Don’t Let English Limits Limit Your World

I started learning English when I was around 10 years old in primary school, just like my peers in Vietnam. I had taken extra English lessons and studied English for more than ten years at school. However, I had very little English. My English level largely remained at Pre-intermediate every time I took a test for a new English course. I was unable to have meaningful conversations in English. I lacked the confidence to converse with a foreigner. My knowledge of English was limited to the textbooks, which were filled with dull concepts like grammatical structures and grammar rules. Of course, I watched English-subtitled movies and listened to English music, but these activities alone did not provide the necessary atmosphere for English usage, much alone the necessary progress.

I was hired as a research assistant in a biotechnology lab after I earned my degree. Just enough English was available to me to enable me to locate and study scholarly works pertinent to my profession. I hardly rarely used English in my everyday life, and I once believed that was the extent of my language skills.

The limit

Later, when I became 26, I felt the need to break out of the circle because I was too worn out and bored with my daily routine. At the time, it felt like the best course of action for me would be to study overseas. But in order to qualify for any postgraduate school, I would have needed to obtain an international English certificate, which meant I had to go above my English proficiency threshold. That is when I really became serious about trying to get better at English. And I succeeded in obtaining the language certification. (By the way, I won't go into detail about how I met my English objective; perhaps later.) That made it possible for me to enroll in a Finnish university's environmental sciences master's program. I left my current employment and spent four years in Finland. I have to admit that this event absolutely altered my outlook on life.

I sometimes consider how different my life might have been now if I hadn't made up my mind then. I would be living in the loop at the young age of 26 if I didn't work on my English. English not only enabled me to enter the globe, but it also gave me the freedom to do so. So never let your universe be constrained by your English language abilities. Use English as a tool and a passport to travel the world and discover who you really are

Takeaway

If you ever find learning English to be challenging or uninteresting, stop studying it and start applying it instead. The goal of learning English is to utilize it in daily life; we are not language experts. I hope you'll find the following list of dos and don'ts for learning English useful:

1.  1. Instead of studying English aimlessly, set a goal for yourself.
    2. Instead of learning English, utilize it.
    3. Do your best to immerse yourself in English as much as you can and don't be scared to make errors.
    

My favorite quotation regarding language is from Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, "The boundaries of my languages are the bounds of my reality."

Avoid having it occur to you.

P/S: Please share your experience studying English with me. Please add yours in the comments section below.