Hello and welcome to my podcast My Life and Other Funny Stories. My name is Dagmar Tomášková, I am an English tutor and coach and I created this podcast for English students who want to improve their oral comprehension. As always you can find the transcription of this episode and vocabulary list in the notes of the podcast. 

Today, it will be just a shorter episode where I am going to share my own journey in English and how I attained the C1 level in English by the age of 18. And no, it is not because I am super talented. I actually don’t think I am any more talented than an average person and if everyone did it the way I did it during the same period of their life, they would probably be even better than me. Of course, I was in my teenage years so my brain was still forming and retaining information, I am not saying that it is not an advantage but I still believe there are still a lot of things to take from it.

I started learning English when I was in the 3rd grade, so I was around 9 or 10. I learned my first words, first grammar, and first expressions. Until then, I hadn’t really thought about English at all.

I have to say, I liked English from the start because I liked our school books. They were very colourful and fun, with small comics and I remember that our teacher told us that we could all pick an English-sounding name for the lessons so we could ditch our Czech identity and be someone else for that lesson. We created little paper tags with neatly written names on them that we put on our desks every time we were preparing for our lesson. My name was Liz and I loved that name. 

Now when I look back at it, I think that was a really great way to get us excited about English lessons. Unfortunately, our teacher got injured after a few months of the school year so she left and we got someone else. After that, I can’t even remember my lessons. I guess they were okay but I didn’t really care about it that much.

What I remember is that when I was in the 6th grade, we had quite a good teacher who taught us our Czech and English lessons. She encouraged me to get interested in reading much more in Czech and I loved it. I was reading a lot. I was reading everything that came into my hands. After a while, I started thinking about reading in English. 

At that time, I started devoting not only my school time but also my free time to learning English. But the thing was that I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t want to learn English to learn a new language. I wanted to be able to read books I wanted to read and also watch videos I wanted to watch. Back then, the internet started being quite popular and I found out about YouTube. Do you know YouTube? Just this very small internet website that you can watch videos on, I know, it is not that popular but you can look into it if you want. 

Anyway, I started watching talking videos on YouTube. I didn’t understand much, almost nothing, to be honest. It was just a stream of words I didn’t understand. But one good thing about being a child or a teenager learning a language is that you don’t really evaluate yourself all the time. I wasn’t sitting there frustrated and angry at myself that I couldn’t understand. No, I just kept watching, I kept reading, I was looking for translations and I was doing it over and over and over and over again. That’s one thing that I would really encourage you to do and also what helped me with my French study as well. I stopped looking at my progress every single day and every single week. Of course, it is super important to track your progress over time but if you keep saying to yourself that you didn’t make any progress this week and you didn’t improve from yesterday, you will not get far in language learning. You can’t expect results in days or a few weeks. You can see progress in months but even that can be sometimes tricky. Especially if you study only a few times a week. 

Don’t let me fool you. It took me years to improve my vocabulary, to perfect my grammar and I still have to work on my pronunciation and many aspects of English. It didn’t come overnight.

Of course, my formal education and by that I mean the study of grammar at school was helping a lot and you can’t really get far without a strong foundation in grammar so I am really happy that getting good grades was a good motivation for me to learn it. Sometimes I had good teachers that taught me a lot but sometimes the teachers sucked. The most important work was happening outside school. That is why I also really liked going to English competitions. I never won, I was always somewhere in the middle of the result table but I still enjoyed it.

When I came to grammar school, my English was already quite good, I could hold a conversation and I was encouraged to read books in English more and more. I was watching TV shows, watching videos and translating songs. I lived in English by accident. It wasn’t my purpose to do it to learn it, I just wanted to have access to all the things I loved. And that is why it is so important to do things you love in English. In the beginning, it is challenging but with time, you will be learning English and you won’t even know about it.

When my third year came, I decided to attempt to do FCE exams. I had a really great opportunity because we could opt for an FCE subject at school where we could prepare for the exams. It wasn’t easy. I had to learn a lot of new vocabulary and our teacher was quite strict when it came to timing and evaluation. I had to learn the structure of the exams, new advanced vocabulary and a lot of expressions. But he taught me a lot about the exam evaluation and I knew that he prepared me well. I am still using things that he taught me when I prepare my students for exams.

Anyway, I went to do the exams when I was 18. Yes, FCE is B2 level and we also had the option to go for CAE but I was always doubting myself, I didn’t believe I was good enough to pass. But if you pass FCE exams with a grade A, it means you officially have a C1 level and that was my case. Of course, from then on, I continued studying English at university and achieved my C2 level eventually but that is another story.

If you think about it, it took me 8-9 years to learn from zero to C1 level. Eight years! And I was studying it at school and also outside school. Do you still think that is a talent? Don’t you think that if you started doing all of these things today, you wouldn’t achieve C1 level in 8 years from now? I actually think you would do it much much quicker than me.

So it wasn’t talent and it wasn’t a miracle. I put a lot of time and effort into it but I benefit from it every single day of my life and I will never regret a single minute I put into my English learning. And I hope you will feel the same when you achieve the level of your dreams.

If you want help with that, I am opening a few spaces for my English coaching in January but they are very limited. So if you want to pass exams with flying colours, communicate on holidays without stress or just put some time and effort into your self-development, write me a message, I am here for you!

Thank you so much for listening to this episode and don’t forget that you can find the transcription and vocabulary list in the notes. Please give it a five-star rating if you liked it and I will see you next time, bye-bye.