http://www.antimoon.com/other/myths.

htm
Myth #1:
The best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country

A lot of people seem to think that being in a foreign country means that you automatically learn the countrys
language well. Perhaps the most prominent people who believe in this common-sense truth are European parents
who pay a lot of money to send their children to language schools in England, expecting that they will come back
speaking fluent English.
Fact:
Most immigrants in America dont speak English very well, even after living there for 20 years. Many of them have
been making the same basic mistakes for decades for example, saying things like He make tea? instead of Did
he make tea? or I help you instead of I will help you. They typically speak with strong accents, which enables
others to instantly classify them as Asians, Latinos, Russians, etc.
The reason immigrants dont do anything about their grammar and pronunciation is that there is little pressure to do
so. Other people can understand them despite their mistakes (sometimes with some effort), and are normally too
polite to correct them.
The example of immigrants in America reveals a truth that many language learners find quite shocking: that living
in a foreign country simply does not make you speak the countrys language well. It does not force you to learn good
grammar, good pronunciation, or a large vocabulary, because you can do quite well without those things in everyday
life. For example, you can skip all your articles when speaking English (Give me apple, Watch is not good) and
still be able to shop in America or Britain without much trouble.
Being in a foreign country only forces you to learn what is necessary to survive the ability to understand
everyday language and just enough speaking skills to order pizza and communicate with your co-workers or costudents. The rest is up to you, your motivation and ability to learn which means that youre not much better off
than someone whos learning the language in his own country.

In addition, being in a foreign country often forces you to say incorrect sentences, because it forces you to speak,
even if you make a lot of mistakes. When youre in a foreign country, you cannot decide that you will temporarily
stop talking to people and focus on writing practice (which would enable you to learn correct grammar better than
speaking, because you could take as much time as you needed to look up correct phrases on the Web or in
dictionaries). You have to speak, because your life depends on it.
By making mistakes, you reinforce your bad habits, and after a couple of years of saying things like He make
tea?, its really hard to start speaking correctly. It is important to remember that native speakers will not correct
your mistakes. Instead, they will try to be nice and try to understand you, no matter how bad your grammar is.
Conclusions

While going to another country may seem like a sure-fire way to master a foreign language, it is not so. Without
sufficient motivation, you will learn very little and are likely to end up speaking in an understandable way, but with
lots of mistakes. On the other hand, if you have the motivation, you might as well simulate a foreign-language
environment in your own home with foreign-language TV and the Internet. Such an environment will be safer,

because it will not force you to speak and reinforce your mistakes. Instead, you can learn at your own pace and
concentrate on pronunciation, input and writing before you start speaking.
The advantages of going abroad are:

easy access to native speakers that you can converse with (though you can also find natives
in your own country, or you can just talk with someone whos learning the same language)

the opportunity to perfect your listening skills (trying to understand English-language TV and
movies is not quite the same as trying to understand the speech of a teenaged supermarket
clerk in Frederick, Maryland)

the opportunity to learn useful everyday words which are not frequently heard on TV or in
movies, e.g. Kleenex, ATM, carpool, parking space, detergent, deli, cereal.

All things considered, learning in your own country will be a safer (and cheaper) option than going abroad,
assuming you can motivate yourself and can find opportunities to speak in the language youre learning. After
youve learned to speak the language fluently, you can go abroad to polish your listening skills and make your
vocabulary a bit more native-like.

