Don't Rely on Grammar and Vocabulary Tips to Improve Your English

Recently I was looking through Facebook groups of English learners from many different countries.

I wanted to share my YouTube channel of English videos that are very easy for beginners to understand, no matter what language they speak.

I was amazed by the number of posts with pictures that gave tips about English grammar and lists of vocabulary.

Some learners seem to be obsessed with getting these bits of information about English!

Unfortunately, a lot of this information about English is incomplete, misleading, or just plain wrong.

What's more, even when the posts are good quality, they’re not really going to help learners improve their English very much.

Fortunately, there's a much better way that learners can improve their English!

But first, let’s look at what’s wrong with many of these English tips.

1. Many English tips are incomplete

One kind of post that I see often in some groups is about turning English phrases that are in active voice into passive voice.

For example, the sentence “He wrote the book” is in active voice.

Changed into passive voice, that sentence would become: “The book was written by him”.

English speakers will sometimes use the passive voice in phrases like that one.

However, there are many posts like this one:

Change “I am going to school” into passive voice.

The “right” answer is: “School is being gone to by me.”

Now, technically, that sentence is grammatically correct.

But, no native English speaker would probably ever use it in speaking or writing.

It just doesn't make any sense to use passive voice in that case, for many reasons.

For one thing, using passive voice is rare when talking about one's own actions — what “I” am doing or did.

An exception might be if someone wants to hide or downplay the fact that they did something — for example, saying “mistakes were made [by me]” instead of “I made mistakes”.

Another reason is that passive voice is often used when something is made, changed, or affected (“the house was built”, “the cake was eaten”, or “the man was bitten”), but when someone is going to school, nothing is really being done to the school.

The other problem with quizzes like that one is when fluent English speakers use active or passive voice, they are rarely thinking about changing one form into the other.

They are mainly thinking of the meaning that they want to communicate.

This meaning, along with their experience with English, determines what voice they will use.

Often it’s best to use active voice, but sometimes, passive voice is appropriate and useful.

For example, if someone asks me how old the CN Tower in Toronto is, it would make sense for me to answer “it was completed in 1976” because the question is about when it was built or completed, not about the people or companies that built it.

While many lists or quizzes teach how to construct a certain grammatical form, they often leave out when or why the form is used.

Often, the rules are far too complex to explain.

It’s far better to learn them by getting a lot of experience with English!

2. Many English tips are misleading

Another common tip that I see is various charts telling people to stop using the word “very” with English adjectives.

For each “very” with an adjective, they give a word that one should use instead.

For example:

? very tired ? exhausted

? very loud ? thunderous

? very happy ? ecstatic

The problem is that each of these suggested words have certain meanings.

They can replace “very + adjective”, but only in the right contexts and situations.

For example, “exhausted” usually means that someone is not only very tired, but so tired that they have no energy left at all.

So it's possible to be very tired but not yet exhausted.

“Thunderous” means very loud, but it suggests a deep, low sound, like thunder in a thunderstorm.

Even though a siren on a fire truck might be very loud, because it's so high-pitched, it wouldn't sound right to describe it as “thunderous”.

“Ecstatic” can mean very happy, but it suggests a very intense, excited emotion.

Someone could be very happy, but in a calm and peaceful way.

In all these cases, just replacing “very + adjective” with the other word without understanding the precise meaning can lead to incorrect usage.

While it's good to expand one's vocabulary and have more ways to describe and express things in English, it's more important to use words correctly.

Learning new words and how to use them correctly comes from hearing and reading English a lot in ways that you can understand the meanings of the words.

And often, it’s OK to just use “very”!

3. Many English tips are just plain wrong!

I recently saw a picture that taught the phrasal verb “realize out”, using this phrase as an example:

“I realized out that I like to teach.”

I’m a native speaker of English and I've never read or heard anyone say “realized out”.

I asked other English teachers who are also native speakers, and they hadn't either.

Instead of “realized out”, I would just say “I realized that I liked to teach”, without the “out”.

I thought maybe this term was from another variety of English.

So I used Google to search for “realize out that” and “realize that”.

I found around 50,000 (fifty thousand) results for “realize out that” and over 100,000,000 (one hundred million) results for “realize that”.

That's over two thousand times as many results for “realize that”.

That suggests when “realize out” is used, it’s an error, not a phrase that English speakers commonly use anywhere.

Unfortunately, with so much free English content online, there’s a lot of incorrect information like this going around.

A better way to improve your English

What should you do then if you want information about English grammar and vocabulary?

It’s best to use sources that you know are accurate and reliable.

Some examples are books or sites that are verified and trusted, and highly fluent or native speakers of English who are also skilled at teaching English.

However, even the best explanations of English can only help you so much.

For one thing, nobody knows all the rules of grammar and usage in English or other languages — not even the best linguists.

People used languages for many, many years before they even began to discover and explain the rules they followed.

Today, we're still discovering rules that speakers of English and other languages always obey, even thought they never knew they obeyed them!

We don't learn to use languages fluently by studying grammar rules or lists of vocabulary, but by getting lots of comprehensible input.

Comprehensible input means listening to and reading a lot of language that you can understand.

With a lot of good comprehensible input:

• You will naturally learn how to use the passive voice and when to use it.
• You will naturally pick up more words that you can use to express yourself more precisely and eloquently.
• You will naturally pick up correct English phrasal verbs and other structures.

As I wrote at the start of this article, I create videos to give English beginners lots of comprehensible input so they can start to learn English, even if they don't know any English at all yet.

I do this by using drawings and other visuals all the time to make it easy to understand the meaning of everything I’m saying in English.

I also help professionals with more advanced English to get more comprehensible input so they can gain fluency and confidence with speaking English and continue to improve their English.

For example:

• I create special stories that they can listen to and pick up English phrasal verbs and idioms.
• I help them with English pronunciation so they can speak and understand spoken English more clearly and acquire English vocabulary more efficiently.
• I help them create habits and strategies so they can continue getting more comprehensible input in English so that they can keep improving.

If you are interested in working with me to improve your English and make the most of your English, send me a message here on LinkedIn!