They say “learn from mistakes”. I agree with that. I had always been for this approach but a few days ago I realized something that changed completely my paradigm. It was kind of AHA-moment! I see it now differently and if it is true, it has significant implications. So, I told myself that I must share it with you.

Look at the sentence itself, and look attentively - “LEARN FROM MISTAKES”

Can you see it? The answer is there… and is in the middle. The answer is “FROM”. I realized it in the morning, before being fully awaken. Still in my bed. I realize that maybe better would be to say “learn AWAY FROM mistakes”. What I want to say? I want to say: do not pay so big attention to your mistakes. If you are aware of your mistake, OK, but go forward. If you speak, for example, continue, do not stop, do not return to that mistake. Focus yourself to activity itself, do not waste energy, go ahead. There will be a lot of mistakes and a lot of opportunities to say it right way. Later.

I see those mistakes just like some stepping stones we use for moving to the higher levels. If you are running upstairs you would not turn back all the time. This way you would either significantly slow down your pace or you would finish your activity quickly with an accident.

Imagine yourself that you are a small boy or girl and you have a new bike. You are learning to use it, to ride it. It is not easy in the beginning. Maybe you have fallen. It was an error. Will you focus on that error so much, all the time, to be afraid to fall again, to think how not to fall, why you fell…? With this attitude you would probably never learn how to bike at all. I think that children (fortunately) have a little bit different approach. The child can see a friend biking and do it the same way, do what works, and after some difficulties, gets skills to do it quite right. There is no need to analyze initial troubles too much. This way the children learn naturally. The same it is with learning to walk or to speak their mother tongue.

At school it is somehow else. The teacher marks errors by red color and all attention (energy) is focused on them. It is so big problem! But I see it now as an artificial problem. It is not a problem of the student but a big problem of the school system itself! The focus in on a bad side, the negative side. The side where the energy is wasted like in some “black hole”.

What I would suggest? I would suggest even to use different terms for those mistakes or errors – maybe something like “nearly right”, “half right”, “partially right”... After all this is a process of learning and it will improve gradually and automatically. Look at small children. Do we correct them this way too when they learn their mother tongue? What they (and we learners) need are only right models to imitate and those mistakes gradually disappear (on its own accord).

The obsession with the “correctness” leads only to lack of fluency and destroys natural zest for language. It creates in us the notion that the language learning is something difficult, unpleasant and probably even beyond our possibilities. It prevents us from using the language with joy and without using it we cannot actually learn it well.

As you could maybe noticed in my previous posts, I frequently say that the best teacher for languages is listening, and especially listening to native speakers. The native speakers can serve us as real role models - we can imitate and learn from them. Yes, who else could be better for this purpose?

The answer is paradoxical – a NON-NATIVE speaker! It is true that the perfect pronunciation, the right stress, the melody of voice, the nice fluency and the rich vocabulary... we can find usually in the speech of a native speaker. But keep in mind that the majority of users of English language in this world today are non-natives. You are also one of them (probably). The English we are learning is intended to be the mean of communication. You will use is with both natives and not-natives.

I found in some stage of my English journey (and my friends confirmed me my experience too) that in many cases is the listening to somebody who was not born in English speaking country quite demanding. In some cases more difficult than listening to any native Englishman or American or Australian. Sometimes it could be quite a challenge. We, language learners, usually complain that the natives talk too quickly. In my opinion it is not the biggest problem. Maybe the bigger is the slang and idioms. Of course, the listening needs some practice (like everything).

My point is that the listening to a non-native speaker could be a good practice, a good valuable exercise. Of course that the bulk of your study should be based on a “proper” English, especially in the beginning of your journey. But after while you do it I would suggest to incorporate non-natives too. I remember myself when I started to listen Osho for example. It was really a challenge for me. Fortunately there were transcripts available. After while I accustomed to his pronunciation, voice, vocabulary. By the way his vocabulary is quite rich. It is true that he does (maybe I should say DID – he passed away a long time ago) some mistakes while speaking. But is it a problem? Definitely not for him. Maybe even we, who are learning English, can gain from that - noticing them a learning from these errors. On the other hand, I would be careful to listen such materials too early. There is a possibility to learn this incorrect English (we usually do at school from our school mates anyway) By the way not to forgot to read my disclaimer :)

There is a lot interesting people on this planet and you can speak (read or write) with nearly all of them in English, there is a lot of materials in English available today. Some of them were created by not-native speakers and are worthy to listen or read (e.g. this blog :-) LOL)

One of another such people I like to listen is Deepak Chopra (born in India) Enjoy this short video (extract from Deepak Chopra - How to know God)

The transcript:

Around 1890 chief Crowfoot a Blackfoot Indian was dying
and he whispered into the ear of a missionary father:
What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time.
It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Life as we know it flickers out all too fast In death we return to the light, the source where we all began
Then, all of reality has only one source
You are that source
God is our highest instinct to know ourselves.


