You Know More English Than You Think
Your English is bigger than your vocabulary
Most English learners have more English available to them than they actually use. The first step isn’t always learning more. Sometimes it’s learning to use what you already have.
If you’ve been learning English for years, there’s a good chance you understand far more than you feel able to say. You recognise words when you hear them. You understand phrases when you read them. You follow conversations reasonably well, but when it’s your turn to speak, much of that English seems to disappear. You search for the perfect word, worry about the grammar, start constructing a sentence in your head, and the conversation has already moved on.
This is one of the ideas behind Langbrella’s first principle: Activate. Before constantly adding more English, we want to help you make better use of the English that is already there.
Real conversation isn't a test
The same is true when you speak. Learners often feel that they need the exact word before they can continue. Native speakers don’t. We forget words too. We hesitate, restart, change direction halfway through a sentence and say things like you know, the thing you use for… while somebody else supplies the word. In fact, in natural conversation we often don’t finish the sentence at all. We don’t need to. The other person already knows where we’re going.
Conversation isn’t two people taking turns to deliver perfectly formed little speeches. It’s something we build together.
That matters because language teaching can sometimes give learners a rather strange picture of successful communication. Teachers ask for complete sentences when native speakers routinely use fragments. Exercises require one precise word when real speakers would happily explain around it. Learners are trained to produce grammatically complete answers even when Yeah, probably would be a completely natural response. Accuracy matters, of course, but communication is much bigger than accuracy.
You can also do an enormous amount with relatively ordinary English. The most useful words in the language appear again and again precisely because they are flexible. You don’t always need the sophisticated word you’re trying desperately to remember. A simpler word, an example, a comparison or a quick explanation may communicate exactly the same idea. Being able to say I don’t know the word, but it’s the thing that… can sometimes be more useful in a real conversation than knowing another hundred words on a vocabulary list.
Getting stuck doesn’t mean communication has failed
This changes what it means to get stuck. Forgetting a word doesn’t have to mean the end of your sentence. Not understanding one word doesn’t mean you haven’t understood the message. Making a grammatical mistake doesn’t mean communication has failed. And the person you’re speaking to isn’t an examiner waiting silently for your final answer. They can help. You can ask them to repeat something, check what you think you heard, describe the word you need, use your hands, point, rephrase, start again, or simply laugh when it all goes horribly wrong and try another way.
None of this means that you don’t need to learn more English. Of course you do. A larger vocabulary gives you more precision. Better pronunciation makes you easier to understand. Greater grammatical control lets you express increasingly complicated ideas. But there’s an important difference between building your English and activating it. If you continually add knowledge without learning to use what you already know, the gap between your classroom English and your real-world English can simply get bigger.
Langbrella starts from the other direction.
Activate what you already have. Then build from there.
Your English isn’t just the words and grammar you can produce perfectly on demand. It includes what you recognise, what you can work out, what you can predict, what you can explain another way and what you can communicate with the help of another human being.
You really do know more English than you think!
