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The English Adventure
The English Adventure is about speaking English, meeting people, and having fun. TEA is the place where a global English speaking community meets a local community of aspiring English speakers in Budapest. Our goal is to bridge the gap between nationalities by the use of English and take the process of cross-cultural understanding one step further. We believe that we can turn globalization into a blessing by broadcasting our national identities throughout the world and learning about other cultures with the help of a common language, English. Our mission is to provide an enjoyable and inspiring platform (both virtual and real) for anyone who wants to speak English. If you speak English already, whether you are a native speaker or are multi-lingual, TEA is your place to meet and network with other English speakers from around the globe and learn about their ways of living and thinking. If you wish to learn English, TEA can give you the help you need. If you are currently located in Hungary, TEA is your chance to meet locals wishing to learn English. No matter who you are, TEA can be your key to open the gates of the English-speaking world!
It is your cup of TEA!
TEA is here to remind everybody that the first step of learning English is mixing with English speakers, listening to the language and trying it out yourself. To do that you need people who speak English, of course. It is our mission to make it possible for you. TEA is the place to meet all sorts of people with the same goal of learning English. On our website, you can read interesting, relevant articles, post your comments in our featured forum, or start up your own topic. What is more, you can watch fun, English speaking videos and share your clips with others. TEA Times will serve to get people together not just through keyboards and screens but face-to-face. That is your perfect opportunity to meet new people or old friends and have fun speaking English. TEA Proof will provide you with first hand information on language schools, exams and teachers, and of course you can share your own experience with others too. We encourage you to post your own accounts - whether positive or critical – so as to help other learners find what they are looking for.
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Make it an adventure!
I spent 9 years of my life trying to learn English in Hungary, but I failed. Then I spent 2 more years in Cambridge trying to do the same thing - and I succeeded. During those years, I met dozens of people of various nationalities, backgrounds, ages, IQ levels and interests, and I watched them learn English. Now I am here to tell you my own story so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes that I made.
In 2001, I had been learning English for 9 years at school which made me think that I should be able to pass an intermediate examination easily. I was wrong. I failed the exam, which was not the end of the world, but after 9 years of study, it makes you wonder.
I kept wondering but could not figure out what I had been doing wrong. I could not get this question out of my head and a year later, it drove me to England. Leaving your homeland, family and friends is a hard decision, but in retrospect, I am glad I made it.
So that was how I came to Cambridge, where I had a chance to improve my English, observe others doing the same, and try to figure out why my previous efforts had not been crowned with success. I could go on and on about what an astonishing adventure it was to be thrown into a completely alien environment but let me focus on English instead. In Cambridge, I enrolled for a language course as soon as I had the opportunity. The teacher was brilliant and very knowledgeable, so I regarded her as the primary source of information to improve my English. Nevertheless, within a few weeks I realized that, for the most part, those words which quickly became an active part of my vocabulary were those which I heard or saw out of school. This was because I remembered not only the word itself but also the situation in which I first encountered it. If you learn words in that way you can categorize them in your own personal style, and connect them to people, things, sounds or events – first-hand experiences which you never forget.
Going to school was also very important in my development because that was where I first met people and started to socialize, but to be honest it was not the place where I picked up the most language. Even though I was an adult, the way I learnt English was much more similar to how babies learn their mother tongue: just by being exposed to it and having fun playing with it.
As I was observing my own improvement, I found that watching my friends learn English was just as interesting. Since Cambridge is a very cosmopolitan city, I had friends and acquaintances from all around the world. It intrigued me that some of them spoke much better English than others after having spent a similar period of time in the UK. I thought about my friends’ lifestyles and noticed some distinctive features that set them apart. One of my friends at the time was Patricia, a lovely Dominican girl who spoke very little English when she arrived in the UK. However, in the first six months of her stay she achieved an astonishing improvement and when she left England three months later, she spoke fluently. How did she do that? The obvious answer is that she was extremely talented, which she may well have been, but that does not fully explain her case. Perhaps the fact that she was a social butterfly can give us a clue to the real answer.
Patricia knew everybody and even more people knew Patricia. If there was anything happening in the town, she had to be there. Socializing was one of her elementary needs. So she exposed herself to the language all the time by her chosen lifestyle. On top of that she was constantly seeking opportunities to participate in conversation actively. When I say actively, I mean that she asked people to correct her mistakes, and she asked the meaning of words she did not understand. Moreover, she seemed to be genuinely interested in everybody. Many of us make the mistake of working on our own answers while our partner is speaking, instead of actually listening to him or her. That was not in Patricia’s nature. She always focused on the speaker, because beside the contents, she was also interested in their intonation and articulation. That is how she managed to lose her sweet Dominican accent by the end of her stay.
The last and most vital point is that she had enormous fun doing all this. Being in the buzz, socializing, and trying to speak English was a challenge and a form of entertainment for her, which everybody could tell just by the look on her face.
Another friend of mine was Mark from the Czech Republic who I met at the language school. He was and still is one of the most delightful chaps I have ever known. He is the type of person you can always rely on whatever the circumstances. He did not make friends easily, but he had lasting relationships with people he liked.
When Mark arrived in the UK, he spoke a fair amount of English. He seemed very confident from the beginning although even I, as a beginner, noticed that he made many mistakes. His plan was to stay in the UK as long as necessary to perfect his English. Mark rarely went out. I invited him out for a drink but most of the time he would refuse, saying that he would rather stay in and learn English. I was always surprised to hear that and asked him what was wrong with learning English from natives in a pub. “You have to struggle for the knowledge” he would answer and would stay in doing exercises in his grammar book, which he treated as his Bible. On the few occasions someone did manage to drag him out for a drink, he preferred to speak Czech with his compatriots. He had been in the UK for six months when I noticed that his English had improved very little and that he had formed his own characteristic way of speaking English, which his close friends understood but strangers found challenging. This process involved inventing English sentences and phrases following the logic of his own language. They made no sense in English, but he used these made-up phrases often enough to teach his friends what they ‘meant’. Mark left England with ambivalent feelings, a year after he had arrived. He did not regret his decision to move to England, but he felt that he had not made the most of his stay. On his own admission, his English had hardly improved. He was no more fluent than before and his accent was – well, let’s be polite and call it ‘distinctive’.
It was not until I had seen my friends, including Patricia and Mark, learn English in the UK that I finally figured out why I had failed my English exam previously. It suddenly struck me that the longest period of time I had ever spent trying to actually speak English while I lived in Hungary was about 10 minutes - and those were the same 10 minutes that I spent taking the oral part of the exam! The outcome was hardly surprising, in retrospect. In fact, having never spoken English before, passing that exam would have meant that I possessed some supernatural powers, which I did not.
Well, that is how I discovered the contrast between learning English the natural way and other ways. I hope this can save you all some time and effort!
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