How to learn English without learning it

Trinh Nguyen Hoang - 2024

I. What? Another Guru?

No, I am not a guru. However, I am an excellent English user according to my Professor and the British Council. And I am Vietnamese.

In this article, I will share with you a reliable method of learning English, without spending a single dollar on courses or school.

To learn English without learning it.

You don’t have to trust me. Feel free to close this tab down.

II. What this method is about? Is this method for you?

There are tons of methods being invented to tackle the problem of how to learn English.

To learn how to learn.

The traditional method is to pay for an offline course that teaches you English. You attend the class, you learn English from the teacher.

The modern method is to use Duolingo. Duolingo helps you create a game out of the learning process.

So far, each and every method has been about discipline and effort. And that you have to commit to the learning process and you have to be conscious of it. But this article offers you a new method of study where you don’t have to be conscious about the learning process. Hence, the title of the Article: “How to learn English without learning it”.

This method is on the macro aspect, not the micro strategies like:

·      Study phrases not words;

·      Get a placement test;

·      Actively take note of new vocabulary;

·      Subscribe to podcasts or YouTube;

·      Read news written in English.

No, macro means the most general and overarching method of studying English. It is the big picture. It is a spiritual concept. It is the mindset. It stands on the borderline of conscious and unconscious learning. It is not about the minor or mundane things. It is intangible, yet reliable.

Can you use this strategy I am about to share? Yes. It is free.

Are you capable of using this strategy? I don’t know. If you can read and understand everything I offer you, then you probably can.

Let’s jump into it.

III. The foundation

The idea of this strategy is simple: If English is a non-detachable part of your life, eventually you will know how to write and speak in English.

Imagine a baby. From birth to 3 months, babies make sounds. Once he hits 6 months, he produces speech-like babbling (‘puh’, ‘buh’, ‘mi’).

Between 12 and 18 months of age, he will say the first word. And then a series of single words of familiar people and objects such as mama, dada, ball, and cat.

By the age of 2: The child says two-word phrases, such as: “Dog sits.” “Mommy go.”

By the age of 3: The child has words for almost everything and speaks three-word phrases. Each year after that, the children will form longer and longer sentences.

Did the baby go to schools, extra classes, cram schools, and training groups to be able to do that? No.

They learn it because they must communicate their needs, their demands, their wants, and sometimes, a cry for help.

They also learn it, because it is the only language that they know will convey what they want to others who listen.

Two factors: Non-detachable and Singular.

It is non-detachable because it is the only way to communicate (earlier in life). It is the only way to communicate because it is not detachable.

Let’s repeat it again. If English is a non-detachable part of your life, eventually you will know how to write and speak in English.

IV. The mindset

My method of learning English is all about the subconscious.

The moment you are aware that you are learning English, you are not using my method.

If you have to remind yourself that you have to learn English for that IELTS test you are going to take, for that job interview that you are going to join, for the sake of your parents, for a better future, etc., you are not using my method.

If you have to power yourself through procrastination and put in so much effort that could result in burnout just to learn English, you are not using my method.

If you have to constantly be afraid that without English your life will be miserable, you are not using my method.

If you need to learn English in order to achieve a particular goal, albeit small or big, you are on to something. You can use my method.

Here is a quick story. 2 years ago, someone told me that if you are good at something, you should teach people that knowledge and charge them money for it. I took that advice and tried to teach relatives English. But then, I didn’t want to waste my time because I wanted to pursue other things in life. That person advised me again to produce a mini-course or an online course for this purpose. Once I documented it, I can sell the online course again and again without wasting my time and still earn money for it.

So, once again, I tried to document my method of learning English to teach others how to do just that. But here is the fun part: I don’t know how.  Not because I don’t know how to talk in front of a camera, how to create a course, how to market the course, or how to teach.

I don’t know how because I did not know how I learned English.

You might ask: “How can you learn English when you don’t know how to learn English? Is this another scam from a self-proclaimed good English user?”