Myth #2:
The best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it

This is probably the most frequently repeated piece of advice for language learners. You will hear it from teachers,
webmasters of ESL sites, and people in the Antimoon Forum (e.g. see Jeff Hooks posts in this discussion).
For most language teachers, the goal is to have you talking as early as possible and as much as possible. They
believe that they should be quiet during their classes, while their students should have the opportunity to speak.
Fact:
Speaking is imitation. When you speak your native language, you dont make up your own grammar, vocabulary
and pronunciation. You use the same grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation as people around you.
Similarly, when trying to speak a foreign language, your goal is to imitate the grammar, vocabulary and
pronunciation of native speakers, so that your way of speaking is correct and natural.
Its pretty obvious that, in order to talk like the native speakers, you have to listen to the things they say and read the
things they write. When you do so, you learn new words and grammar structures that you can use to express your
thoughts. As a result, it becomes easier and easier for you to build your own sentences in the foreign language.
By contrast, if you follow the popular advice and concentrate on speaking rather than listening and reading, you will
learn few new words and structures and, like so many learners, will be stuck with your limited vocabulary and
grammar. It will always be hard for you to express your thoughts in the foreign language.
Benefits of speaking

While speaking practice does not develop your vocabulary or grammar, it does offer a few important benefits:

1. It helps improve your fluency (moves your knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and

pronunciation from your slow memory to your quick memory however, first you must
put something in your slow memory through input)
2. Communicating in a foreign language is quite exciting and motivates you to keep learning
3. It helps expose gaps in your vocabulary and grammar (shows you what you dont know and

encourages you to look it up)

What you should do

If you dont know how to begin your sentence, even after thinking for a while,

If you stop in the middle of a sentence, and cant continue because you dont know a word,

If you produce awkward-sounding sentences because you dont know how to say something in
a natural way,

If you often make mistakes and are not aware of it,

...you need more input, not more speaking practice. Such problems show that you simply dont know how to say
certain things in the language, and should look at how native speakers say them. More speaking will not improve
your vocabulary and grammar; actually, it can make things worse.
From the very beginning, you should spend all of your time on reading and listening (thus acquiring the necessary
vocabulary and grammar) until you can write a few simple but 100% correct sentences in the language. For
example, you can start by writing an e-mail message to someone who speaks the language. (It doesnt matter how
long it takes you to write that message. It may be two hours, if you have that kind of patience.)
At the same time, you should study the phonetics of the language, practice pronouncing its sounds, and learn the
pronunciations of words.
Then, you should continue getting input and writing until you can produce simple and correct sentences without
consulting the dictionary or the Web. This is when you should start speaking again, slowly and carefully.
However, you should still spend most of your time on reading and listening, because input is the only way to
develop your vocabulary and grammar.
What happens in language classes

Sadly, the importance of input has been greatly underestimated in the past years. The monopoly of the
Communicative Approach in English language teaching means that students are expected to speak in class and write
compositions almost from the first lesson, even though they have had almost no chance to absorb the grammar and
vocabulary of English. A typical teacher demands output from his students, but does nothing to ensure they have had
enough input. A few hours of English classes every week, where the teacher tries to speak as little as possible (to
give his students the opportunity to speak), are not nearly enough.

Myth #3:

It is OK to make mistakes
If a student in a language class does not want to speak, the teacher will normally assume they are shy, and will
encourage (sometimes force) them to speak. Hell tell the student: Speak and dont worry about mistakes. After
all, speaking practice is more important than making mistakes, isnt it?
Fact:
Mistakes are not harmless. Every time you say an incorrect phrase in a foreign language, you increase the
probability that you will say that phrase again. Therefore, if you speak with mistakes, you can easily teach yourself
bad grammar.
A lot of people think its more important to improve your fluency than to improve your correctness. If you follow
this path, after some time you may find you can speak the language with ease, but it will be largely your own
version of the language not correct language as its spoken by native speakers. In other words, you may become
quite fluent in speaking the wrong way.
Perhaps such a state is more desirable than not speaking at all. But when bad grammar comes to your mind so
easily, it becomes very difficult to improve. When youve been saying things like He go away for the last two
years, its not so easy to start saying He went away all of a sudden.
The point is that its hard to go from fluency with mistakes to fluency without mistakes. Its much easier to start
with careful, correct output and then work on your speed to achieve fluency without mistakes.