The Persian mystic poet Rumi once said,
When I die I will soar with the angels,
And when I die to the angels,
What I shall become you cannot imagine.

IS THAT SO?

I was doing my Qigong exercise today (I do it twice a day) and suddenly I realized that I was thinking, my mind was producing a stream of thoughts. I, at that moment in the role of an observer of my thoughts, realized that these were not in my native Czech language but in English. It was nothing special in my case. But …

And I would like to share this “but” with you. Originally I wanted to do something else today, not to write, but I would forget it, so only shortly.

They say that we have thousands of thoughts during the day and the majority (maybe 99%) of them are useless, repetitive thoughts.

I agree, but what if we could do this thinking in English? This way we could be able to learn the language, better to say let ourselves to be „learned“.  And I tell you, it is doable! I do it. Not all the time. Maybe it is the result of extensive listening of English (I use mp3 player) or because of doing our BrainSpeakActivator exercises every day. It learns me spontaneously express myself. I like it and I enjoy it!

I also realized, that when I speak (and it is valid not only for English but for my Czech language too) I practically „think aloud“. I just say what comes to my mind and I do it aloud, using my vocal cords, tongue, mouse... you know, what I mean. But in case of my English it was not always this way. And at that time my speaking was in trouble. I tried to translate from my mother Czech to English first and then to say it. It was not working of course. In most cases I wanted to translate something for which I had not proper vocabulary yet...

So, I have a question for you - because I do not know, if I am right. That question is:

„IS SPEAKING REALLY = THINKING ALOUD?”

If it is, and I will assume for now that it is, then hardly anybody who learns English at school really speaks English. The speaking is NOT translating, it is NOT reading a text aloud... So, what is that? THINKING ALOUD!

Maybe you will be able to persuade me that it is not. BUT at least for now I THINK so.

I see it quite relevant to learning languages now. Everybody agrees that children are super effective language learners (especially in comparison with adults). Why is it this way?

I would start by clarifying that I am not a believer and on the other hand I am not any unbeliever in God. I think that both are the same, but from other side – one believe in existence of God and the others believe in non-existence of God. But is not the topic of my post - So, what Jesus wanted to say to us? And how it is connected with our inability to learn effectively foreign languages?

From my perspective, Jesus sees children as innocent beings, still free of stuff we (adults) put on them, free of conditioning, prejudices and judgments … They are spontaneous beings, they have a courage and vitality (maybe because they do not carry all of that mentioned stuff with them). They overflow with activity, they are able to play and experiment, they are willing to make mistakes and learn from them without any gilt or shame, they are very flexible ... to name just a few. Such attributes are unfortunately lacking in us as adults (partially or completely) and it strongly influences our learning processes (language learning included) and needless to say that the influence is negative.

First of all, we are conditioned to speak with some language already (our mother language) and it is not easy to get rid of it (to give it away form our head) while using the other language we are learning.

Second, we are afraid to make mistakes and teachers support us in such approach. If you make a lot of mistakes, you are considered to be a bad student and you are “punished” by bad grades, of course… In such situation could be better not to be very initiative. The children, on the contrary, are eager to do things, to speak, they make mistakes, fall down while learning to walk, but they jump on their feet again and are able to learn very quickly this way :-)

Spontaneity was lost – we think to much before using our language - even our native language - but in case of the foreign languages it is even worse – we have grammar rules* on top of it! In his post on my blog, Jarne from Finland said that we should had special language kinder-gardens for adults (similar to those for children, where they learn foreign languages very early, before school) Would it be helpful? Would not it be kind of business meeting there anyway? Long faces and uneasy silence most of the time.

We somehow lost a fantasy, we tend to do things repeatedly over and over again, once learned. We fight against new approaches, ideas. And we struggle, because, everything is changing anyway. The lack of openness, tolerance and acceptance keeps us stuck on spot. No progress means no joy and it leads to quiting such an activity very quickly – in our case the language learning activity.

To say just a few.

