What I wish I had known about English before moving to the US

Nobody understood me

In Vietnam I had heard many foreigners speak Vietnamese with a heavy accent and the wrong tones, and I still understood them. So I assumed Americans would understand my accented English too.

They did not. People asked me to repeat myself, or looked puzzled. Little by little I became shy of speaking. The shyer I was, the less I spoke, and the less I spoke, the slower I improved.

Only later did I understand that English listeners rely heavily on final sounds, word stress and the rhythm of a sentence. Without them, a grammatically correct sentence can turn into a string of sounds that is hard to recognise.

The department head's "Finally!"

I arrived at New Mexico State University after a great deal of paperwork. When the head of the department met me, he said: "Finally!"

I guessed what he meant: you finally made it here. But I was not confident I had understood, so I did not know how to reply.

Not quite understanding happened to me many times that first year. Not because I did not know the word "finally", but because I was not used to hearing real English, in real situations, with real intonation.

What I wish I had practised: pronunciation

I knew that you need good pronunciation to hear correctly. But my school never taught pronunciation. In the US I still had to study English, and nobody taught me pronunciation there either. I taught myself on YouTube.

Self-study helped a lot. My reading and writing are close to a native speaker's. But my everyday spoken English is still limited by conversational vocabulary and pronunciation.

If I could go back, I would spend time on pronunciation and on listening to real spoken English long before getting on the plane.

Advice for anyone about to study or work abroad

• Work on pronunciation early, especially the sounds that speakers of your language tend to get wrong: final sounds, word stress, and sounds your language does not have.
• Listen to real spoken English, not only textbook recordings: conversations, interviews, lectures.
• Prepare a few short replies to common greetings. Something like "Yes, finally! I'm so happy to be here." is enough to keep a conversation going.
• Do not let shyness keep you silent. Speaking, making mistakes and fixing them beats not speaking at all.

And why I made English for Fun

That lesson is part of why I made English for Fun for young children: so they hear clear voices and say words out loud from a very early age, instead of waiting until their thirties to start working on pronunciation, as I did. Read more about us.