Conclusions
Making mistakes is not OK if your goal is to speak fluently and correctly.
If youre a person who cant help but make a mistake in every other sentence, you definitely shouldnt speak yet.
Even if you have a teacher who will correct your every error, you will not be able to remember such a large number
of corrections and will make the same mistakes over and over again. You should rather concentrate on reading and
listening, no matter what your teacher says.
If you decide to speak, do it carefully, sticking to phrases that youre absolutely sure are correct

Myth #4:
As a beginner, youre bound to make a lot of mistakes

This is often given as justification of the Mistakes are OK myth. The reasoning is that mistakes are a part of
learning, therefore it is pointless to try to avoid them.
Fact:
While you cannot eliminate mistakes completely, you can speak and write with very few mistakes, even if you are a
beginner.

The trick is to put input before output. If you follow good examples (i.e. build your sentences out of correct phrases
and patterns that you have read in books or heard from native speakers), and avoid uncertain phrases (phrases that
could possibly be incorrect), you will make practically no mistakes.
Heres what this means:

You should not open your mouth until you see/hear enough correct sentences to build your
own sentences correctly. If you cant help but make mistakes, spend all your time on getting
input (reading and listening).

You should look things up on the Web and in dictionaries before you write a sentence, to make
sure its correct.

If youre not absolutely sure and cant check if what youre going to say (or write) is correct,
dont say (or write) it. Otherwise, you may teach yourself an incorrect phrase.

When reading or listening, pay attention to details like word order, articles, prepositions, and
tenses. Compare sentences in the foreign language with equivalent sentences in your native
language. Notice how different they are. This will help you realize which parts of your own
sentences can be wrong.

The above techniques help you avoid developing bad habits that would be very difficult to cure later on. If you are
careful and patient enough, you can learn with very few mistakes and gradually acquire the ability to use more and
more phrases that you are absolutely sure of, until you can express anything you want in the foreign language
correctly and fluently.

Myth #5:
You are a foreigner, therefore you will always have a foreign accent

This line is often used to discourage language learners from studying pronunciation seriously. You didnt grow up in
an English-speaking country, so why bother trying to get your English vowels right?
It is related to the Critical Period Hypothesis (see next myth).
Fact:
The fact that most foreigners have a foreign accent does not mean that you have to be like them. Many comedians
are able to perfectly imitate the speech of actors, politicians, etc. Renee Zellweger was able to do a perfect British
accent in The Bridget Joness Diary, even though she is from the South of the United States. I can also humbly offer
my own example on listening to my speech samples, a number of Americans said that if they met me on the
street, they couldnt tell I wasnt an American. (By the way, I have lived in Poland all my life and started studying
English pronunciation at 15.)
There is no reason why you cant speak a foreign language with a perfect, natural accent. You will need at least
some talent for imitating sounds (if you can imitate people in your own language, thats a very good sign). However,
if you just dont have the knack, you can largely make up for it with persistence and a little technology.

For example, you can record your voice with your computer and compare it with the proper pronunciation (if youre
learning American English, you can use PerfectPronunciation for that). This technique helps many learners see
where their pronunciation is different from the original and lets them gradually make it more native-like.
You will also need to study phonetics. First, find a resource which has recordings of all the sounds of the language
youre learning (like the table with English sounds we have for English). Then, discover which sounds are used in
which words by listening to the language and by reading phonetic transcriptions in dictionaries.
Perhaps you will not be indistinguishable from a native in the end, but you are likely to achieve clear, pleasant
pronunciation that will give native speakers something to wonder about (for example, Michal Wojciks accent is
confusing for some native speakers they think hes from an English-speaking country, but they cant tell which
one).