So, was Jesus right? Did Jesus know the truth? I think so. He also used to say: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free”

  Let's break free! :-)

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*We think that children do not learn the grammar rules because they are too small to understand them – and we are not. We think that we, as adults, should learn simple sentences like children first. Isn't it perplexed a bit? We are adults, we do not need to learn such simple sentences, and at the same time we do not need to learn those complex grammar rules as children do not learn them explicitly. Yes, we can, but later - children learn them later too. (Excuse me for this, if you are a „Grammar Lover“ - you can do it
now ;-) Everybody is unique)

New Age of my English: from listening to speaking, tragedy turns into comedy

When I was about 40 years old (as you can see, learning languages, and learning in general too, is not about age – so, never is too late) I switched my learning approach to listening. Listening became my main source of English. Not only I listened in my car, but I started to use headphones (better to say only one headphone) and practiced that “unconscious” listening (look at the V.F.B. video below) and actually even nowadays I have that headphone in my ear nearly all day long :-)

I listened that course based on V.F.B. approach, I listened BBC radio in my car, I listened different kind of courses (those courses were not courses intended to be language courses – these courses were self-improving materials in English (the topics in which I was interested), audio-books (here I had sometimes both audio and printed version or PDF – so, reading was also practiced but in lower extend) I started to watch movies with subtitles and I made parts of them into mp3 version for later conscious and unconscious listening (for example the Terminator ;-) - which was my first movie I „worked“ with). I restarted watching the satellite TV – namely CNN and at this time it was not so frustrating. Actually it was joyful for me to be able to understand (most of it). Some programs I recorded and there were transcripts on Internet too for downloading – I printed them, found unknown expressions, marked them and wrote above their Czech equivalent and then I listened them using my mp3 player. At home I let play English talks (and I continue with it even now) often to create kind of English surrounding. It is not necessary to pay attention to it, sometimes I do, but in most cases I do not. It could be rather silent at the background like a radio (the same it is with my listening of mp3 player during the day. I do at the same time my other activities, for example business activities, dealing with clients, solving computer problems or washing up dishes, running, biking… I bought wireless radio headphones too and I am able to listen whatever I want in all my house or in the garden (whether gardening or sunbathing-I prefer second one;-) ).

This way I had continued about for 2 years (I was quite happy about my increasing ability to understand) and then I met my best friend RF for the fist time. She was better in English than me, especially in speaking. She spent some time abroad. I was keen into her ;-) She was and still is really a beautiful girl! We started to write emails together and then I suggested her to write them in English. At that time I had no courage to propose English speaking, of course. And she also had not such need. Actually as I found later that she is not willing to speak English in public here in Czech republic between people speaking Czech. Kate is but I will talk about it later. Sometimes at that time I created my first „plan for English“. See the picture – click to enlarge:

One day she (RF) came with possibility to attend an English course, they has some interesting offer at work and I agreed. I was relatively confident knowing that my English improved. But what happened? It was course of a small group (the group of about 5 people and it was meant to be mainly a conversational course. But it turned that it was such a combination of all activities. By the way, I was there only one man among young women (except a teacher).

Yes, I was a „star“ in listening, average in reading and grammar exercises, but my speaking was… terrible! How to say it, there was NO speaking at all. I was hardly able to say anything and because I was not very outspoken even in my mother tongue it was not very surprising to me. I also noticed that I do not like to speak in English somehow. I did not like to hear myself to speak in different language – it was not natural for me. I did not feel well doing it.  I realized, that I needed some new approach at this stage or to incorporate to my approach some additional components if I would like to speak. V.F.B. calls this „ the activities“ as I notice in that video and there are also some possibilities, I think, described in her book too, but it is all let up to every individual. This stage is not so elaborated in her approach – at least it seems to me.

So, I started to search and I found (YES! „Search and you will find“ It works) two remedies. I do not know which one of them helped me more. First was that I found another best friend (I have two now :-) ) Kate and because she used to live (at that time) in neighbor country (Slovakia) we chatted via Skype every day – and I must say that it was very, very hard for me (at the beginning) Even frustrating and I am glad, and maybe even kind of proud of myself, that I was able to do it for sufficient period of time. Meantime I realized that my talkativeness as such is poor (in my Czech too) and I found the second remedy a METHOD (God bless!) which promised to boost the talkativeness. I found that it existed also English version (even it was kind of unfinished at that time). I bought that method in PDF format and I started to practice it according to instruction every day. At the beginning it was a bit strange for me to do that kind of self-talk but I managed to continue anyway. After while I created a habit and everything went surprisingly well, smooth and forward. I started to speak better with Kate and I become familiar with my voice in English and on the top of it I realized that I was starting to think in English! This „self-talk“ I practiced using that strange method turned into „inner self-talk“ = THINKING. When I think of it now, the goal of everybody who learns some foreign language should be to be able to think in that language. But to return to my story. It was about one year after my first, not very „successful“ course with my friend RF and we decided to attend another one. This time it was conversational course with native teacher. Only we two (students) and the teacher from England who does not speak a word in Czech! I was a little bit nervous about it. I had never met any native English speaker before and never spoken with any one before! And how it went?

