Why You Should Stop Comparing Your English to Native Speakers

By Richard Marshall

On Before and After Moments, and the Only Comparison That Actually Matters

I just had one of those before and after moments, the kind that sneaks up on you when you're not looking for it, which is, in my experience, the only way they ever actually arrive.

I was at my sister-in-law's this afternoon and found a book I'd given her about seven years ago. I'd found it by the bins (a very common way for beloved treasures to find a new home in Spain, by the way, people leave things out and the world helps itself, and it's one of my favourite things about living here), and I remember picking it up and thinking it looked genuinely interesting, exactly the right mix of eighties pop culture and nostalgic ramblings from an era when people spoke to each other face to face.

The only problem was that I couldn't understand a word of it.

It was in Spanish, and my Spanish at the time was, to put it generously, a work in progress. So I did what seemed logical: I kept it in the family, gave it to someone who could actually read it, and more or less forgot about it.

And then this afternoon I picked it up again, seven years later, and read it.

Just like that. Sat there in her living room, read a few pages, understood everything, put it down, and felt something I'm still not sure I have the right words for. Big, anyway. Bigger than the moment deserved, probably, and yet exactly the right size for what it was.

The Only Comparison Worth Making

I love it when things like this happen, these small, unannounced moments where you measure yourself against the only person you should ever really be measuring yourself against, which is who you were before.

Not your colleagues. Not native speakers. Not the person in the meeting whose English sounds effortless and whose accent you've spent years envying from across the table. Just you, from seven years ago, standing by a bin in Madrid holding a book you couldn't read.

Most of my clients are so focused on the gap between where they are and where they think they should be that they never stop to look at the gap between where they are and where they started. And that second gap, the one that runs backwards through time rather than forwards toward some imaginary standard of perfection, that's the one that actually tells you something true.

What Seven Years of Imperfect Spanish Taught Me

The book by the bins wasn't a lesson. I wasn't studying. I wasn't doing exercises or completing grammar tasks or listening to a podcast at the right level. I was just living in Spanish, slowly and imperfectly, for seven years, and somewhere in the middle of all of that the language settled into me, the way languages do when you stop forcing them and start inhabiting them instead.

Which is, as it happens, more or less what I try to help my clients do in English.

Not to study harder. Not to finally crack the subjunctive or nail the third conditional. But to stop comparing themselves to an impossible standard long enough to notice how far they've already come, and then to keep going from there, in the direction of the person they already are in Spanish, rather than the person they think they should become in English.

The book is still at my sister-in-law's. I'll probably leave it there. But I'll think about that afternoon for a while.

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If this resonates, I've been exploring how language, mindset and identity shape the way we speak English on my podcast, From Lost to the River. You can listen at procoachenglish.com/podcast (by CLICKING HERE) and on all major streaming services as well as YouTube.

And to learn more about working together, you'll find everything HERE.