Improving your English is more than just meeting with an online teacher a couple times a week

by Marc Anderson

When you want to get really good at something, do you spend a few hours a week training and learning that subject? If you said yes, don’t read on but if you said no then read on. Learning any language be it English, French, Arabic, or Spanish all require a lot of time on your own without a teacher. For the 3 hours a week you might spend with a teacher, you might put in 10 hours outside of class time studying the materials, watching or listening to programs in the language that you are trying to learn.

Some students are able to learn quite a bit with just being with a teacher 3 times a week but those are the exceptions. If you are at a very basic level and have no prior English experience, a couple of lessons a week for a month or two could show significant improvement. On the other hand, once you are at a very advanced level, it is the finer issues of a language that a tutor can help you with. When it comes to the finer issues of a language, somebody probably won’t recognize that you learned 50 new idioms and how to apply them as much as a person who once had no knowledge of a language is now able to speak in a basic conversation. What I am saying is that generally languages are learned over a period of time with consistent work that becomes both a rewarding and a motivating factor for continuing to improve upon your 2nd language (or 3rd or 4th language if that is the case).

There are other ways to learn a language besides finding a suitable teacher and I recommend using them in conjunction with a teacher who can help you go over things that you do not understand or need further work with. Other ways include, foreign language newspapers and books, television shows, grammar books and software applications such as Rosetta Stone, tellmemore or even online applications such as Global English.