advanced ESL
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English is ambiguous, but you don’t ✨feel✨ it
“I saw her duck.”“Let’s meet next Friday.”“I’m on my way (just left my house).” You probably understood all three instantly. Each one is ambiguous. “Duck” could be a verb or a noun. “Next Friday” depends on where you are in the week. “On my way” might mean five minutes or forty-five. Your brain fills in…
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Fluent… but not here
I’m American, and I had to rewind a sentence that made no sense to me in English. “Drop call my phone.” I paused the show, went back, and listened again. In that context, it meant: call me so I can save your number. It made sense. It just didn’t make sense to me. The same…
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A sentence can be grammatically perfect… and still lose the room
A lot of multilingual professionals focus on using clean grammar, having a solid vocabulary, and figuring out whether a sentence makes sense. But what they say still doesn’t land the way they want. Persuasion isn’t built on correctness. It’s built on how language functions in real time. Aristotle mapped this out a long time ago…
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AI can write jokes. They aren’t funny.
An English language learner was telling a joke: “Every time his phone rang, his wife plugged it into the charger… why?” He paused. “His girlfriend was Low Battery!” No one laughed. The answer was honestly clever. The cheating husband had saved his girlfriend’s name as “low battery.” But it didn’t land. We can understand the…
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“That’s not how I’d say it” isn’t a rule
There’s (unfortunately) a moment where someone hears a non-native speaker and decides, almost instantly, that something is off. They can understand the person, but it doesn’t sound like what they’re used to. A multilingual speaker might say something in a way a native speaker wouldn’t. They might use a slightly different structure, emphasize a different…
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Multilingual speakers don’t have a thinking problem
Teaching ESL, I hear this all the time: “I know what I want to say. I just don’t know how to say it.” This is because multilingual speakers don’t struggle to think. They struggle to translate their thinking into what sounds right to someone else. Multilingual speakers are working with multiple options at once. Different…
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Aha!
You don’t learn a word the first time you see it. You might recognize or understand it. But that doesn’t mean you can use it. The shift into usage happens later, when meaning attaches to the word. In Second Language Acquisition, this is called form–meaning mapping, or connecting a word to what it represents. Richard…
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Why “do a mistake” sounds wrong
“I did a mistake.” You understand this sentence immediately. Nothing is confusing, but it still sounds off. “Make a mistake” feels natural. “Do a mistake” doesn’t, even though “make” and “do” are similar and both are grammatically possible. The problem isn’t grammar. This is a collocation: words that naturally go together in a language. Not…
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Meaning doesn’t live in words
“Coffee?” What does that mean? The answer is: all of them. There’s no subject. No verb. No full sentence. But… it’s completely clear. That’s because meaning doesn’t live inside the word “coffee.” It comes from context: where you are, who you’re with, what just happened, and what both people already understand. Philosophers like Wittgenstein argued…
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Native speakers break rules constantly
“Who are you talking to?” That sounds completely normal. No one stops mid-conversation to panic about a preposition. Buuuut teeeechnically, you’re not supposed to end a sentence with one. Most people don’t even know that rule. And even the ones who do ignore it constantly. Some rules come from formal grammar teaching, but real English…