I’ve got a quick question for you today…
If someone said to you, “Can you help me find my thing?”, what would you do?
I’m guessing you would say, “What does it look like?” or “What is it?“… You probably wouldn’t start looking for the ‘thing’ if you didn’t know what the ‘thing’ was.
Well, a few weeks ago, my fiancé asked me, “Have you seen my earrings?”
We were getting ready to go out for dinner, and she needed her earrings to complete her outfit. I ran upstairs to help her look (I was already ready to go out), and I noticed that she was wearing her earrings.
I was puzzled. Why is she looking for her earrings when she’s already wearing them?
When I pointed out this fact to her, she told me that the earrings she was wearing weren’t the earrings she wanted to wear.
Well, that’s when our mission impossible began. We had five minutes to find the earrings and leave the house, so my questions were:
– What do your earrings look like?
– When did you last wear them?
– Where did you last see them?
And four minutes later, I asked, “Are you sure you need to wear those particular earrings?”
We left the house on time, but without the earrings that she wanted to wear.
Now that I think about it, there were two reasons why we couldn’t find the earrings:
- I didn’t have a real idea of what I was looking for.
- We didn’t know where to look.
And this made me ask the question:
If you don’t know what you’re looking for
and where to look, how can you find it?
This is the challenge with ‘discovering English’ – learning English by chance. If you’re trying to discover English through context (which you should be doing, btw) and you haven’t thought about what you’re looking for or where to find it, then you’re just making it harder to learn.
And if you’re making this mistake… then you are not alone. This is something that a lot of people do without meaning to.
In fact, believe it or not, it’s mostly higher-level English learners who have trouble with discovering English…
They don’t know what to look for. They don’t know what to improve. And they don’t know where to look…
So what can you do?
On Sunday, I’ll go into more detail about discovering English, and how you can do it the right way.
Until then, if you’re interested in my new English learning project that I’m working on, you can learn more and get notifications here:
[thrive_leads id=’2394′]
Just a warning: This project is only for higher-level English learners.
If you’ve been learning English for less than two years, then it might be a bit too advanced for you.
But, if you’ve been learning English for a while… Check it out.
Sam
