In this perfect world of mine, the system of learning skills might be like in the film, The Matrix, where knowledge is uploaded straight into our brains. In one of my favourite sequences from the film, Neo (Keanu Reeves) has just been undergoing ‘training’. This involves being strapped into a chair, having a cable stuck in the back of his head, and then an operator uploads skills directly into Neo’s brain. After learning Kung Fu in less than a minute, Neo tries out his new found fighting style on Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne). Check it out here.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in my perfect world. Learning most things takes a lot of time and effort. Achieving true mastery of anything is extremely rare, and may take a lifetime. If originality of ideas led to directly to publication or production, I’d by now have a creative C.V. as long as a giraffe’s neck. Instead I have to keep working slowly at my work.

Most pieces I write take quite a long time to go the original idea I had to what you read. I have to think about the best way to construct every sentence – which words to use, what grammatical structure is the most effective. And then there’s the complication of the flow of sentences and ideas in both paragraphs and across the piece as a whole. What you’re reading now is quite different from the first draft I wrote. If I didn’t take care with what I wrote and how I wrote it, people would get bored, stop reading and go and look at something else. That’s definitely not what I want.

A part of my work that I really enjoy is when someone gives me a piece of their writing and asks my opinion on how to make it better. I give this advice freely, but it disappoints me a little when they haven’t even read it themselves before I get it. Just handing over a first draft is not a particularly effective way for anyone to improve their writing skills. Some self-editing will always reveal mistakes or better ways to write something. When I give someone a piece of my writing to look at, and they point out basic mistakes that I should have picked up myself, I feel embarrassed. I want their opinion on the things that I couldn’t have thought of.

Admittedly, self-editing takes a lot more time, and at the end of the day it still might not be perfect. But at least I will have produced something which I’m not totally embarrassed to read again. And along the way, by looking at the way I write, I’ve learned something about my own writing skill. Then hopefully the next time I write something, both the first draft and the final product will be of better quality and quicker to produce.

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SYDNEY BUTTS OUT, BUT BUTTS GET BIGGER

Or something like that – I was pretty tired after a long day at work. I had to look at it a few times to work out what the headline meant, so I felt a bit sorry for the guy who asked me, because he’d had no chance of working it out by himself.

The confusion is obviously the use of butt, which is actually quite a common and useful word to know. The problem is that it has quite a few uses (not limited to these):

1. Cigarette Butt: The end of a cigarette, generally the filter, which some stupid people still throw on the ground.
2. Butt: Another word for bottom, rear, rectum, bum, derrière, etc. Famously used by Sir Mix-A-Lot in the song Baby Got Back.
3. to butt heads with someone: when you’re having a disagreement with someone. For example, if I was talking to someone who believed that it was a good idea to execute criminals who commit certain crimes, I could say that ‘We butted heads on the issue of capital punishment.’
4. to butt out: when you tell someone to butt out, you’re basically telling them to mind their own business. If I was having an argument with my girl friend, for example, and my mum started taking my girl friend’s side in the argument, I would probably tell my mum to ‘butt out and let us handle it’.

So which ones of these was the headline using? At first glance I thought they were using (4) and (2), but really it was (1) and (2). As far as I could tell, the story was basically saying that the amount of smokers in Sydney had gone done (they had put their cigarette BUTTS OUT for the last time) but that people had gotten fatter (their BUTTS were BIGGER).

Newspaper headlines can be cryptic like this sometimes, especially for a non-native speaker. Personally, the style annoys me a little, especially when the person writing the headline is trying to be funny, witty, or make a pun (a play on words). My main problem is that often, in an attempt to be clever, the writer makes a headline which doesn’t really reflect what the article is about.

I don’t know if this was the case with the mX article, because I didn’t bother reading the whole thing after I’d translated the heading for my fellow passenger.

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Sometimes it can be entertaining. Spelling mistakes can always be a source of humour. For example if someone writes goblinisation instead of globalisation that always makes me chuckle. Once someone wrote In China, from ancient until now, many Chinese have been influenced by Confusion ideas and I smiled for days.

Probably the most common spelling mistake I come across is people writing quite instead of quiet, or vice versa. It’s a very understandable mistake – all it involves is switching the last two letters of the word around. But as far as spelling errors go, it’s actually quite annoying.

The main problem is that they are totally different words used in completely different ways. So when one is used instead of the other, the affect on how we read the sentence is quiet significant. As you can see from that example, the sentence now makes no sense whatsoever. When I’m reading an essay, this in not a good sign.

Of course, quiet is an adjective and is the opposite of loud. That’s pretty much all it means. Quite is another story entirely. It’s an adverb, is extremely common, and is used to grade adjectives. There can be variations in the meaning, depending on the context.

In formal British English, it can mean completely:

That opera was quite amazing = That opera was completely amazing.

In the negative quite is commonly used to mean not exactly:

That’s not quite what I meant = That’s not exactly what I meant.

The word is can also be used to imply that something is good, but it’s not the best, or it could be better:

That hamburger was quite nice = I liked the hamburger but it wasn’t the best one I’ve ever had.