I can see now, that this blog post is a bit too long, so I will let the rest of it (and I will rest;-) ) for tomorrow. Although they say that „tomorrow never comes“ I hope that at this case it will come.

to be continued ...

We usually consider the speaking to be the most difficult part of our language learning process and actually, when I think of it now, it is the ultimate goal of all this “effort”. Language is about speaking, it is no doubt about it. The natural way for children to learn is to 1. listen and after some time (one, two or more years) they start with 2. speaking. And speaking very simply at the beginning. They IMITATE their parents and family members. It is natural way. No reading and no writing is involved, no lists of words to memorize, no grammar rules... and parents do not correct them every time when they make some mistake or when the pronunciation is not so perfect. They enjoy the process and go forward. Naturally.

So, from my personal perspective, the LISTENING and the SPEAKING are our natural, maybe genetically inherent abilities, which we, as human beings have inside of us for millions of years. We do not need any school education to attain them. Rather different situation is with reading and writing. These skills need the school or some teacher support (in most cases).

But why is the speaking for us learners with ESL (English as Second Language) so problematic? I think that the reason is that we approach it from the wrong direction. We start usually with learning lists of words (and it is a mix of our native language and target (learned) language, we learn a bunch of grammar rules (riddled by exceptions) and then we TRY to combine those words together, using those complex rules … Sometimes, we (as children) hardly know the meaning of the words (even in our native language, because we do not use them actively very much, or at all, or they are for us rather meaningless. The topic is irrelevant, but school book forces us to learn them anyway). We learn a lot ABOUT that language, about its structure, grammar... We learn a lot ABOUT it in our native language. A teacher is not, in many cases, a native speaker. We hardly know the correct pronunciation because of it, we hear more our own language during lessons of foreign language then foreign language itself. This MIX of languages creates its equivalent in our head.

Yes, it is as it is and we cannot do too much with it. We cannot change the school system immediately. I think that such learning about the language can be useful to some extend too. But it is not real language learning. It is learning ABOUT it. And it is a big difference. So, what we can do? We can return to the natural process – “listen and imitate” and the school let as kind of supplement only.  About listening we were talking before. So, to the speaking - how to “imitate” the speaking? Simply: You can listen a speak together or slightly delayed as you are listening at the same time. Do it this way: You are listening native speaker (you already perfectly understand because of previous activities) and you imitate his (her) pronunciation (you are familiar with too). After while you can be even slightly beforehand. Advantage is that you can compare yourself with the “real” speaker, you do not need (at that phase) any partner and you are becoming familiar with yourself (with your voice) speaking in the foreign language.

The second way (or (sub)phase) could be similar to the writing exercises we did – after listening you can try to say it in your own way, preferably using same (or some) vocabulary from the material you have just heard. /Here I would like to make a little remark – chose the topic you are INTERESTED IN, which has some MENING for you!/ You can notice that some words are more difficult to remember and to be used for you – you can mark them somehow (color). You know (understand) them but you cannot use them in your speech. It is you passive vocabulary. And to activate it? It needs speaking, using it, be active … there is no other way! Repeat, practise.

What I found very useful, after years of listening and some reading (but being unable to speak well) and after some attempts to speak with my friend via Skype (which had some impact, but made me feel a bit frustrated) is the method called Brain Speak Activator – which is “easy” to use, it does not need any partner, you do not need to be under any pressure, to be self-conscious, shy... or to "suffer" anyhow. You can do it on you own, with your own pace. Originally it was not intended to be language learning tool. But It had enormous impact on me and my speaking! I will write about it next time (noticing that the post is rather long already) and I will reveal my “English story” to you.


To be continued …

Today a little detour around writing about English and learning process. I was slightly surprised that people (you) read my BLOG in such a big amount. At the same time I got some contradictory reactions which I must at least shortly comment.