Further reading:
How to learn English pronunciation

Myth #6:
If you didnt learn a foreign language as a child, you will never be fully proficient in its grammar

This is a more general version of the foreign accent myth described in the previous article in the series. It has its
roots in the Critical Period Hypothesis proposed by Eric Lenneberg in 1967.
Lenneberg suggested that ones first language must be acquired before puberty (about 12 years of age). After
puberty, he claimed, neurological changes in the brain make it impossible to fully learn a language. To support his
hypothesis, Lenneberg pointed to examples of children who were kept in isolation from others and had no contact
with their first language until after puberty. Such children kept making basic grammar mistakes, no matter how long
they tried to learn the language.
The Critical Period Hypothesis has been generalized to refer to second/foreign language acquisition, leading to
statements such as: If you dont acquire a second/foreign language before puberty, you will always have problems
with some parts of grammar This causes language learners to interpret their flaws as a neurological necessity and
discourages them from trying to improve.
Fact:
Grammar proficiency has more to do with how much input you get than how early you begin learning.
Take my example: I was born in Poland and started attending English classes at 6. Despite my young age (which, in
theory, should have allowed me to learn very quickly), I didnt manage to acquire the language. After 9 years of
attending classes my knowledge of grammar was extremely limited and I would always make tons of grammar
mistakes. Finally, at 15, I started taking English seriously reading books, using spaced-repetition software, using
dictionaries, etc.
According to many linguists, I was already past my critical period, but guess what I started making fantastic
progress. I was learning faster than I had ever learned as a child. In 2-3 years, I managed to master native-like
grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

Today, my English is nearly as good as a native speakers. My writing is natural and basically flawless. After a few
days of speaking practice, my accent becomes indistinguishable from that of an American native speaker. When I
went to California this spring, I met some people who couldnt believe I hadnt been born in America until I showed
them my Polish passport.
I occasionally make mistakes (Im almost always aware of them), but it doesnt bother me, because I have reasons
to believe they would quickly disappear if I spoke English on an everyday basis.
I am 25 years old and Im sure I could master another European language just like I mastered English. (Im not sure
about Chinese and other non-European languages.) Based on my experience, I certainly dont think I would be too
old to absorb any part of French or German grammar.

Further reading:

This article discusses the Critical Period Hypothesis and gives a few examples of scientific
studies which confirm the existence of people with native-like skills who started learning a
foreign language after puberty.

More about my English and how I learned it

Myth #7:

Studying pronunciation is not important

Many language learners assume their pronunciation is good enough because their teacher doesnt correct them too
often or because other students can understand them.
Fact:
Those learners are often dead wrong for two reasons:

Most teachers ignore all but the biggest pronunciation mistakes of their students. Normally, they just let their
students speak and interrupt them only if they just said something completely unintelligible. One of the
reasons is that there is too little time to work on each students pronunciation in class. Another thing is that
teachers often dont know how to help students who have poor pronunciation. As a result, pronunciation is
the most neglected subject in language learning.

If youre from Iran and other students in your class are from Iran, too, it will be easy for them to understand
you, no matter how strong your Iranian accent is.

Because of the above, if you believe your pronunciation is good enough to communicate because it is good enough
for your teacher and other students, you may be in for a nasty surprise when you actually go to a foreign country
and try to communicate with native speakers. One of my friends was the best student in his English class in Poland.
When he went to work in the United States, he found that Americans didnt understand half of what he said.

What if youre sure you can make yourself understood in a foreign language? Do you have any reason at all to study
pronunciation?

Fact:
Yes, because your pronunciation may still be quite far from that of a native speaker. If this is the case, other people
will have to make an effort to understand what youre saying, and will not be comfortable with you. They may even
avoid you for this reason.
When I went to a language school in England, I myself didnt enjoy conversing with those students from other
countries who kept mispronouncing English words. Sure, they would get their meaning across, but it would take me
more effort than usual, and I was often forced to ask them questions to make sure I understood them correctly.
The bottom line: When I had the choice, I preferred to talk with people whose accents were close to British or
American English. It was simply a much smoother and more pleasant experience.
A related problem is that if your pronunciation is unnative, other people may unconsciously assume youre slow
and treat you in a condescending way for example, talk to you more slowly and loudly, as if something were
wrong with your comprehension.

