Learn English for Travel, Work and Study

English uses the bare Latin alphabet, without a single accent, and spells worse than any language in Europe. The sounds changed after the spelling was fixed, and words were borrowed from everywhere with their spellings intact, so a learner cannot reliably say a word from seeing it — “colonel” is said “kernel”, “queue” has four silent letters — or spell a word from hearing it. The sound system has around twenty vowels, far more than most languages, including the weak, mumbled vowel in unstressed syllables that makes “photograph” and “photographer” sound so different; two “th” sounds that few other languages have; and a rhythm that stretches stressed syllables and squeezes the rest, so that native speech sounds faster than it is.

The grammar is light. Nouns have no gender and only one ending, the plural “-s”; adjectives never change; verbs take an “-s” for he, she and it in the present and otherwise keep one form, with the past made by “-ed” for most verbs and by a change of vowel for the oldest ones — “sing, sang, sung”. Word order does the work that endings do elsewhere, and is strict: subject, verb, object. The articles “a” and “the” are the single hardest point for speakers of languages without them, and the tenses are the hardest point for everyone: English combines two times, two aspects and two voices into forms like “she has been being treated” that a learner must hear thousands of times to feel.

English has no polite “you” and no formal verb forms; everyone is “you”, and politeness is carried by tone, by indirectness and by a set of phrases that soften requests — “Could you possibly…?”, “Would you mind…?”, “I was wondering if…” — which native speakers use so heavily that a learner who asks directly, with correct grammar, can sound rude without knowing why. Titles are light, first names are quick, and “please” and “thank you” are used more often than in most languages. British English adds “cheers” for thanks and “sorry” for almost everything; American English adds “you guys” for the plural you the grammar lacks.

There is no standard English and no academy to set one. British, American, Australian, Canadian, Irish, Indian, Nigerian, Singaporean and South African English are all native varieties with their own sounds, words and spellings — “colour” and “color”, “lift” and “elevator”, “queue” and “line” — and all of them are correct. Learners generally choose British or American as a model because the course books and exams use them, and then meet the others in life. The English spoken between non-native speakers, which is now most of the English spoken in the world, is simpler, clearer and slower than any of the native varieties, and perfectly good English.

How long English takes depends on where a learner starts. Speakers of Dutch, German or the Scandinavian languages share its grammar and half its everyday words and reach a working level within a year; speakers of Spanish, French or Italian share the other half of the vocabulary and get there in about the same time with more work on the sounds; speakers of Slavic languages struggle with the articles, speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean with the sounds, the articles and the word order, and need two to three years for the same result. For everyone, the plateau comes at the middle levels, where the grammar is known and the phrasal verbs, idioms and native-speed listening are not, and the remedy is the same: enormous amounts of English in the ear, which the internet supplies without limit.

English is needed wherever this site's readers are going. It is the official or working language of some sixty countries and the language of international business, science, aviation and tourism everywhere else, so that a traveller with English manages in Bangkok and Bogotá as well as in Boston. The governments of the English-speaking countries test it at the door: the United Kingdom for work, study, partner and settlement visas, Canada for its skilled immigration points, Australia for working holidays and skilled visas, the United States for citizenship though not for visas. Universities in the English-speaking world and English-taught programmes everywhere ask for a score from one of the big exams, usually at the B2 to C1 level; employers ask for “fluent English” and mean the same.

• Ghoti spells fish: The old joke: “gh” as in “tough”, “o” as in “women”, “ti” as in “nation” — and “ough” alone has at least seven pronunciations: though, through, tough, cough, thought, bough, hiccough.
• More learners than natives: Roughly three people speak English as a second language for every one who speaks it as a first, and most English conversations in the world have no native speaker in them.
• No word for bon appétit: English has no everyday phrase to wish someone a good meal; “enjoy your meal” is what waiters say, and diners say nothing. Learners find the silence strange; natives do not notice it.
• The capital I: English is the only major language that capitalises the word for “I” and not the word for “you” — a habit from medieval scribes that nobody has corrected.
• Set has hundreds of meanings: The verb “set” and the words “run” and “go” each have several hundred recorded senses, which is why a learner who knows a thousand words still meets them in new uses daily.
• Sorry means hello: In Britain “sorry” opens a question to a stranger, apologises for being bumped into, and asks someone to repeat themselves; Britons say it dozens of times a day without regret.
• Pants are not trousers: In Britain “pants” are underwear and “trousers” the outer garment; in America “pants” are trousers. The same word, two countries, one embarrassment.

English has more certificates than any language, and four families matter. IELTS, run jointly by the British Council, IDP and Cambridge, reports a band from 1 to 9 across listening, reading, writing and speaking, in an Academic version for universities and a General Training version for immigration; a band 6.5 is roughly B2, 7 is the lower edge of C1. TOEFL iBT, from the American ETS, scores 0 to 120 and is the exam American universities know best, with 90 to 100 the common range for admission. Cambridge English offers level-named exams — B2 First, C1 Advanced, C2 Proficiency — whose certificates do not expire, unlike IELTS and TOEFL results, which are usually accepted for two years. Pearson's PTE Academic and PTE Core, the Duolingo English Test, LanguageCert and Trinity College London's exams round out the field, and the OET tests English for healthcare professionals in their own clinical settings.

The English-speaking governments name their levels. The United Kingdom accepts only a Secure English Language Test from an approved provider — IELTS for UKVI, PTE Academic UKVI, LanguageCert, Trinity inside the UK — and asks for B2 of Skilled Worker applicants and degree-level students, A1 of partners at the first visa rising to A2 at extension and B1 for settlement, and B1 with the Life in the UK test for settlement and naturalisation alike. Canada measures English in Canadian Language Benchmarks through IELTS General Training, CELPIP-General or PTE Core, and its Federal Skilled Worker programme requires CLB 7 — roughly IELTS 6 — in every skill. Australia asks for Functional English on its Work and Holiday visa and scores Competent, Proficient and Superior English — IELTS 6, 7 and 8 — in the points test for its skilled visas. The United States tests no English for any visa and tests reading, writing and speaking at the naturalisation interview, with exemptions for age and long residence. Universities ask for IELTS 6.5 to 7 or the equivalent; employers accept any of the exams or none and judge English in the interview.

No language can be learned more completely for free: the whole of the internet is English practice, and the public broadcasters, universities and dictionary publishers of the English-speaking world have built learner's material on a scale no other language approaches. The kit is a learner's dictionary that shows pronunciation and example sentences, a grammar reference that explains the tenses and the articles, a site that plays any word as real speakers say it, and then television, podcasts and news in the variety of English the learner has chosen, with subtitles at first and without them later.

What a tutor adds in English is the mouth and the register. The twenty vowels, the two “th” sounds and the stress pattern that decides whether a word is understood become audible to the learner only when a fluent speaker repeats the word back; and the indirectness that English politeness runs on — the difference between “give me the report” and “could you send me the report when you get a chance?” — is learned by practising with someone who reacts as a native speaker would. A tutor from the country where the learner will live or sit the exam is worth more than one with a famous accent.