Learning a Language

Story · all 20 words

The Year I Stopped Translating

I started English properly at twenty-six, which everybody told me was too late. I was a complete beginner in the real sense: I knew perhaps two hundred words and could not hear where one of them ended and the next one began.

For the first year I did what most people do. I bought a thick book of grammar and worked through it carefully, and I tried to memorise lists of thirty words a week. I passed the tests in the book. I could not order a coffee.

What I was actually doing, every time I opened my mouth, was building the sentence in Arabic and then trying to translate it. It works, slowly, for about six words. Then somebody replies at normal speed and the whole system falls over.

The year everything changed was the year I stopped studying English and started using it badly. I found three people online who wanted to practise too, and we spoke for forty minutes every Tuesday. We were all roughly intermediate, none of us was a native speaker, and every single one of us was frightened for the first month.

That turned out not to matter at all. What mattered was quantity. I made an enormous number of mistakes and slowly stopped minding: at some point you understand that a mistake which is understood has done its job. I asked them to correct me only when the meaning was wrong, not every time, because being corrected every eleven seconds makes you silent.

My vocabulary grew fastest through reading, and only when I stopped trying to look up everything. I forced myself to guess from the sentence around the word and continue, and to check only the words that appeared three or four times. This felt lazy and was the most useful thing I ever did.

Listening took longest. For months I understood films and understood nothing at a bus stop. You have to get used to real speed, and real speed does not care about you. It came suddenly, the way these things do – one evening in a shop I realised I had understood a conversation I was not part of, and I stood there like somebody who had won something.

My pronunciation began to improve on the day I stopped being embarrassed about my accent. I had assumed the goal was to sound British. It is not, and it never was. The goal is to be understood easily, and I am.

I still keep a dictionary app on my phone and I still pick up a few new words a week without trying, mostly from things people say to me at work. My level is not what I want it to be. It never will be, and I have made peace with that.

Am I fluent? A colleague asked me that last month and I said no, automatically, the way I always do. Then I thought about it and realised that we had been having that entire conversation in English, at speed, about something complicated, and that it had not once occurred to me to notice. I think that is what people mean when they say the word. It does not feel like arriving. It feels like forgetting to check whether you have arrived.