Conclusions
In conclusion, dont think you can communicate in a foreign language until youve tested your skills on real native
speakers (native speakers who are not your teachers). If youre sure your accent is understandable, aim for native or
near-native pronunciation, so that people you talk to can have a smooth experience interacting with you. In order to
achieve these goals, theres no doubt you will need to start thinking about pronunciation and spend time on it.

Quiz 2. Myths about learning English

Part A. According to the writer of Myths about Learning English, the following statements are (choose one): True (the idea was
written on the passage), False (It was not correct according to the writer), NC/Not Clear (The Writer did not mention the idea in
his passage). Remember , I am not asking your opinion or the public opinion. I am asking the writers opinion in his essay.
1. You cannot master English in your home country. (T/F/NC)
2. Studying pronunciation is not important. (T/F/NC)
3. It is impossible to speak like a native because you are a foreigner. (T/F/NC)
4. The best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it. (T/F/NC)
5. You must pronounce English words correctly and comprehensibly. (T/F/NC)
6. Grammar is important but not the most important thing in learning English. (T/F/NC)
7. It is OK to make mistakes. (T/F/NC)
8. Making mistakes is acceptable for a beginner. (T/F/NC)
9. If you didnt learn a foreign language as a child, you will never be fully proficient in its grammar. (T/F/NC)
10. The best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country. (T/F/NC)

Part B Match each myth with the best solution.

MYTHS
1. Many parents send their kids to learn English.
2. It is okay for a beginner to have a lot of mistakes in English.
3. Just say it, dont think too much about your grammar.
4. Practice making a conversation more than reading, listening, and writing.
5. You are not a native speaker of English, you pronunciation will never be at the level of a native one.
SOLUTIONS
A. You can simulate an English speaking atmosphere with TV and the Internet at home.
B. You need input in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation before you speak the language.
C. Your speaking will be fluent and free from mistakes if you consider the input before speaking.
D. It is important for you to practice how to say English words like a native speaker.
E. When learning English, you make some grammar error. But make sure you correct the error before it becomes a bad habit.

Part C Choose the correct option to complete the sentences.

1. They typically speak with strong , which enables others to instantly classify them as Asians, Latinos,
Russians, etc.
A. accent foreign
2.

B. foreign accents

C. foreign country D. country foreign

Speaking is imitation. When you speak your native language, you use the same grammar, vocabulary and
as people around you.
A. probability

3.

B. possibility

C, pronunciation

D. product

Less reading and listening but more speaking will not improve your vocabulary and grammar; actually, it can make
things worse. This statement has the similar meaning with
A. You should practice more reading and listening before practicing speaking.
B. You should not practice reading but more speaking.
C. You should practice speaking at all because you need reading and listening
D. Grammar practice is more important than others.

4. Mistakes are not harmless. Every time you make mistake and not revise it immediately, the mistake will be your habit.
The statement above means.
A. Mistake is not dangerous for your learning B. Your mistake can not be your habit
C. Mistake is dangerous for your learning
D. Making mistakes for beginners is okay.
5.

The trick is to put input before output. What does this statement mean?
A. You dont need to know the vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation before speaking.
B. You can directly practice speaking without learning the vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
C. Before speaking you should learn some words, how to put them in sentences, and how to say them correctly and
comprehensibly.
D. None of them

6.

Your English is distinguishable from a native, but it has a clear and pleasant pronunciation.
The synonym of the underlined words is
A. different from

7.

B. similar to C. the same with

D. worse than

You can improve your pronunciation by reading phonetic transcriptions in dictionaries.

The underlined words mean how to.a word correctly.
A. write

8.

B. say

C. use

D. understand

If you didnt learn English as a child, you will never be fully .. in this language.
A. pronunciation B. pronoun C, profit

D. proficient

Part D. What you have done so far to improve your English?

1
2.
3