Why we can help you learn English
1. We’ve been in your situation
We are not native speakers of English. We are learners.
Native speakers have never learned English. Instead, they got it “for free” from their parents when they were children. There was no decision to learn, no effort, no difficulty. They simply received their English, and they don’t know how they did it — just as you don’t know how you learned to walk.
We are not native speakers — we’ve been learning English all our lives. We’ve attended English classes, we’ve done grammar exercises, we’ve taken exams. We’ve done all the things that you’re doing now. We know what is hard and what is easy. We know your problems.
2. We have succeeded
We first started looking for effective ways to learn English in 1993. Back then we were average learners with an average knowledge of the language. Like you, we could read simple English texts, but our other English skills were poor.
In about 3 years, by taking several important steps, we became experts at English. Suddenly we could do things we had never dreamed of:
- talk to native speakers easily
- read books in English and enjoy it
- pronounce words naturally (listen to recordings of our pronunciation in Tom’s story and Michal’s story)
- understand British and American television
- write letters and compositions with advanced vocabulary and grammar
- get better than most of our teachers (people with English degrees) and almost as good as native speakers.
Was our English perfect? No, it was not. We sometimes made grammar mistakes. We sometimes pronounced words incorrectly. We often had to look up words in a dictionary. In fact, we still do, and we’ve never stopped improving our English. (We hope there are no mistakes on this site. If you find a mistake, please send us an unpleasant message.)
The point is, we took our English from poor to impressive in less than 3 years. In the process, we came up with a number of techniques for effective English learning and tested them on ourselves. These techniques form the Antimoon Method which you can read about on this website.
You may think that we succeeded because we had some kind of advantage. We didn’t. Our first language (Polish) is very different from English. Besides, English is not very popular in Poland. For example, there are no local newspapers or TV programs in English. And few people speak English well.
3. We have helped other people
In the past years, we have told many people (our friends and students) about our learning methods. Those who listened to our advice improved their English greatly.
We have also met people who have learned English successfully without our help. When we asked them about their learning methods, we often found that they were very similar to ours.
You can read about people who have mastered English by following our advice in the “Learner reports” section of this site.
One more thing: if you use our methods and you think they are effective, tell us about it! We have created Antimoon to help people learn English, and we would like to know if our efforts are successful.