Four learners and one teacher on overcoming forgotten words and mid-sentence freezes.
People rarely fail at English because they are incapable of learning or lack intelligence. More often, they fail because they approach language like a school subject to be mastered rather than a lifestyle to be absorbed.
LeverX English teacher, Olga Mozhugova, together with our colleagues, challenges several familiar beliefs about how we learn.
Usually, the learner’s bottleneck is a mismatch between what they think learning should feel like and how learning actually works.
Many people treat English the way engineers treat a broken system. They want to identify the flaw, find the right mechanism, and install the fix. If they just find the perfect app, the perfect teacher, or the perfect prompt, English will finally click.
It feels rational. It also slows them down.
Olga Mozhugova sees that people overanalyze the process. As a corporate English teacher, she explains that many learners try to “fit a new language into the logic of their native one.” They want the system to make sense before they start using it.
But language does not work that way.
The problem becomes obvious the moment language leaves the classroom. Aliaksandra Vinavarava, a recruiter working across global markets, remembers when that gap became real.
Read the full article in the magazine, available soon online and at several LeverX offices.