Perhaps you’ve been learning English for years.
Perhaps you need it for work, travel, relationships or life in another country.
Perhaps you genuinely want your English to be better.
But you don’t actually like learning it.
That’s allowed.
And it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re lazy, unmotivated or “bad at languages”.
It may mean that the way you’ve experienced language learning isn’t working for you.
“I’m, Sorry, I Hate English”
So many learners think that I’m going to take this personally, but I don’t.
I understand your English skills as a stepping stone in your career or life path.
I’m not obsessed with English.
I certainly don’t think you should be either.
I do know that life gets easier when speaking English feels more natural. For that reason, I take your English seriously — so you don’t have to.
And I don’t need to get you from “I hate English” to “I love English.”
Getting you from “I hate English” to “it’s mostly harmless” is a very good result.
Because once English stops feeling like something to dread, resist or avoid, something important changes: you start letting more English into your life.
What Don’t You Like About Learning English?
This is a more useful question than asking yourself how to become more motivated.
Because there are lots of different things people mean when they say:
“I hate learning English.”
You might hate studying grammar.
You might hate making mistakes in front of other people.
You might hate classrooms.
You might hate feeling like an inferior version of yourself when you speak.
You might hate homework, apps and vocabulary lists.
You might be perfectly happy speaking English but completely fed up with being a language learner.
Or English might represent something you never chose in the first place.
Those are different problems. They don’t need the same solution.
Firstly, there ARE Valid Reasons to Not Want to Learn English
Sometimes English Represents Pressure
Early in my teaching career, I worked with employees in a French company that had been taken over internationally.
Their jobs were suddenly connected to their English level.
Unsurprisingly, they didn’t greet English lessons as an exciting opportunity for personal growth.
English represented additional work, insecurity and threat.
Telling people in that situation to “enjoy learning English” misses the point.
Sometimes the first useful change is not learning more.
It is changing what English has come to mean to you.
→ Why Your English Needs a Time Out
Maybe English Isn’t Boring. Maybe Your English Learning Is.
Later, I taught English in art schools across France.
There, English was socks under the Christmas tree: thoroughly useful, but not exactly the exciting part of an arts education.
So I stopped expecting students to be interested in English simply because I was their English teacher.
Instead, English became a way into things that mattered to them: artists, ideas, exhibitions, professional conversations and creative work.
They got involved and learned almost despite the language-learning element, rather than because of it.
That experience has shaped almost everything I have done since.
English doesn’t always need to be the interesting thing.
It can be the language through which you do interesting things.
You Might Need to Change the Mix
If you don’t like learning English, it is worth asking whether English itself is the problem — or whether you’ve experienced too much of one kind of language learning.
Language learning has four important strands:
Meaning-focused input — reading and listening to things you understand and care about.
Meaning-focused output — speaking and writing to communicate something real.
Language-focused learning — deliberately studying vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and other features of the language.
Fluency development — becoming faster, easier and more comfortable using English you already know.
A good language-learning life needs a mixture.
If most of your experience has been exercises, corrections and deliberate study, the answer may not be to work harder at them.
You may need to fix the mix.
→ Discover your language-learning mix
What Would You Rather Be Doing?
This is one of my favourite questions to ask.
If you weren’t “learning English”, what would you happily spend that time doing?
Walking?
Making things?
Talking about art?
Cooking?
Exploring somewhere new?
Meeting interesting people?
Reading?
Being outdoors?
Learning about Scottish history or culture?
Your answer matters because language doesn’t have to sit apart from the rest of your life.
It can happen inside things worth doing anyway.
Perhaps You’re Tired of Being a Language Learner
There is another possibility.
You may already know plenty of English.
You’ve studied it. You’ve passed exams. You’ve used apps. You’ve had teachers. You’ve accumulated vocabulary and grammar.
And somehow English still doesn’t feel good.
In that situation, another course isn’t automatically the answer.
Our six-part Alone With English podcast was made for exactly this territory.
It doesn’t try to teach you more English.