This is probably the most common use of quite. Australians, particularly, use quite as part of their idiom when praising something or giving someone a compliment. In Australian English, quite can be used as a synonym for very. If I went and picked up my girlfriend on Friday night and she was wearing a new dress, I might say:

That’s quite a nice dress, is it new?

Why do Australians do this? My theory is that we know it’s important to give people praise people, but we don’t want people’s egos to get too big when we give them compliments. But please don’t tell my girlfriend that, though, or I’ll get in quite a lot of trouble the next time I say it.

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You can watch twenty-five films in less than half an hour and vote for your favourite one. A good break from study, or work, or whatever else you’re supposed to be doing right now.

My favourite is the Romanian film, How Do You Do.

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Personally, I’m a big fan of phrasal verbs. Not only are they extremely common and useful, they’re also relatively easy to learn. There are thousands of them though, so you won’t be able to learn them all at once – sorry.

Basically, phrasal verbs are verbs that combine with adverbs or prepositions. Here’s a sentence with two phrasal verbs in it:

The monkey picked up the banana and put it in his mouth.

Different phrasal verbs have different rules. Some of them are flexible (like someone who has been doing yoga for a long time) and others are very inflexible (like me – I can’t touch my toes!).

The first phrasal verb in our example, picked up, is flexible. We can change the position of the banana (the object) and keep the same meaning:

The monkey picked the banana up and put it in his mouth.

But the second phrasal verb is very inflexible. The word it must stay exactly where it is. We can’t say:

The monkey picked the banana up and put in it his mouth.

Now the sentence says that the monkey put his mouth inside the banana. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

Another interesting thing about phrasal verbs is that they not only extend the meaning of the verb, like in our monkey example, they can also change the verb’s meaning! For example, when I was growing up my mother used to say to me:

“Don’t forget to pick up your little brother after school.”

She said that to me every single day. I don’t know why – maybe she thought I had a bad memory. But I didn’t pick up my little brother in the same way the monkey picked up the banana, did I? I could have, but my little brother was fat from eating too many Mars Bars and he was too heavy for me to actually pick up.

If you’re interested in exploring phrasal verbs more, you could get a phrasal verbs dictionary, or check out websites like this one which specialise in phrasal verbs. If there’s a phrasal verb you’re having trouble with, leave a comment or email me and I’ll do my best to explain it.

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For these learners, generally, their accuracy is high, but their fluency is low.

The other type of language learner doesn’t really care about making mistakes or errors. They have an idea in their head of what they want to communicate, and they say it with whatever words and language feel the most natural. They make frequent mistakes, sometimes in every sentence! Their grammar can be a mixture of English and their native language. They either don’t know or don’t care if they are making errors or mistakes.

These learners have high fluency, but low accuracy.

So which one is more important – fluency or accuracy? Because I’m a Libran, and I like balance, I’m going to say that both fluency and accuracy are equally important. At the end of the day, it depends on what your goal is for learning English.

Language, essentially, is used for communication. So you have to ask yourself – what do I want to be able to communicate? How well do I need to speak English?

For example, if you are working in a restaurant or a retail shop, the level of English you need is quite basic. You need to known certain words or phrases related to your job – the items you are selling, how much they cost, and certain social phrases like how’s it going, thank you and see you later.

This is all you need to communicate with your customers. It’s not important to communicate accurately – the customer will understand both what you want？ and what do you want？ equally well. But it’s very important to communicate the information quickly. Time is money, as they say. In this situation, fluency is the key.

On the other hand, if you are studying at university, or perhaps working in an office environment, accuracy becomes very important. This is especially true when you are trying to communicate complicated thoughts or ideas. In these situations, speaking quickly, but with lots of errors, becomes very confusing for the listener. This is because the errors and mistakes distort, or change, the meaning of what you are trying to say. So you need to pay more attention to what you are saying.

So what should you focus on, fluency or accuracy?

The answer depends on what kind of learner you are. If you focus too much on accuracy, and therefore speak very slowly, you need to improve your fluency. Speaking too slowly is bad for maintaining a conversation. After a few seconds of silence, the person you are talking to starts thinking about something else. Communication is failing, you need to speak faster. Don’t worry about making errors or mistakes – most are not serious, and don’t affect communication.

But if you focus too much on fluency, you need to ask yourself if you are achieving your goals in communication. Are your mistakes and errors causing problems for the people who listen to you? If the answer is yes, you need to slow down and pay more attention to what you say. Speaking really fast, with lots of errors, is very problematic for the people who are listening to you.

And if you are somewhere in the middle? Now you have to take a balanced approach. When you are in the safe environment of a classroom, with the support of teachers and fellow-learners, you should focus on accuracy, because these people can help correct your mistakes and errors. But when you are outside the classroom – when you are at work, or socialising with friends – concentrate on communicating as fluently as possible.

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The error is commonly heard in situations like this:

Q: Do you like everyone?
A: No, I like almost people. …or…

Almost Australians love barbecues. …or…

Almost people use mobile phones every day.

The word almost means very nearly, or very close to. So you can see that it is an error to say I like very nearly people. That doesn’t make any sense at all!

