There’s the old fable that talks of two friends, Bill and Ben, out camping in the wilderness. They have dinner by the campfire, then head to the tent to sleep for the night.

After a while, Bill wakes his friend up and asks, “Look up and tell me what you see”.

Ben answers, “Millions of stars”.

“And what does that tell you?”, asks Bill.

“Well, it tells me that the universe is huge beyond comprehension, and we are small and insignificant. It also tells me that, as it’s a clear sky, the weather will probably be good tomorrow. Why? What does it tell you?”

Bill pauses for a moment before replying, “It tells me that someone has stolen our tent”.

Sometimes we get stuck on one point that we completely miss what is in front of our very eyes.

We completely miss the obvious.

When it comes to language learning, we often miss the obvious cause of a problem or weakness, and end up trying to solve it the wrong way.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

When people can’t see what the solution is, they often try to solve the problem with the problem itself.

This means we end up going round and round in circles without ever solving it.

And all that does is perpetuate the problem.

Not sure what I mean?

Well here are the five most common learning mistakes that students make.

“I need to improve my speaking skills, so I should find a native speaker to speak to”

No.

You don’t need to have a person in front of you to practise speaking.

When I say this, everybody always disagrees with me at first. After I explain the logic, everyone agrees.

Think about it.

When you speak to another person, you are practising two skills: listening and speaking.

One person speaks while the other listens. Then you take it in turns. Imagine you remove the other person, then you are only practising one skill: speaking.

There is no difference between speaking to another person or speaking alone with regard to speaking practice.

(This is the moment when everyone says the following…)

“But if I speak alone, nobody will correct me!”

Imagine you’re having a conversation with a native speaker and you make a mistake, do you think they will correct you?

“Oh…erm…no”.

Of course they won’t correct you. When I make a mistake when speaking in Spanish, nobody, absolutely nobody corrects me.

And it’s normal that people don’t correct others’ mistakes. It would be weird.

So you can see that the only difference between speaking alone or with another person is that if you’re speaking with another person, you’re also practising listening.

If you don’t know how to have a conversation, then by all means speak to another person.

But if it’s fluency that you’re looking to improve, you don’t need another person.

There are a million different things that you can do to practice speaking and improve your fluency. I cover all these techniques and more in my free ebook here.

Which brings me to my next point…

“I make a lot of mistakes when I speak in English, I need to improve my speaking skills”

I speak about this a lot because it’s such a common problem. If you make mistakes when you speak, that’s not a speaking problem.

It’s a grammar problem.

It just so happens that you make these mistakes when you speak. But speaking isn’t the problem.

Speaking more will not remove those mistakes, it will just make you speak more fluently.

That’s not a bad thing. In fact, fluency is very good and something that you should definitely work on. But if you want to stop making mistakes, fluency won’t solve it. Only addressing the grammar points that you make mistakes with will remove them.

So yes, speak more. But go over the grammar that you have difficulties with in order to stop making those mistakes.

“I need to improve my listening skills, so I should listen to a lot more in English”

This statement in itself is not a mistake, but depending on how the learner tries to solve it, it could be.

And most of the time, it is.

While listening a lot is always a good idea if you want to improve the skill, not all listening practice is the same.

The fact is, most English learners spend far too much time listening to get the general understanding, and not nearly enough practice listening for detail.

That makes people very good at listening in general, but not very good at listening for detail.

Erm…obvious, right? You don’t need a doctorate degree in particle physics to reach that conclusion.

Why do they do this? Well, because listening for the general understanding is really easy. You can do it lying on the sofa in your pyjamas while eating chocolate.

The problem is, what you practise is what you get, and if you only practise listening for the general understanding, then all you get is the general understanding.

That may be fine at the lower levels, but as you improve, you should really understand the details too.

You can only do that by practising listening for detail.

The absolute best exercise to practise listening for detail is dictation.

It’s the king of all English practice exercises. You can learn how to do it on your own by reading this post, or by downloading my other free ebook on how to practise and improve your listening.

“I make a lot of mistakes with conditionals, so I should learn them again”

Hang on a second.

You’ve already had maybe fifty classes on conditionals. Do you think another class will help?

Probably not.

The following is the standard life-cycle of conditional learning: a teacher explains the rules and structure of conditional sentences. The student kind of remembers it from the last class they had.

Then they do some gap-fill exercises and the student says, “ah yes, I remember this”.

They do a bit of speaking practice and the student leaves the classroom with it pretty clear in his head.

A week goes by and the student slowly starts to forget everything.

Two weeks later and they remember almost nothing and are making mistakes again with conditionals.

Six months later they have another conditional class and the story repeats itself.

Another class on the conditionals is not the solution.

Just read this post and you’ll never need to worry about conditionals again.

“I can’t remember vocabulary. I have a bad memory, so I should improve my memory”

Who hasn’t thought this at some point in their learning journey?

Your memory is not the problem.

The problem is that when you learn a new word, you think that all the work is done.

Really, that’s when the work begins. Just because you’ve learnt a new word, that doesn’t mean you’ll remember it.

You remember things by using and practising them. Just as the old saying goes, “use it or lose it”.

This post of mine covers the best ways to do this.

Easy!

Conclusion

A big part of all this comes down to what I always say about learning. It’s not what you practise, it’s how you practise.

And unfortunately, many learners don’t know how to practise.

After all, most learning programmes teach people what to practise, so they never learn the techniques that will help them to learn on their own.

Learn how to learn, and you will never need to worry about what you learn.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]