Still, I have to honestly tell you that back then, I did not know how to learn English. Or rather, I did not know how I learn English up until then.

When I looked back, I didn’t even know when I started learning English. I didn’t know how I learn English. I did not know anything.

Just one day, my father told me that: “You should practice for IELTS.” That was the only period of my life where I actively tried to learn English. And it wasn’t for a long period of time because all I did was learn enough to know the format of the IELTS test.

Then it occurred to me: It is not that I don’t know how to learn English, it is just that I have been learning English subconsciously ever since I was a kid.

Sure, I don’t know how I learned English. That’s why I cannot compile my insight of years-long accumulated knowledge into an online course and sell it for money. But it is true that I did manage to learn English somehow.

It was all subconscious learning. Or rather, unconscious.

The process was hidden from me. I use that process again and again, subconsciously.

So, to use my method of learning, you must throw away your brain.

To learn it without learning it.

To suddenly realize one day that you are good at English.

To recognize that you are struggling to tell others how you learn English.

In the next section, I will show you why subconscious learning is the best kind of learning and how it can help you get so much better at learning English.

V. Why it works

If you don’t want to know about the academic and research stuff, you can skip this section and go straight to the next. However, I warn you – You are missing out on the core reason why this method of study is the best.

To begin with, the conscious mind contains all thoughts, feelings, and actions within our awareness. “All of the thoughts that pass through your mind, the sensations and perceptions from the outside world, and the memories that you bring into your awareness are all part of that conscious experience.

Meanwhile, the subconscious mind is “all the reactions and automatic actions that we can become aware of if we think about them”. But they are generally operating just below the level of conscious awareness. Breathing or automatic skills such as playing the piano (if you can) can happen with little conscious awareness because they are so automatic. But we can stop, focus on them, and alter them.

Lastly, the unconscious mind is made up of “thoughts, memories, and primitive/instinctual desires that are buried deep within ourselves, far below our conscious awareness. Even though we’re not aware of their existence, they have a significant influence on our behavior.”

Most of our day-to-day actions such as driving a car, talking, walking, and doing the dishes are automatic and don’t require a lot of conscious thought. These routine actions are the product of learned neural patterns in the subconscious part of the brain.

The subconscious mind is habitual. It has programs in it – habits. These habits play automatically without us thinking of them. This is why even small activities done repeatedly can become habits that we do routinely.

In Wilson’s book Stranger to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Subconscious, he estimates that approximately 95% of our thoughts, feelings, and memories live in our subconscious. The human brain can absorb about 11,000,000 bits of information a second, the conscious mind can only process about 40 bits a second.

The brain is bombarded with information and it is the subconscious mind that processes all of it and decides which information to pass on to your conscious mind. The unconscious mind is the engine of information processing. Much more is recorded by the unconscious mind than the conscious mind. Subliminal messages and images can be picked up by the unconscious mind even when they aren’t consciously seen. And these messages and images can drive behavior.

Now, let’s answer this question: Does the things we put in the subconscious mind are the things that we are already good at?

Take riding a bicycle for example. On the first day of practice, you must be conscious about every little thing that you do with your bike: your hand position, your leg position, your posture, your seats, your bells,  and your balance. The constant conscious mind makes you feel overwhelmed.

However, once you get the hang of it, those worries start to disappear one by one.

You don’t care about your hand position anymore. You don’t even need to put your hand on the handlebars anymore

You don’t care about seats anymore. You don’t even need to be seated to ride a bicycle.

You don’t care about your posture anymore. Because you can balance the bike even with your arm and your leg crossing.

It just becomes natural. And you enjoy the scenery of your hometown. It is effortless one can describe.

Things become subconscious. Of course, you can still bring your worry up if you feel like it. But you will never stress about it anymore. You have achieved mastery of how to ride a bike.

So, under the perfect circumstances, the things that you do subconsciously are the things that you are already good at, or at least are competent enough.

Then, what about learning English?

