I Started Learning English Grammar

I put off English grammar for years — a classic frog goal. It turned out one simple decision stood between me and the goal: message a tutor.

We don’t start not because it’s hard. It’s the other way around. It’s hard because we don’t start.

There are goals in our life — frog goals — that we reeeeally don’t want to take on. As the old song goes: “we put this moment off as long as we could.” That’s how things went between me and English grammar rules and tenses.

But a few weeks ago I finally worked up the nerve to message a tutor and started learning English grammar.

I’ve spoken the language reasonably well since my school years and understand it perfectly by ear. 80% of my YouTube is English-language channels, and by now I read books in the original with ease.

But when I start speaking myself, I’ll often mix up verb tenses, slap in the wrong articles, or make some other mistake.

And a command of the language close to C2 could be very useful to me in a few years.

I try to plan my life over long stretches of time, so if you ask me “what do you want from life 20 years from now,” I’ll be able to give you a specific answer.

I understand perfectly well that most of my goals may never come true, and that many plans go through serious corrections along the way, but I still consider setting and reaching goals an important skill, and I work on it constantly.

Nobody else is going to set life goals and want things on my behalf.

Among my very distant plans is the desire to enter the English-language media market. Both with my content on social media and with my own books.

If God allows and all goes well, in 3-4 years that question may become relevant. By then I’d like to move from my current B2 up to C2.

So I started lessons with a tutor who, from the very first sessions, explained Present Simple and Present Continuous in a way that finally made sense to me. We’ll be studying one hour every week.

I added an item to my habit tracker, Habitty: 5-7 minutes of English grammar exercises every day.

It’s a great feeling when something starts to work out and you’re finally doing what you should have done long ago.

When you feel progress in some area of your life, you feel happy.

And the most interesting part of all this is that often just 1 simple decision separates us from moving toward our goal — get in touch with the right person and simply start.

Have you started working on any of your goals this year?

Do you have frog goals you don’t want to take on?