Today I’m going to talk about the hierarchy of competence, which is often visualized as a pyramid with four stages of learning. The goal of the learner is to complete each stage and move to the next without skipping anything in the previous stage. And the ultimate goal, of course, is to climb up to […]
Speaking fast doesn’t make you sound fluent
In this post I will discuss one of the biggest mistakes English learners make when they want to sound fluent. This is something that many people do but don’t realize that it makes them sound less clear. When we first start listening to native English speakers, we can’t even understand where one word ends and […]
Mistakes in English – theory vs. real life
In this post I will discuss several English rules that you might have learned but native speakers don’t always follow. Keep in mind, though, that I will be talking about speakers in the US, and it might be different in other countries. In this post you will learn what kind of mistakes Americans make when […]
How soon should you start speaking in English?
Build negative sentences with Yet or Still
In this post, I’m going to share with you a sentence structure that can be quite confusing to many English learners. It is confusing because it can create a negative sentence without using any negative words like not or don’t or can’t or won’t. Not even a negative prefix. By the way, talking about negatives, […]
The best way to learn English
Commonly confused pairs of words in English
As you might already know, there are some words in English that sound very similar or even identical but have different meanings. Even native speakers sometimes make mistakes when they spell some of these words. But for nonnative speakers, these words can be a nightmare. Ok, I might be exaggerating a little, but they are […]
Are you fluent in English?
Confusing double negatives in English
Ok, let’s talk about double negatives. You have probably heard that double negatives in English are not grammatically correct. A double negative is when you use two negative words in a phrase or a sentence. For example, ✘ “I don’t like nothing” is grammatically incorrect. The correct way to say this sentence in English is […]
