Craig Peters writes:

I am an English teacher (primarily of English literature) who currently runs a tutoring company in Hong Kong. However, I have also taught students to improve their English, strengthening students who are intermediate or even beginner learners of English to become much stronger.

Your Antimoon resource is quite valuable. What you teach there accords with my findings. The biggest thing students need is good English inputs, and those indeed come from reading, especially.

Something that you may want to consider drawing more explicit attention to: it’s worth encouraging students of English not only to read, but to read aloud.

The problem with just reading quietly is that it does not necessarily help you improve your grammar and expression that much. As an example of this, I had a professor at university whose third language was English. Although he could publish his articles in academic journals, he still made some grammar mistakes when speaking, and undoubtedly when writing, too.

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I have rewritten my article on grammar rules. The new article shares almost no text with the old version (except the introduction). Overall, the advice hasn’t changed that much (spoiler: it’s okay to use grammar rules, but only a little). However, the reasoning is improved and there are many more examples. The new version also answers the following questions:

• Where do grammar rules come from? How do they differ from the rules of formal systems like programming languages?
• Can grammar rules describe a language completely?
• Are there any good ways to use grammar rules?

Why you shouldn’t rely on grammar rules

In a new page, “Using English correctly requires a massive amount of knowledge”, I carpet-bomb you with examples showing why speaking English without mistakes is so damn hard, and why vocabulary and so-called “grammar” are just a small part of the stuff that you have to put in your head.

Why is it so difficult to learn a language? The main reason is that speaking a language correctly requires a vast amount of knowledge – far greater than is necessary to be a competent doctor or lawyer. A large chunk of this knowledge is, of course, vocabulary. To speak English fluently, you have to know the meanings and pronunciations of at least 10,000 words and phrases (for comparison, the average college student in the US knows about 20,000 words).

But while most learners realize vocabulary is a major area that requires a lot of attention, fewer are aware that there is an equally large body of facts that is described with the word usage.

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Many languages have sensible writing systems. If you look at a Spanish, German or Italian word, you can tell how to pronounce it – all you need to know is a handful of basic rules. But English is not one of those languages. English words with almost identical spellings often have different pronunciations, so looking at a word’s spelling doesn’t tell you very much.

In my new article, I try to pinpoint why English pronunciation is so difficult that even native speakers occasionally get in trouble. I put on a horror show of tricky pronunciation examples that will make you abandon all hope of learning to speak English without mistakes. Finally, I offer a ray of hope as I explain what you can do to survive.

Read more in “English pronunciation is a minefield — here’s how to survive”