Journalled on Wednesday, 14th of August 2024 | Santo Cristo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: 22 degrees, hot, sunny, with a blue sky.
It is the middle of the week, and I’m about to give an experimental class to a prospective new pupil.
Marcela, an ex-pupil of mine, referred Thiago to me. Marcela had to stop her classes in January because she’d just had Raphael, her premature newborn. Fortunately, both mother and baby were fine. I also teach Victor, Marcela’s husband and Raphael’s father, whom I’ve known for more than 15 years.
Thiago works in IT project management in São Paulo, like Victor, Marcela, and my other pupil, Fabio. Before the pandemic, they all worked entirely in person, going into the office every day. When lockdown hit, companies had to adapt fast. Now, more than two years on, most have settled into a hybrid system: three days in the office and two at home, or vice versa.
Supposedly, working from home makes employees, and more importantly, companies, around 30% more productive. And we all know productivity is one of today’s business buzzwords.
Back when I ran the school, I was dead against online classes. I couldn’t see it working. How wrong I was. These days, the idea of a physical school that people travel to daily or weekly seems almost unimaginable.
The whole dynamic of teaching has changed. On a human level, people still want to meet, talk and study face to face. But in practical terms, online is the future, or perhaps more interestingly, a hybrid model: mostly online, with the occasional in-person class or forum thrown in.
We talk a lot about how the internet has changed our lives, particularly retail. I saw it clearly on my last trip to England. I call it the Amazon effect. But it’s not just retail: the internet now touches every area of our lives, and the pandemic was the catalyst that catapulted it into every corner of daily life.
I scheduled the class with Thiago for midday. At five to, I sent him the link, and we began. It went very well. He’s a married man in his early 40s, an IT project manager living in a middle-class area of Rio, with a six-year-old autistic son.
To me, he’s a typical qualified IT professional who’s just had reality hit him in the face: the job market, his place in it, and the importance of English on the global stage.
He has invested heavily in himself: in his field, his career, his specialisation. But somewhere along the way, he either forgot his English or never took it seriously enough. Now that the job market is no longer geographical, borders are falling just like the Berlin Wall.
He’s a small fish in a much bigger sea, and if you don’t get strong quickly, you get eaten. Right now, for non-native speakers, English is the real superpower. If you don’t speak English, you won’t survive. You’ll be eaten alive, bones, nails and all, the way pigs devour a body.
Traditionally, historically and socially, Brazil is Portuguese-speaking, surrounded by Spanish-speaking neighbours, which makes it something of a cultural island. Oddly, French was long more popular than English among the Brazilian middle class.
One thing that’s been obvious to me since I’ve been in Brazil: the English schools have long marketed the language as difficult and sophisticated, something that takes years of dedication. That’s not true. It’s more of a sales pitch.
For minimum fluency in English, you only need between 1500 and 2000 words. Portuguese, by comparison, is a Latin-based language and far more sophisticated: to reach the same level of fluency, you’d need to know between 3500 and 4000 Portuguese words.
What makes English a little different, or trickier, is that it never stops mutating. It’s an animal that absorbs new words from other languages every year, a language in constant evolution, a monster that never stops growing. You only need around 2000 words for minimum fluency, but the full vocabulary runs to half a million words and keeps expanding every year.
For Brazilians, English has long been seen as a difficult, unattainable language from another planet. But English is easy. What makes it difficult, beyond what I’ve already mentioned, are the exceptions to the rules- the opposite of what you find in Latin-based languages like Portuguese, Italian or French.
In a Latin-based language, you can follow the rules blindly, and you won’t go far wrong. In English, you follow a rule, but somewhere along the way there’s an exception waiting to trip you up if you don’t remember it.
That said, the first thing I tell my pupils is that English is easy. It’s not a monster with seven heads, and if my brother can speak it, it has to be easy.
The experimental class with Thiago went very well. He liked it, and we agreed to start classes and to put a bit more money in my bank account. I get real pleasure from helping people reach their goals. Getting paid for it makes it that much sweeter.
Be kind and be happy. If you cannot be happy, still be kind, but never be naïve.
In bed by 10.30 p.m.
Thank you for reading. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments.
Richard
