ETB Key Principles

There are a few purposes for this article:

• To help you decide if the English Tea Break method is right for you.
• To introduce you to the main ideas for our method. We'll fill in the details in later articles.
• To provide a reference list, which you can revisit anytime for a reminder.

Here, I'll very briefly describe the main philosophies and what we believe to be the best way to learn English. For each of these principles, I'll describe them in much better detail later. I'll explain why I believe these things to be true, and how you can use them to improve the efficiency of your language learning.

I'd encourage you to revisit this page from time to time. As you continue to read the roadmap, more of these principles will make sense to you. It will help you keep the important parts in mind as you continue to learn English.

Don't worry if some of these principles don't make a lot of sense yet. I'll explain all of them in much more detail in later articles.

You'll learn each of these principles if you follow the order of the roadmap, but you can also click on each principle's name to be taken straight to the page where I describe it more.

Requirements and Primary Recommendations

1. Immersion is the Most Important Tool - This is required. There are no substitutes for reading and listening. You need thousands of hours of immersion in order to become fluent in any language.
2. An SRS is the Second Most Important Tool - An SRS like Anki is highly encouraged, but it's not required. It's an extremely useful tool for building a large vocabulary.
3. Effort is a Requirement - Growth comes from struggle. This is true for almost all aspects of life. You need to fight to understand a new language. The effort tells your brain that it needs to adapt.
4. Create a Goal and Revisit It Frequently - Language learning is a long process. After years of study, it's easy to forget why you began in the first place. Goals also help you to design an effective study plan for yourself.
5. Structure Facilitates Fast Growth - Math classes in school are designed pretty well (better than language classes at least). You learn basic arithmetic before algebra, and algebra before calculus. This roadmap provides the structure needed to help you learn English efficiently.
6. The Four Language Skills Enable Fluency - Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening. If you can do each of those well, you can consider yourself "fluent". Spending time on other tasks might help some of these skills—learning grammar helps improve your writing, for example—but they aren't essential for fluency.

Mindset

7. You Can Learn English for Free - You've already learned a language for free! And before the internet, almost every bilingual person became bilingual for free.
8. Fun Makes Things Easier - If you enjoy something, then it doesn't feel like studying. Consume content that you enjoy. It will help you remember better too.
9. Keep It Simple - Spending time researching other tools, techniques, or algorithm tweaks for your SRS is time spent not studying. Studying at 95% efficiency is better than not studying while researching how to become 100% efficient.
10. Language Learning is Easier as an Adult - You learned your first language as a baby by using immersion, but you didn't learn it efficiently. As an adult, we are in control and can make language learning faster and more enjoyable.

Things That Help

11. Cognitive Science Helps Us Learn Faster - At English Tea Break, we study the research of cognitive scientists and apply their lessons to language learning. Here are a couple of important principles used at ETB:
    • Filing Cabinet Analogy - The idea of creating folders in your brain; we'll fill those empty folders with information over time. That's the purpose of this page 😉
    • Dual-Coding Theory - Attacking a language from multiple angles to reinforce our learning (reading novels and forum posts, for example).
12. A Little Grammar Gets You Started - Learning a little bit of grammar helps create empty folders in your filing cabinet. Your brain will put the pieces together faster if it is aware of basic grammar rules. After learning the basics, there's no need to continue studying grammar.

Things That Don't Help

13. Learning Phrases is not Helpful - So, you learned "Where is the bathroom", great! Now, what happens when the native speaker replies with, "Down the hall, hang a left, second door passed the kitchen"? Phrasebooks aren't going help here.
14. Real-Time Translation is Too Slow - In a real English conversation with a native, you don't have time to translate each word in your head. You need to hear a sentence and immediately understand the meaning. Immersion solves this problem. Translating before speaking is even slower, you need to practice outputting.
15. Vocabulary + Grammar =/= Fluency - Fluency is more than just vocab and grammar. That's why traditional school learning doesn't work. To really understand a language, you need to recognize subtleties like implied meaning, tone, humor, idioms, and body language. You'll learn it all from immersion.

Perfectionism

16. Output Whenever You Want - Outputting is fun. If you are excited about it, give it a try! There's no need to hold back. The more you immerse, the better your output will be when you start, but you will have to start eventually.
17. Bad Habits Aren't That Bad - Try. Make mistakes. If you create a bad habit, it's not the end of the world. You have a habit of using your native language, and using English is a new habit! You're smart enough to build or break habits whenever you want.
18. Course Correction - Collect enough information to get started and then go! You'll refine your strategy over time.
19. Pronunciation Doesn't Matter That Much - Some people obsess over trying to speak with perfect pronunciation. Perfect pronunciation doesn't exist. I say things differently than my friends who are also American, but we still understand each other.
20. Seek to Understand and to Be Understood - You don't need perfect grammar, a perfect accent, or a 100% complete vocabulary. My English is imperfect too, it's okay.
21. Speaking Like a Native is Overrated - You can learn to speak like a native if you really want to. I'll show you how to do it. But it takes a long time, a lot of effort, and really isn't very important.

Many of these principles are controversial. For example, where I say "don't fear bad habits", other methodologies argue that mistakes are dangerous. I'll explain my reasoning for these principles in later in the roadmap.