And if you are wondering then the answer is yes, once you are good at English then you use it subconsciously and effortlessly, just like you do with your mother tongue.

But what about learning English?

Can you be so good at learning English that learning English becomes a subconscious activity?

Yes, you can. And I am here to tell you just that.

And once you do, learning English becomes effortlessly easy, just like the analogy of riding a bicycle.

The earlier you apply my method, the quicker you will learn English. To the point where you don’t even know how you learn it.

Alex Hormozi once said to his professor: “I am just naturally good at languages”. And his professor replied to him, asking: “When you were a kid, did you have multiple languages in your household?” To which Alex answered: Well… Yea.” His Professor then replied smirkingly: “What are you even talking about? You literally started with that, so of course, language is easier for you”.

So here is the lesson that Alex Hormozi has concluded:

People that have things that “come naturally to them”, it is because they have forgotten the work it took them to get there.

Yes. Same as I did. Since all of the learning was done subconsciously, I barely remember them.

That’s why I cannot tell you how I learn English.

As you will discover below, the process will differ for everyone. But if you understand the macro aspect of learning English, be subconscious.

If you understand everything so far that I have taught you, you can actually design how you will learn English from now on.

But in case you are still not sure how to implement this method or are too lazy to come up with your own way of learning, feel free to continue.

P/s: Search Alex Hormozi on Google if you don’t know who he is.

VI. How to apply this method

To make learning English a subconscious activity, you must make the whole process non-detachable and irreplaceable.

In a nutshell, everything you do must be English-related, without you even remotely and consciously thinking about it.

So let’s look at how I do it so you can get the basic idea of how to do it.

1. From the age of 3 to 15, I play video games

Yes, the good old video games, never fail to amaze me.

Since Vietnamese people back then are not good enough to create games that are truly entertaining, we don’t have games with Vietnamese as the language.

In fact, every single game that I have played up until now is rendered in English. Therefore, how do you play a video game that has no Vietnamese text and guides? How can you understand what you are looking at?

The answer is: You don’t.

At least I didn’t understand anything. The two games that I played regularly were Age of Empires and Warcraft III. Both of them were complex games that required long hours of guidance and tutorials before you could actually enjoy the games. Not only that, but they also have rich storylines with lots and lots of characters talking with subtitles. And all of them were made in English.

Since I didn’t understand, I just played everything by feeling. Literally, look at how the AI plays the game to copy from them.

I heard a lot of sounds during my playing. They were English, and I knew that they were talking about something, but to me, they were just background noises. Oftentimes, because I didn’t understand what the games were telling me to do, I just ended up doing random things that led me to nowhere.

But sometimes the random things that I did were actually what the games were trying to tell me to do. And therefore I connected the dot. And whenever I heard that particular sound, I would do the things that work.

And the sound was, oddly enough, the voice of the games telling me to “Build a strong enough army to destroy the enemy's forces”.  But back then they are all just gibberish to me. However, once I started doing it repetitively, I formed my little Vietnamese version of that command inside my head: “Huấn luyện quân, tấn công kẻ địch”. And because I understand Vietnamese, I performed as the games instructed me to do.

What is more, with rich storylines, you could expect a lot of talking and dialogue between characters. And again, I did not understand any of that. I remember a character saying this line many times: “I will hear you and obey”. But to me as a kid, all I heard was, in Vietnamese: “Mày bị điên à hành động đi!!!” (Are you crazy? Act!!!). It made no sense.

And one can imagine that I should just quit the game. But I kept on playing for years. Because I really wanted to play this game, and there were only a few games that I had on my computers, I kept at it. Because I had to beat the game, I had to figure out one way or another what the games were trying to tell me, that’s why the process of learning English became subconscious.

I focused on the game, not the voice line or the subtitles in English. Since I didn’t understand English, they were just another puzzle for me in order to win the game, unlike the native speakers who only had to focus on the strategy. And sometimes, I had to accept that some of the puzzles could not be solved, or some of the English words I could not understand, leaving me unable to progress to the next level.