The correct way to say these things is to say:

I like almost ALL people
Almost ALL Australians love barbecues.
Almost ALL people use mobile phones every day.

If you want to use this phrase as a negative, we replace ALL with NO. For example:

Almost NO Australians love barbecues.

It’s not an error anymore, but it’s still wrong, isn’t it?!

You can also say almost ALWAYS or almost NEVER, in sentences like:

Australia almost ALWAYS beat England in the cricket.
My cat almost NEVER does what I want him to!

The reason this is one of my favourite errors is because of the picture that almost people creates in my mind. What are almost people? How can you almost be a person? You either are a person, or you’re not, right? Is an almost person a body without a head on it? How do almost people without heads use their mobile phones?

What about almost Australians? Does that mean people who are trying to become Australian residents? They have studied in Australia, and got a good score in the IELTS test, and now they’re just waiting

I almost smile when someone says almost people… whoops! I mean almost ALWAYS smile!

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They are wrong.

Yes, an IELTS class is more serious, but it is extremely important to remember that it is an exam class. The purpose is to introduce students to the IELTS test, and give them strategies, hints and tips to improve their test score. An IELTS class is not designed to improve a students’ English.

So why do students who aren’t doing the IELTS test want to study in an IELTS class? Sometimes, the style of teaching in Australia is difficult for students to adjust to. This is especially true if the student comes from a country, like Japan, Korea or China, where learning English is a very formal experience.

The General English classroom in Australia and other English speaking countries focuses on communication. There is a lot of emphasis on improving listening and speaking skills. There is less focus on accuracy and more on fluency. There is more focus on fun, and enjoying language, than there is on doing millions of useless grammar exercises and getting each one 100% correct.

Some students don’t like this because they aren’t used to it. They’re used to gruff teachers who crack the whip and tell them to work harder, not teachers who smile and say to relax.

So when students like this want to go to the IELTS class where they can ‘work hard’, I understand why they want to do it. But I still always recommend that they try General English for a little longer, because at the end of the day it will be better for improving their English ability. If a student is really interested in improving their reading and writing, my advice is to study an Academic English course.

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G’day Chris, how’s it going?

Which actually sounds more like:

Gidday Chris, owzitgoen?

How’s it going? is one of those sayings which is really important in starting conversations, like ca va in France, alright in England or genki in Japan. The it in the middle probably refers to life; there’s another Australian greeting which goes How’s life treating you? (Howz life treatin’ ya?) which basically means the same thing.

It’s similar to when people ask how are you?. When someone says how’s it going?, they don’t want to hear your life story, they might not even care how you are. The saying is automatic, like a reflex or a ritual, and the reply should be the same. There are many different ways to answer, and most Australians will have their personal preference. Some of the most standard replies are:

Not bad
Alright
Pretty good
Can’t complain
Good

And each of these might have mate or yeah attached to either the beginning or the end. So the beginning of my conversation with Chris might sound like this:

Me: G’day Chris, how’s it going?
Chris: Yeah, not bad, mate.

And now that Chris and I have completed the conversation ritual, we’re ready to actually start talking to each other. Chris lives in Perth at the moment, so we usually have a lot of catching up to do.

But sometimes Chris might be feeling really good, or really bad. In these situations he might want to break the ritual and tell me person exactly how he feels, and why. The purpose of his call might be to tell me about how he feels. This is where the word actually is very useful:

Me: G’day Chris, how’s it going?
Chris: Actually… not so good.
Me: Really? What’s up? (What’s wrong?)

Or:

Chris: Actually… pretty good.
Me: Oh yeah? How come? (Why?)

For English learners in Australia, understanding how the locals talk can be one of the most difficult things. The best advice is to try using Australian slang yourself. So get down to the pub, buy a VB, and try out your best Australian accent!

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Learning English - boring, right?

There are a lot of students from many different countries studying English in Australia. If you walk down George Street in Sydney, you will see people from all over the world, and lots of them will be students who are studying at a language school. In my experience some of these students are Learning English, and the others are Living English.

What do I mean by this?

Well, some students are in Australia, and they are studying English at a language school, which is good, but in my opinion they aren’t making the most of their opportunities. They live and socialise completely with people from their own country. They stay in the city, they rarely go anywhere that is far from their house. Outside of class times, they speak their native language as much as they can. The only native speaker they will ever meet is their teacher. This is Learning English.

But why did this student come to Australia? They could have saved a lot of money by staying home and studying English there.

Living English - that's what it's about!

For other students, living overseas is an opportunity. For them, Australia and its people are the classroom, and the building with the students and teacher are simply a support and a visa requirement. These students live in a homestay, or in a place with people from mixed nationalities. They travel to different parts of Australia, they make friends with people from all over the world. This is Living English.

Which person do you think has a better experience? Which person’s English improves more? Are you learning or living English?

Living English definitely isn’t easy. It’s the hard path. But the things that are most valuable in life are those that we work hardest for. If you would like to live English a little more, I don’t recommend cutting off completely from your native language and friends. That would be crazy! But maybe try and find some ways to make the most of your time in Australia. Being away from home will then truly be the experience of a lifetime.

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