It supports the person who has been carrying the experience of learning it.
Maybe You Need a Different Kind of Teacher
If most of your experience of English has been in schools, academies or group courses, don’t assume that disliking those means you’ll dislike all English learning.
Working online with an independent English teacher can feel completely different.
There is no academy syllabus deciding what comes next. No class moving at somebody else’s pace. No waiting while other students take their turn.
A good independent teacher can start with you: the English you already have, the situations you actually need it for, what interests you, what gets in your way — and the kind of learning you can realistically fit into your life.
For some people, that change of environment is enough to discover that English wasn’t really the problem.
You just hadn’t found the right way to work with it yet.
→ Help With Online English Options | The Independent Revolution
Language and Culture Immersion Holidays
Another way to change how English feels is to take the learning out of the classroom altogether.
In summer, I share beautiful Perthshire, Scotland, with people who choose to improve their English through a language and culture immersion holiday.
These people do want to improve their English — enough to devote a holiday to it. But they also know they don’t want to learn in traditional ways.
Learning English does not have to mean being trapped inside a classroom or in front of a screen.
On our holidays, English happens while we’re doing other things: exploring Scotland, meeting people, making things, encountering art and culture, walking, eating and talking.
There are clear language-learning goals behind the experience, but having a genuinely good holiday matters too.
And something interesting happens when English becomes the language of an experience you want to be having.
You stop practising English simply because you should.
You start using it because there’s something you want to do, understand, say or discover.
For someone who has spent years thinking “I hate learning English,” that’s quite a shift.
Can you imagine what it would feel like to enjoy yourself in English?
And What if You Don’t Want Lots of Conversation?
Even alternative language learning can accidentally become another demand.
Speak more.
Join in.
Be sociable.
Practise at every opportunity.
Some people need something different.
English Amnesty is for people who want Scotland, culture and thoughtfully designed language experiences, but need more quiet around their English.
You choose the pace and level of interaction.
There is room to walk, notice, think and allow language to settle without constant conversational pressure.
You Don’t Have to Love English
I have worked with plenty of people who don’t particularly care about English.
That’s fine.
English might simply be something you need in order to do something else: develop your career, live somewhere, travel, participate, communicate or feel more like yourself in an international world.
I’m not obsessed with English. I don’t think you should have to be either.
My job is to help English become less of an obstacle between you and the things that matter to you.
Which brings me to Douglas Adams…
Mostly Harmless English Learning
Douglas Adams described Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with two wonderfully underwhelming words:
Mostly harmless.
I’ve always liked them.
And perhaps mostly harmless isn’t such a bad ambition for English learning either.
It doesn’t have to become your passion.
You don’t need to transform yourself into someone who loves grammar exercises, downloads vocabulary apps for fun and can’t wait for their next English lesson.
But English can stop being something you battle.
It can become something you use.
Something that accompanies interesting experiences.
Something that feels increasingly like yours.
And perhaps, somewhere along the way, you might discover that English wasn’t the thing you disliked after all.
From “I Hate English” to “It’s Mostly Harmless”
That might not sound like a spectacular transformation.
But it is.
If you have spent years dreading English, avoiding situations where you have to speak, or feeling inadequate whenever you use it, getting to “actually, this is mostly harmless” is a significant result from an investment in language learning.
Because that change can last.
But change how English feels, and you change what happens next.
You speak when you might previously have stayed quiet.
You read something because you’re interested in it, rather than because it’s English practice.
You join the conversation.
You travel.
You listen.
You notice.
You use more English — and because you use more English, your English keeps developing.
The most valuable language learning doesn’t just add more English. It changes your relationship with the English you already have.
Moving the needle from “I hate English” to “it’s mostly harmless” might be the small change that brings more and more English into your life.
If you fear your English is ugly, being asked to speak more can feel like being asked to expose more of it. Our English Amnesty holiday takes things slowly, giving you just one language coach, plenty of space and silence, and no pressure to meet our community until you feel ready.
