The Blog

How to think in English: put in the time!

A user on the UsingEnglish.com forum posted a question that got me worked up to respond:

How to thinking in english....???

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When I practise to speak english. I always repare a sentence with a native language then I translate it to english to speak.

I knew it wrong for speaking english. But how to thinking in english. Plz give me advice. Thanks in advance

My response:

Here's my opinion, based on just the little bit of writing that I saw in your question. I don't think that you should expect yourself to be thinking in English yet.  I think that you will need to spend more time studying the language.  How much more time?  Probably another 500 hours.  That includes the time that you spend watching English movies, studying vocabulary, practicing writing to people, and...

The role of correction - super drastic but still with permission

Don't correct.  Re-write.

Steve Kauffman put up a blog post yesterday: The role of correction in language learning - very limited and only with permission. His basic claim is that corrections don't work very well. People don't remember the corrections you made.  Even when someone does intellectually understand a structure that they're messing up, they still may not be able to produce the correct version when the pressure's on.  And frequent corrections interrupt the flow of conversation and potentially de-motivate the person.

All good points, but I want to propose an amendment. Assume that someone has come to you looking for corrections. Assume that you're not interrupting them. (I agree with Steve's suggestion that written corrections are better, because they're easier...

"Will", "Going To Do", and "Doing" - why learners get them wrong

Here's a little example of something English learners get wrong that I attribute to a failure of textbooks and teachers to properly reflect the way language is used.

I've been spending a lot of time recently hanging around Lang-8.com and helping people out by correcting their journal entries. Most of the corrections are novel - they're things that I've never encountered before.  Others are so common that I barely even think of them - problems with plurals and articles being the main example of this.

There are a few types of mistakes that are common enough that I've developed a standard response to them but not so common as to seem hopeless.  One of these is the over-use of "will".  Here's a made-up (but not too far from what I've seen) example:

Tomorrow I will go...

The Importance of Not Being Thorough

This morning I was trying to think of some phrases that use the word "face" to show to someone and did a quick Google search. One of the results I came across was this: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/32/messages/937.html

I think that this is fairly typical of phrase lists and repositories that you'll find on the web - long, exhaustive lists that contain the best and most useful phrases right along with ones that you've never heard of ("A face like a fiddle") and those that are commonly known but little used ("Cut off your nose to spite your face").

I've written before about the need to differentiate the everyday phrases from the merely interesting ones. A longer list of phrases isn't better than a short one.  It's worse, because the language learner has no way to tell...

Uncommon Common Phrases

I was going through a list of English phrases that I collected from watching TV, reading online articles and so on.  I came across this one:

Are we still on for Saturday?

As natural an English expression as one could hope for, but not something I expect to hear from my students or friends who didn't grow up speaking English.  And certainly not a phrase I would expect to encounter in a textbook. This is exactly the kind of language that I love to find and point out.

I want PhraseMix to point out the uncommon common phrases. "Common" because they're used all the time; "uncommon" because it's rare that anyone teaches them.