Let’s do a little exercise for a moment. A bit of ‘mindfulness’ before we get into the meat of the post.

Take a deep breath.

Relax your body and your mind.

Imagine a flowing river in a valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Wild flowers growing on the banks of the river, and little rabbits hopping through lush, green grass.

Now think of the following words: conditionals in English.

How did your body and mind react when you thought of those words?

Nervous tic around the eye? An uncontrollable twitch in your neck? Tense stomach? Negative thoughts and emotions boiling up inside?

Don’t worry! These are all perfectly normal responses to these seemingly innocent but powerful words.

Nothing creates such a strong physical and emotional reaction in English learners as the word “conditionals”. Well, come to think of it, “phrasal verbs” is probably up there too…

Think of how many classes you’ve had in English on conditionals. Ten…twenty…thirty? But you still can’t use them correctly.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

No wonder you’re twitching and sweating when you think of those words.

Think about that for a moment: ten, twenty, thirty classes on conditionals, and most learners still can’t use them. We can interpret this in two ways: either English learners all have a common flaw, or we’re teaching them in the wrong way.

I think it was Einstein who once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result each time.”

Standard teaching methodology is insane.

They do it once, it doesn’t work. They do it again, still doesn’t work. Surely the logical thing would be to take a moment here to reconsider the tactics. But no, they do it another twenty times, hoping the result will be different.

The only result they get are traumatised adults that can’t use conditionals correctly in a conversation. Well done!

Their intentions aren’t bad. They really want you to improve your use of conditionals. The only way they know how, though, is with these silly little gap-fill exercises, or match the two sentence halves, or…”yawn”.

As a learner, you need to be very selective about ‘how’ you practise because, in essence, you get good at how you practice, and not what you practise.

If you practise conditionals with gap-fill exercises, you get really good at gap-fill exercises, but not at conditionals.

So what happens is that students get good at writing them, at putting the verb in the correct form into the little gap, and may even feel that they know how to use them. But then in a conversation will use them incorrectly.

When do you need to use conditionals? When you’re speaking in English.

When do you make mistakes with conditionals? When you’re speaking in English.

So how do you need to practise conditionals? Saying them aloud.

I figured this out while learning Spanish. After a whole year of using conditionals incorrectly in Spanish, I saw a conditional written correctly in a book. This was when I realised I’d been using them incorrectly, and knew that I just had to learn to use them well.

So I did the following, which you can do to practise conditionals in English.

I’m not going to go through the rules, explanations, and all the rest as I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times already. I’m going to show you how to practise them.

Conditionals follow a fixed grammatical structure:

1st conditional: if + present, future

2nd conditional: if + past simple, would + infinitive without to

3rd conditional: if + past perfect, would + present perfect

Write these structures down on a piece of paper.

Now sit on a chair in a comfortable place, and brace yourself for an hour of fun.

Say fifty 1st conditionals. Yes, fifty. Say them aloud, and check that what you’ve said coincides with the written structure. You don’t need a teacher to correct you here; you can correct yourself if you have the structure written down.

After twenty, you’ll feel a bit more confident, and won’t need to check the structure. After thirty, you’ll get faster. And after forty, the words will flow off your tongue.

Now say fifty 2nd conditionals.

“What? Again?!”

Oh yes. No pain, no gain.

Don’t worry. You’ll be a machine by the end of the hour.

After fifty 2nd conditionals, say fifty 3rd conditionals aloud. It doesn’t matter what you choose to say in the conditionals that you create. You can make them as crazy as you like. The important thing is the grammar.

In total, it should take around an hour.

Is it a pleasant hour? No, not really. It’s certainly not your first choice for a Saturday evening. But the great thing is that at the end of the hour you’ll be completely cured of your mistakes, and you’ll be able to throw conditionals at people till the cows come home!

You’ll be dealing out conditionals like a croupier in a casino.

And you’ll feel great!

You can of course choose not to do this activity. You can choose to spend probably the rest of your life having conditional classes in English.

Or one hour of hardcore practice.

You choose.

Imagine someone gives you two choices: thirty slaps in the face now, or one surprise slap in the face everyday for a month.

Which would you choose?

I’d take the thirty slaps now. It’s not pretty, but it’s over in a few minutes, and I never have to worry about being slapped in the face again.

Seriously. If you do this exercise, you’ll never make a mistake again with conditionals.

Now go find one hour in the next week to do this exercise, and become an awesome conditional machine!

Slap in the face anyone…?[thrive_leads id=’1049′]