Overcoming the English Block

Embrace your intuition and leverage your first language

If you speak Portuguese as a first language and you're struggling with the "English block," it's time to shift your focus from exceptions and false cognates to embracing your natural intuition and leveraging your first language.

The concept of intuition is pivotal here. Intuition is a tool that sizes up the world and makes sophisticated, precise decisions before the reasons are fully conscious. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, refers to these split-second decisions as "snap judgments," a process also known as thin-slicing. In psychology, this is often termed "fast and frugal heuristics." Different fields have their own terms: in basketball, it's called "court sense," and in the military, it’s known as "coup d’oeil" (a French term meaning "stroke of the eye," reflecting a military sense of spatial awareness). Here, we’ll refer to it as simply intuition, or the adaptive unconscious, which highlights two important aspects: its quick, instinctive nature and its ability to operate without using conscious mental energy.

This is the main tool we use in communication. We don't think about grammar patterns when speaking in the same way we don't think about the positions of the keys on a keyboard when typing. In fact, overthinking the positions of the keys can ruin your intuitive spatial awareness. That’s why you experience the mental barrier popularly known as the English block — when your brain gets too technical about the communication process and you get stuck. Many people say they speak English better when they're drunk, because it stops them from overthinking. The good news is that you don't have to drink to get the same effect. A communication-forward approach combined with drilling practices is highly effective in learning a second language: we teach grammar, vocabulary, and phonetics to your intuition, not just to your surface-level cognition.

This is also why we don't focus on "traps" like false cognates, which would only bring you back to an overanalyzing mode. While interesting and sometimes even funny, false cognates are far from being the most relevant intersection between English and Portuguese.

It's important to note that the time it takes to learn a language depends upon which language you're coming from, a phenomenon known as the Linguistic Proximity Principle. Due to the significant intersection between Portuguese and English, learning English is generally easier for Portuguese speakers compared to those with Finnish or Japanese as their first language, for example. The pragmatic application of this principle is known as Comparative Linguistics, and underscores the importance of leveraging this intersection in your learning process.

Learning methods that apply Comparative Linguistics not only boost confidence but also aid in understanding the formality of English usage. For example, many English words of Latin origin tend to be more formal. Since Portuguese is primarily descended from Latin, students can be trained to intuitively recognize a word's higher level of formality in English when it resembles its Portuguese counterpart, such as 'commence' instead of 'start.'

At the early stages of learning, you can use the word that pops into your brain first. As you progress in refining your craft, you can use that intuition to choose the word that better fits each situation. For example, 'start' is suitable for casual conversation, while 'commence' fits more formal contexts. With time, you will notice that highly formal words can also be used facetiously to add character and personality to your speech, even in casual conversation. Yet, you wouldn't even reach this stage if you were held back by a prohibitive focus on false cognates.

While intuition is often inaccurately dismissed as too abstract or unscientific, its role in effective communication is undeniable. Our approach acknowledges its importance in language learning. We advocate for using your first language to build knowledge and confidence, not for arbitrary and rigid comparison traps that can undermine your learning intuition and lead to the dreaded English block. By focusing on congruence points between Portuguese and English, we avoid overwhelming students with an excessive focus on exceptions. This strategy empowers our students to trust their natural intuition to guide them in building upon their previous linguistic knowledge and communicating more fluently and confidently.