Tập Viết

English has three fundamental pillars: vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.

If you have the time and the willingness to relearn English from these three foundational elements, it will be easier, faster, and more proficient for you to use English for any purpose in the future.

Learning these basics is like building physical fitness through activities like running, weightlifting, eating a balanced diet, and getting enough sleep: it takes a lot of time, requires daily consistency over a long period, gradually increases in difficulty, can be boring and easy to give up, and doesn’t serve a specific immediate purpose.

However, once you have a solid foundation of physical fitness, it becomes easier, faster, and more effective to learn any sport than for someone who doesn’t have a good physical condition.

These three foundations of English are endless; the more you learn, the deeper it gets, and you’ll never know when you’ve learned enough. Advanced grammar is closely related to linguistics, pragmatics, history, and the cultures of English-speaking countries, including contemporary culture. Vocabulary is connected to etymology, and with the continuous development of new knowledge and social phenomena, vocabulary is always being updated, making it impossible to learn it all. Pronunciation also evolves; once you can speak clearly, good pronunciation enhances communication, public speaking, acting, hosting, singing, and dubbing—skills far beyond what a native speaker needs for everyday life.

It’s a pity that when we were young and had plenty of time to study, many of us didn’t focus on building these three foundations. As adults, when we value learning, we often don’t have the time and want to quickly achieve proficiency in areas like conversational English, English for exams like TOEIC, IELTS, TOEFL, or English for the workplace. Learning this way, by building the advanced skills while patching up the basics, leads to confusion, difficulty, fatigue, and discouragement.

If you find that your basics are weak, you should relearn them properly. Don’t be afraid to revisit the fundamentals that children are learning, and don’t worry if your peers are learning more advanced things. You’re learning for yourself, not to compete with anyone else.

Đà Nẵng, Sunday, June 23, 2024

Nguyễn Tiến Đạt (sutucon)