When I got stuck, I had to go online and search for a solution. There are tonnes of walkthroughs and guidance people on the internet have written about how to get past certain parts of the game. As you have already guessed, it was also in English. Therefore I guessed every single word and phrase necessary to achieve clarity.

Once you put in enough repetition, some patterns of words start to look similar and you can predict the close meaning of that word.

But here is the funny part, you don’t translate that word at all. You just know what that word means, on its own without translating it back to your mother tongue. That is the beauty of subconscious learning.

When you subconsciously learn English, you know the meaning of the word without translating it into your mother tongue or a third language.

And little did I know, that is my foundation of learning English subconsciously – through playing video games made in English.

2. From the age of 15 to 18, I am addicted to the internet

Here is an insight of mine from a long time ago. You can disagree with me if you will, but back then I thought that:

“Everything good things in my life is not available to me in Vietnamese”.

This notion probably stems from my childhood “trauma” of not being able to find a single guidance or tutorial written in Vietnamese when getting stuck trying to solve a video game.

Therefore, I carried this “trauma” on with my life.

If I wanted to watch a film, I would never watch a Vietnamese film, but I would search for an English film instead (with subtitles of course).

If I wanted to watch a video about Minecraft on YouTube, I would search for the channel of an English-speaking YouTuber.

If I wanted to get educated about certain topics during high school, I would never search for a lecture taught by a Vietnamese teacher. No, I would search for an English-speaking teacher on the Internet.

Take Maths for example, you don’t really need to know what the teacher says in order to understand the maths. Because what you need to is literally on the blackboard. But during the learning process, you subconsciously take in the meaning of the words and correspond it with where on the blackboard the teacher is pointing to.

I wanted to learn Maths, but English was sipping into me.

It went the same for Chemistry, Physics, and Biology. Look up an English video and learn from it.

Can you predict what would happen next?

Suddenly one day I realized that I could still understand what the teacher said without him writing anything on the blackboard.

And I remember that day very clearly. That day was the reason why I wrote this article.

It was a sudden epiphany that enlightened me and made me aware for the first time that something I did back then was magical. However, I never came to the recognition of what I did.

And once you understand something, there is an invisible urge to make you go for more.

Throughout my high school, I did not consume a single piece of content in Vietnamese.

No, everything was in English. But not because I wanted to learn English.

It is because I want to know more about this world.

I remember toward my 18th birthday, I became obsessed with Greek mythology and I needed to learn more about it. As an impulse, I ignore everything in Vietnamese and go straight to English. And Ted-Ed was my stop for the dose of Greek story.

Ted-Ed has a series of illustrative videos about Greek Mythology, and I have been captivated ever since. Once I had enough of Greek Mythology, I branched out to other videos on Ted-Ed to learn more about space, earth, ecosystem, physics, issues of the world, and so on.

My curiosity was endless. And I became addicted to the Internet.

I wanted to know more. Not because I wanted to learn English.

But I subconsciously learned Engish, because it was the only bridge that connected me to the vast amount of knowledge this world has to offer.

The end result? By the time I finished high school, which was in 2018, I managed to achieve an IELTS score of 7.5 without studying for a single day.

3. From the age of 18 till now, I studied Law

Law was my major during my university era.

If you are like me, then the university’s library is probably where you spent most of your time during this era.

And let me tell you this, learning Law was brutal.

Because there are millions to trillions of words you need to read throughout the span of 4 years.

And let me tell you one more thing, learning the Law of English (or Legal English for short) was even more brutal as you are basically learning a new language.

Even if you are a native speaker, tell me how many percent of the following paragraph you can understand:

“The Company’s obligations to pay any partial liquidated damages or other amounts owing under the Transaction Documents is a continuing obligation of the Company and shall not be terminated until all unpaid partial liquidated damages and other amounts have been paid notwithstanding the fact that the instrument or security pursuant to which such partial liquidated damages or other amounts are due and payable shall have been canceled.”

