreign language) over and over again because instead of studying at all I’ve just wanted to go in and communicate and chat and enjoy myself. If you’re going to go for the complete accuracy method then you have to accept that its going to take you much longer that it might not be as enjoyable that you might find the process more boring but the rewards are greater in the long run.

Both are completely viable options but this is a conversation, I would love you to write below about your methods, which kind of side you go towards, if you’ve got a completely different method I’m so interested to hear what you guys have to say because you guys are all here for the same reason. You’re trying to improve your English so let’s share some experiences and ask yourself that question and see if it can help you with how you go forward.