Most of you supports me, the others say that my writings are full of mistakes, riddled by grammar errors… I am grateful to ALL of you. I was thinking about it and I must say (or better to say “write”) something explicitly about it: I AM NOT NATIVE SPEAKER and I LEARN AS I WRITE. English is my second language (ESL), I am one of you. I learn with you. The majority of us, speakers of English all over the World are non-native speakers of English. I am one of them, one of you. I write here my experiences, my points of view and my knowledge I gained during the process called the LIFE. Small part of this process was an acquiring the ability to use languages (my native Czech, and then Russian, English, German, Spanish, Esperanto - some of them only very VERY slightly!) And this ability as far as English is concerned is not perfect at all, actually it is rather average till low average. To improve I need to write (everybody needs to practise) and I do it. And I do my best (as Don Miguel Ruiz says: ”Always do your best” :-) which is, I think, “his” Fourth Agreement).

First group of you (who supports me and say that I am doing a good job) encourages me to continue and second group (those who do not like my mistakes) helps me to learn from them. But YOU, dear reader, learn English from somebody else, please, preferably from native speakers. From my writings get just the MESSAGE. Or maybe you can notice those mistakes and learn from them too with me. Maybe you can start writing too (comment my posts :-) ) We are in the same process. So, this is my DISCLAIMER. These texts are not proof-read or anyhow corrected by anybody competent. Be aware of it and read all these writings with this notion in your mind. Thank you very much! :-)

Next time it will be to the topic. I promise! ;-)

The more you know, the easier you learn. Is it true as far as a language is concerned? Really? Not always. But it is exciting perspective! Isn't it? It is not about remembering more and more words, expressions, adding a new vocabulary to the existing one, which demands continues repeating and revising and represents a continues effort to maintain and keep what you already know – not to be forgotten. Despite the fact, that in most cases it is this way, there is here an another, a different approach. It is to see the language as MOSAIC. The lexical units are the pieces of a broader picture, the whole which represents not only the collection of that pieces but IS much more than that, because it has a MEANING. That picture, that mosaic represents the meaning expressed by the language, is created from those pieces. If you have a mosaic, you do not need to know all pieces to figure out the picture – the meaning. And it works vice versa too – you can “easily” figure out missing pieces (meaning of unknown words in our case) from the broader picture, mosaic (=context). This way you can learn, and this process is natural way of learning new vocabulary. In addition to that, you can also notice some grammar patterns and you can find that some words go together (collocations). You learn them too. Naturally. This “mosaic” approach significantly improves your understanding – it is instantaneous, without any internal translations, no need for mixing languages anymore, no need for thinking about grammar rules, actually there is no need to think at all (“about” language) – just communication happens! So, isn't it nice? Yes! You can ask: “But how to achieve that?“ And it is the relevant question! I will explain it, but not now. Think of it, maybe you are going to get it! The hint is: we do not have only a logical mind.

Sometimes I think of my English and I know that it is not perfect at all. I am not very confident, especially as far as the grammar is concerned. When I was younger, I had studied this language at school. We combined our mother Czech with English, it was a lot of grammar, theory, exercises. Yes, I understood them, but only that particular hour, next was another grammar rule and it was the same. Gradually I realized that I have a big mess in my head. An it has not changed to this day :-) Maybe, fortunately for me, I started few years ago looking at English from a little different perspective and maybe because of it I was able to continue to learn and actually I love this language today. What happen? I realized that all of that is nonsense. I realized that I do not need all this knowledge ABOUT the language, I need USE this language, understand it, be able to speak and write... NO grammar rules too much needed. I realized that when I was a little boy I did not learn any grammar too. Yes, at school it started and actually it does not helped me to be more FLUENT in my mother tongue – Czech. Maybe to the contrary :-( While speaking I do not have time to think about any grammar rules, I need to focus my attention to the topic I am saying, to the message I am delivering and to my partner in communication. I found that it is better to make mistakes, but to be fluent and natural than NOT TO BE ABLE to communicate at all. By the way, most of the time I speak with not-native speakers and they “do not now” too, and if with native ones – they are tolerant :-) So, I follow the rule: "Always Do Your Best" what is, I think, the 4-th agreement by Migual Ruiz. Hopefully the right grammar will come later too! With my Czech it was the case after all. What about you?

Why do you think is our active vocabulary so small in comparison with passive one? And is it the only reason why we cannot express ourselves properly sometimes, communicate effectively and fluently? Why not to train our brains like we train our muscles?