What is the best way to teach someone English?

Making it personal. Pretty much including the person in English events. For example, the person who wants to learn English may want to live with an English family or go to an English camp. That same person may also want to go on outings with a group of English people who simply speak English with each other. In other words, the best way to teach someone English is to lead by example and welcome someone into your English life as though he or she belongs and it is the most natural thing in the world for him or her to be there. The person’s comfort level is important. Why? So that he or she can feel comfortable attempting to speak English without being looked down on. It would also give him or her a chance to practice and possibly even learn English expressions and which tone certain sentences are often said in. It may help to slow down in speaking around a person who does not speak English at all or well, simply out of respect, so that he or she does not have to struggle to keep up with the conversation.

English is the hardest language to learn on the planet.

Headphones, a bottle of wine and let them listen over and over again.

Headphones are for them.

The bottle of wine is for you.

@john65pennington
re “English is the hardest language to learn on the planet.”
Then, how would you explain all those Americans that seemingly have mastered it? ;-)

In general, the best way is just speak English to / with them. Don’t use any other language.

My kids are in a British International School and they have been submerged in the language. That exposure has proven more efficient than any of the efforts we spend on this before we left Holland,

Language learning is about necessity. Cf. @whitenoise‘s and @AnonymousGirl‘s posts.

The question becomes much more interesting (and challenging) when immersion isn’t an option.

I have thought about this question, @poisonedantidote, and have considered two approaches as interesting thought experiments. I don’t know if anyone has tried these ideas; I’m not in a position to implement them, so I haven’t done any research.

Actually, my focus was never on “the best” or “the perfect” method but rather just “a good or effective” approach. Perfection is a pretty useless concept to me except in a theoretical context.

I’ve thought it would be interesting, first, to design a course to simulate the way children learn their own language—that is, not just with immersion but with a speeded-up recapitulation of infant experiences, focusing on eating and sleeping, comfort, cuddling, warmth, and love. I don’t know how that would work in practice for adults, but I’ll bet something effective and practical could be designed without inviting crude humor and inappropriate behavior.

Second, I’ve wondered what would happen if someone chose to teach a language—say, English—by starting with the way English-speakers speak their language. Let’s say your native language is Greek and you want to learn American English. Suppose I started not by teaching you any English but by teaching you to speak your own language, Greek, like an American? You’d learn an American accent, you’d learn typically American mistakes in Greek usage, you’d learn typical American errors with Greek grammar—errors that most likely reflect the sound and structure of English rather than Greek. Maybe you’d even practice writing Greek words using the Roman (English) alphabet. Then once you got used to sounding and thinking more like a Greek-speaking American than a Greek-speaking Greek, we’d start replacing Greek vocabulary with English words and adjusting the grammatical structures.

@john65pennington, I don’t think it’s universally agreed that English is the hardest language to learn, and I also wish English-speakers would quit boasting about the oddities of English. Relative difficulty might depend at least a little bit on what native language you’re starting from. A Finnish woman whose English was excellent told me that she had a much harder time learning German.

@john65pennington Enter Georgian.