Hello everyone and welcome back to the Easy English Podcast.
And today we are doing something a little bit different.
We have an interview, the first interview on the show.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to interview a non-native English speaker, my wife.
You may have heard me talk about her in some other episodes of the podcast, but I thought it would be interesting to hear the perspectives and language learning journey of someone else who I think speaks English very well but is a non-native speaker.
So this is Kate.
Hi, kid.
Hello.
So how this is going to go is I am going to ask her a number of questions about language learning, her language learning journey and different stages and things that she has learnt, and then, on the patreon, there will be an extended version of this interview with some more interesting questions, like how we met and some other information as well.
So let's get started.
So can you introduce yourself to the listeners?
So where you're from and a little bit about you.
So i'm kate, as you all well known, and i'm from russia, And now I've been living in the UK for two and a half years, isn't it?
Yeah, about two and a half.
Yes.
So I'm working in a big international company and I am only 25.
That's great.
So when did you start learning English?
I think firstly, I wasn't introduced to English at school.
I was about six, seven years old when I started learning English.
And it didn't go quite well, to be fair.
And what was English like in school?
So how did they teach it?
And did you enjoy it?
So when I was just a child, I didn't understand why we should learn English.
What is the purpose of that?
So I would just go to the school and learn things that I didn't understand and maybe even didn't learn.
We would just have, you know, like textbooks and audios and sing songs sometimes, like i still remember some of them, to be fair, and it was boring because i didn't have the purpose, why i'm doing that and when i will be able to use it as well.
As our teachers weren't really quote what english i would say and they didn't try to interact a lot with us, didn't try to tell us why we need english, and this was a big problem.
I think yeah, lots of learners say um, even sometimes on comments, that they don't like how they learned english in school or in the past.
So yeah, it's a good point, and do you think that you could speak english confidently after school?
I think after school I knew a lot of grammar.
I knew how to read, but I also knew that I weren't able to communicate with people because even though we had really a lot of hours per week of English, but we didn't practice speaking.
So when I left school, when I went to university, I couldn't really speak and I wasn't brave enough to do so.
Yeah, yeah, I know that makes complete sense.
And what would you say when you started English, so maybe in school or with your own self-study, what were the biggest difficulties, the things that you found the hardest when you were learning English at the start? at the beginning so it's interesting question because probably the hardest part was to understand why english has 12 tenses not three like normal people do like normal languages do and then to understand when you need to use future in the past present continuous or past perfect so this was quite complicated for non-native speaker to understand what is this all about and to do grammar exercises was quite difficult as well yeah yeah grammar is hard even for me when i'm teaching english it's i don't fully understand english grammar um so what what made you then decide to continue learning english like after school so what did uh what did you do and why did you continue learning it So when I went to university, I thought, oh, it's a great opportunity.
I will definitely learn English at uni.
Spoiler, it didn't happen that.
When COVID hit, I had some money saved and I thought okay, I will invest this money in learning English.
So I joined an online school Ukrainian online school and Their main point was teaching you how to speak.
We had grammar exercises, but mainly it was all around speaking.
And when teachers force you to speak and you actually realize from the first lesson that you can't speak.
But it's just another language and you have enough grammar, you know enough force to communicate.
You just need to practice more and more and more to become more fluent in English and any other languages as well.
Yeah.
So you find that by trying to speak and actually practicing more speaking, it really helped to improve.
Yes, it actually did.
And personally with me, every time after English lessons, I felt like hypo.
I felt like, oh, I'm so happy.
Like I had so many emotions and After having these lessons even before the lessons, I was so stressed, but after I had all these emotions inside of me that made me feel so happy and made me realize wow, I actually can speak another language and people can understand me.
So I can communicate with different people.
I can explore different cultures and they just made me feel very good.
Yeah, no, that's great.
You had a lot of energy and good positive emotions.
It helps with motivation and keeping learning.
Yes, exactly.
And did you study alone as well?
So while you were doing the course, what kind of practices did you have with maybe, your routine for learning English?
So i had a lot of textbooks at home.
I tried to do them, i tried to do all the tests but, to be fair, it wasn't successful.
Like i couldn't motivate myself enough to open the book, and like I could motivate myself to open a book but I couldn't motivate myself every day, open the book and spend like two hours studying English.
