Speak better than me

Rafaella is a student of ours that always amazes us by her (almost) perfect English. Her abillities to form phrases, use incredible vocabulary and her accent makes her stand-out anywhere she goes. Michael loves to teach her and her sister Juliana and their lessons are always pleasant. We have a lot of students with these characteristics – but they have a particularity.

Rafa is just 16 years old. Her sister Juliana is 13! And their English sounds so perfect that they can impress even native speakers. The accent is a game-changer. They could be easily mistaken as Americans. And this made me think: why, at such a young age, are they better English speakers than most Brazilians we know?

We all know somebody who is not a native speaker that can speak English really well. I know this because, as a Brazilian, we are easily impressed by this kind of ability – it’s beautiful to watch a Brazilian speaking other languages in a very nice, fluid way. We appreciate every effort! We are inspired by it. If they can do it – so can we.

Right? Wrong! Brazilians, and pretty much all students, are not 100% happy with their English “level”. It’s very common to receive a students’ form that shows they selected they are in the Beginners level when they can actually speak very well. We have this tendency of putting ourselves down because we “don’t sound like that guy from that movie”.

So are Rafa and Ju some kind of a prodigies? Well, they probably are, but for many other reasons. One thing we can observe is that their accent is no accident – they consume lots of material as in movies, series, music and culture in English. They make themselves surrounded by English – they listen to it all the time, they read it, they basically breathe it.

And as they are listening to English all the time, they are able to reproduce what they hear. That’s why their accent is so good – they can bring what they listen to to their repertoire. But this is not the only reason. They are also not afraid! They are confident enough to speak the way they want because they are not stopping themselves because of what other people may think.

I know we’ve all been there - the paralyzing fear of being judged by others when speaking English. It’s not an easy task – it requires a lot of confidence to understand it’s okay to make mistakes in front of others. We are speaking a different language than our mother tongue and that’s a huge thing already! And we may not even make as many mistakes as we think...

Improving vocabulary is one of our most requested things. People usually relate lack of vocabulary with not speaking the way they want to. Obviously it’s very important to improve vocabulary – the more the merrier, always. But is the lack of vocabulary really the main problem? For some, probably. But not for everybody!

For example: sometimes during a class, I receive a few “how can I say (insert a word here) in English?” And when I tell them, they are all like “ohhh yes, right, I remember it!!”. See? The probability of you already knowing the word you want to say or at least a way to say what you mean is huge. We are in touch with English all the time even when we are not paying attention. And sometimes we want to impress, use hard words even in our motherlanguage and we make things so much more complicated than they really are.

Confidence, on the other hand, can make things simpler. If we don’t mind others’ opinions and just try to speak, we will see things are way easier than we thought. Aligning confidence with good practices, improving vocabulary and exposure to English (especially listening) can take you so far you will actually be happy with your nimbleness (yes, I chose that word for you to Google it!).

Always study, practice whenever you can but make sure you feel comfortable with your progress. Confidence is the key to achieve all your goals, no matter how hard they are or how far they seem – if you believe it, you can do it!