Hard, right?

Now imagine that we have to read millions of paragraphs like these.

With some spark and luck, I found myself to be particularly interested in English Law (which eventually led me to pursue my Master's Degree in the United Kingdom).

And when I say “spark” and “luck”, you can already guess why.

“Everything good things in my life is not available to me in Vietnamese”.

But at this point, it had already become subconscious to me.

I naturally gravitate toward everything made in English. Because I know that is where the goldmine of knowledge is located.

Since I wanted to know more about how English people deal with Law, I read everything in English and then compared it to Vietnamese to see the differences.

The goal was to learn about Law, not English.

But once again, English is a non-detachable part of my life.

I spent 1 year in the United Kingdom to pursue my Master’s Degree. I did not struggle with language at all.

4. So how exactly can you do it?

If you are at this point in the article, then you are pretty clear on what you need to do.

To learn English without learning English, everything must be subconscious.

Notice how earlier I said if you are not subconscious, “you are not using my method” instead of “you are studying English the wrong way”.

Obviously, you will have to be conscious about learning English at some point. That is the only way you can review your mistakes and improve upon your mistakes.

But as I have already argued above, the things that you put on the subconscious level are the things that you are extremely good at and can yield extraordinary results.

To learn how to learn.

At the end of the day, here is what subconscious learning will give you:

·      English knowledge comes to you as naturally as it can. You don’t have to force yourself to learn it.

·      You will have the ability to understand English as it is. You don’t have to translate back to your mother tongue or a third language.

·      You can be flexible with your usage of English. Mastery will come much faster than the normal method of brute-force learning.

·      It is a reliable way to master the English language.

So, let’s break down what you should be doing to apply this method.

First, always have English as a companion in your life. It is best to have English appear in every aspect of your life. Design your life so that English is a vehicle that carries you to your goal. Remember my example? Without English, most of the things in my life cannot be achieved. If it is a non-detachable part of your life, eventually you will master English. Focus on the goal you want to achieve in life, but use English to help you get there.

Second, multi-tasking. If you travel to work using public transportation, plug your earphones in and listen to your favorite topic in English. If you are doing household chores, put up some English music or podcasts so you can enjoy the things you do while still gaining knowledge. Always have English as a background noise.

Third, realize that if you limit yourself to just your mother tongue, you are hiding yourself from the world of knowledge that is all written in English. Do you want to live inside a well and never get out of it?

Fourth, always be curious. And if you are curious about something, research every aspect of it. Use every method you can. I guarantee you, that at least one of the methods will involve English.

Fifth, entertain with something relating to English. Find something that you are extremely fond of that you don’t mind the existence of English just to enjoy that. For example, if you are into soccer, find a soccer match commentated by English people. If you are into makeup, find an English-speaking makeup expert on YouTube. If you are into gym and fitness, find an English-speaking gym coach on Facebook or Instagram. If you are into video games, find an English-language game with a rich storyline with complex character development. If you are into chess, find an English-speaking Chess streamer on Twitch. If you are into traveling, find an English-speaking Vlogger on the Internet. Consume English content only and stay away from your mother tongue.

Sixth and probably the hardest one: Use English as if you are a native speaker. You may have noticed that although my mother tongue is Vietnamese, I am writing this article in English. Aside from the main reason that I want to reach international readers, it also forces me to use English subconsciously. To subconsciously learn English, you must use it. Not learning it and then never using it.

Lastly, and this is a meme one: Don’t speak with ChatGPT in your mother tongue. Use English.

VII. Conclusion

Obviously, this whole article will never reach those who are in desperate need of a method to learn English. Because… well, to read it you must understand English.

But it is also the goal. If the goal is to understand this article, then you must use every available method to understand it. It is part of the training. And your journey with subconscious English learning started the moment you picked up this article.

But if you feel like this Article is meaningful and effective, please do me a favor by translating it and sending it to those who are in need.