I could do it for like 20 minutes, 15 minutes.
But what my teacher told me back then, then doing something is better than doing nothing.
So, even if you have like five minutes and you can open the book and read something in English, this is better than not doing that.
So, which was quite motivating as well and probably was a good lesson for everything that i do now in my life.
Um, what helped as well is watching movies.
So uh, we had speaking clubs in my like school and our teacher would ask us to to watch a movie during the weekend and then we will discuss it next time, which was very interesting, because not only you speaking to the person and discussing it, but you also practicing your listening skills and learn some grammar as well as well.
As uh, What was this app called that we met?
Do you remember?
Tandem.
Yes, this Tandem app.
So I think that what helped me a lot as well is meeting and communicating to people through Tandem app, because you just see different people from different countries that speak English or native speakers and then you can connect to them and communicate with them.
So I think this also improved my English, because I was able not only to communicate to my teacher, but hear different accents and yeah, just practice more speaking.
Yeah, that's great.
Definitely, speaking with um other people and practicing with native speakers as well is a great way to improve your english.
Okay, What was the most difficult part of improving your English?
The most difficult part was moving to the UK and trying to understand different people, different accents, that you realise that English you hear on TV or at school at uni it's not real English.
So this was the most complicated part of my learning journey, I think, and I'm still learning a lot.
Yeah, accents can be really difficult for learners and even for native speakers.
I know I said this to you before, but when I was in Scotland and I was working lots of people's accents when they came into the pizza shop that I worked at, it's very hard to understand what they're saying, even for a native speaker.
So it must be very hard for non-native speakers too.
Exactly.
It's not easy.
Absolutely.
And with learning English.
So at any point in your English learning journey, did you ever feel like giving up?
And what kept you learning?
What kept you going?
Well, because...
I consider myself as a person who has been learning English for years, years and years.
Yes, I had this moment the first time when I was at school and I really liked English when I was in middle school.
Then in high school, I stopped learning English completely.
I thought I don't need it.
I don't need to do my exam, so I will not learn it.
I will do it in uni.
Then it didn't happen at uni because I was focused on different things and English wasn't my priority.
However, even during these times, as I said before, I had a lot of textbooks and I tried to do a little bit of something during the times, but it wasn't consistent.
So one month I could do something, another month I would do nothing.
So I didn't have really progress.
And because you don't see the progress, you're giving up.
And that and the part when I was already like when I when I started speaking English at this moment.
I didn't want to give up, like, I just wanted to continue to improve.
So when I finish all the courses at the school, I then ask teacher to give me like private lessons.
So we had private lessons afterwards and.
I try to communicate with native speakers through this Tandem app so I don't lose my skills during this time.
So I don't feel like when I already started speaking, I wanted to give up.
But when I couldn't, yes, I didn't want to do it because I didn't yeah yeah it makes sense i mean i relate with when you don't see progress it can be hard to continue to get the motivation to keep going and lots of people experience that with language learning for sure and i have it yeah problems with obviously oppression too sometimes it's when you feel like you're not progressing or that you're stuck on the the same level for a long time it's very hard to know when you don't see the little improvements as much yeah but every day is an improvement so yeah and um i guess we can go to i think i had a last few couple of questions so that one was uh what advice would you give to other people learning english so don't be like me and think that because you didn't learn it at school you will learn it at uni you will not just if you have an idea that you want to study like any languages just start do it today and do it just do it don't think you will do it later you will not this is like the biggest advice i would say about everything like learning in general just do it today Don't delay it.
You will not have more time.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, absolutely.
If you want to watch the full extended version of the interview, with some questions about how we met and some other additional English questions and discussion, it is on the Patreon.
You can find the link in the description below.
And if you join up and support the Patreon, you get bonus episodes every single week and some special things like these interviews as well.
So click the link in the description below and support Easy English to get access to that full extended interview.
Thank you very much for listening today and I hope you enjoyed this short little interview with a non-native speaker my wife in this case.
So if you would like more and if you enjoy this podcast, make sure that you're following and that you've rated the podcast five stars on whatever platform you're listening on.
Thank you very much for listening and I will see you in the next one.
Goodbye.
