From Frustration to Fluency: My English Learning Adventure

My journey with English began only in high school. In September, we bought textbooks (incredibly dull), and with the help of our English teacher—who was fresh out of school with possibly a B1 level—we got to work. By the end of the school year, I realized I knew nothing. I had a strong aversion to English; it just didn’t make sense to me, and my frustration level was at its peak. At that time, intensive English courses were very popular in our town. Two of my classmates attended these courses and knew a fair amount of English. Maybe inspired by them, or perhaps driven by a desire to travel, I told my parents I wanted to enrol in one of these courses.

After taking an entry test that confirmed my lack of English knowledge, I started from scratch. The intensive course involved 100 hours per trimester (10 weeks), so every day after school, I had two lessons in the afternoon. Fortunately, the groups were small (10-12 students), and even more fortunately, the teacher was very experienced, charismatic, and explained grammar excellently. English finally started to make sense.

In the first school year (three trimesters), I completed 300 hours and missed very few classes. The same pattern continued the following year. After 600 hours, I theoretically should have reached a B2 level, so I enrolled in a preparatory course for the B2 exam (another 100 hours). Totalling 700 hours, exactly as indicated by the Cambridge charts. I don’t even count the hours I had during high school. I passed the certification, but even with the certificate in hand, the ‘wow’ effect didn’t come, and I didn’t feel comfortable speaking in English.

Getting into university meant studying specialized subjects in English, including reading literary works, analysing them, and writing seminar papers—all in English. Despite very good academic results, I still didn’t feel proficient in English. Yes, my grammar was excellent, but my speaking lagged significantly. I knew I couldn’t respond spontaneously and that I couldn’t express all my thoughts naturally. I realised I needed to experience English outside of the academic environment.

At the very beginning of my journey in 2000, accessing authentic materials (articles, videos, etc., meant for native speakers, not language learners) wasn’t easy. My only available source was songs, which I tried to understand and translate.

After my second year at university, I decided to travel to the USA on my own. During three months, I worked at a summer camp for children and finally used English in natural interactions. Every night I fell asleep completely exhausted, with a headache filled with all the grammatical mistakes I had made and embarrassing situations caused by language barriers.

I repeated the work experience in the USA the following summer and also managed to participate in an Erasmus exchange program in Sweden, where I studied for one semester. The headaches after a day of communicating in English diminished, and the frequency of embarrassing moments decreased. However, the expected result of understanding everything and everyone did not materialise. Neither did the state exams or the thesis change that.

So when did I start to understand ‘everything’? Simply put—when I finally accepted that I would never know all the words and expressions and that I would actually be learning for a lifetime.

I began to deduce the meaning of new words from context, and when I didn’t know the exact word, I described it. And when I met someone with an unfamiliar accent, I gave my ears time to adjust 🙂

No matter where you are on your language journey, don’t despair, don’t consider yourself foolish or untalented, and above all, don’t give up. Great things take time, or to use an English idiom—Rome wasn’t built in a day.