Topic Talk | How can I learn English by myself? (Spoiler: You can't!)

In this episode of The A to Z English Podcast, Jack explains why it's not really possible to learn English alone. Interacting with other English speakers should be your goal and is a necessary part of the process of learning English. Transcript: 00:00:01 Jack Welcome to the agency English podcast. My name is Jack, and today I have another solo episode, and today's episode is a topic talk episode. 00:00:12 Jack The question we're trying to answer today is. 00:00:16 Jack How can I learn English alone? 00:00:20 Jack How can I learn English alone? 00:00:25 Jack And my answer to that. 00:00:28 Jack I'm going. I'm going to answer that with a an English expression or an English saying. It's very. It's a very old expression. 00:00:38 Jack And it goes like this. We say no man is an island, OK? No man is an island. 00:00:49 Jack And I think what that means is that we are all connected or. 00:00:57 Jack No one person can completely disconnect from. 00:01:03 Jack Other everyone else, you're always connected to some person through your work, through your family, through your friendships, whatever it may be, we're we're all connected. 00:01:19 Jack We can't. We cannot help it. 00:01:23 Jack It's just one of and I think that's why you know, we use those expressions on social media, you know, making connections on Facebook. 00:01:33 Jack How many can you know how many friends do you have? Oh, I connected with this person on Facebook and then and then that person connects to another person who connects to another person that connects to maybe somebody else that you know and. 00:01:47 Jack And it's all about connections, right? So when students ask me, you know, Jack, how can I learn English alone? 00:01:59 Jack My answer is you can't. 00:02:02 Jack UM, you can't learn English alone. 00:02:08 Jack Any better than you could learn how to be a friend. 00:02:14 Jack Without talking to any people you know, like reading a book called how to be a friend. 00:02:21 Jack Chapter one. 00:02:23 Jack Be kind. 00:02:26 Jack Chapter 2. Listen to your friend. 00:02:29 Jack You know chapter 3. I mean, it's ridiculous, right? Trying to, you know, learn to learn how to be a friend. I I think learn to how to learn, you know, learning English alone is almost as ridiculous as. 00:02:50 Jack Learning how to be a friend alone. I mean you learn how to be a good friend by. 00:02:57 Jack By befriending people and having relationships and experiencing those things. 00:03:06 Jack And the exact same thing. 00:03:08 Jack Can be said about English. It's about. 00:03:13 Jack Interacting and using the language with other people. 00:03:17 Jack Creatively trying to communicate, trying to be understood. Now, obviously there are times where you could. 00:03:27 Jack Study certain things by yourself, like you could learn some new vocabulary, or you could do some reading by yourself. You could listen to a podcast by yourself. You could do some grammar exercises, but if you don't, if if you don't take all of that, work those. 00:03:47 Jack That homework type stuff, you know, grammar exercises, listening to the podcast, and you don't apply that to some kind of actual real life speaking situation where you're talking with other people. It doesn't have to be native speakers, it could be other language learners if you don't. 00:04:07 Jack Take that next step and actually use the language creatively. Then all the other stuff is pointless. There's. 00:04:16 Jack No, there's no point in. 00:04:19 Jack Practicing grammar if you're not going to go out and use the language and that's, you know, the hardest part, and we're making that easier here at the edges. The English podcast, because we are associated very closely with something called World English. 00:04:40 Jack And world English is a a community that I that I started with a YouTuber, Robin Shaw. 00:04:51 Jack And we started this, this community, so that students can join the WhatsApp group. They can come in there and they can talk to e