How I learnt English and why I kept learning

I started learning English in high school.

German would have been the logical choice. The town where I grew up had an influx of Austrian tourists every day, so German was the obvious practical language.

But I chose English.

At the time, I had very little idea what learning English would involve. My main contact with the language had been through pop songs I listened to on the radio.

Then came my first English lesson.

I remember the textbook almost as clearly as I remember the lesson itself. It had colour pictures printed on glossy paper and a carefully designed layout from a major UK publisher.

That may sound insignificant now. It wasn’t then.

We were used to rather bland, state-published school books. This looked and felt different. The book itself made English seem like something connected to another world.

Our teacher was young and enthusiastic.

And somehow, from that first lesson, I had the feeling:

This is for me.

Then I started learning on my own

I spent hours in the afternoons with the textbook and the audio tapes.

That was essentially all I had.

No internet.
No YouTube.
No apps.
No online conversation partners.
No streaming English-language content.

Just a book, some tapes and my own curiosity.

After a couple of weeks, I noticed something interesting.

Words and phrases were coming to me quite easily. I was often quicker than my classmates at answering questions and completing tasks.

That gave me another reason to keep going.

English was becoming something I wanted to understand, not simply another school subject I had to study.

English was also becoming a doorway

This was in the final years of the Eastern Bloc, only a few years before the political changes that would transform the part of Europe where I grew up.

I obviously didn’t understand the significance of that at the time.

But English was about to become much more than a school subject.

It was becoming a way of accessing a world that had previously felt distant.

The language gave access to music, information, people, ideas and eventually travel.

Looking back, I think that sense of discovery was an important part of my motivation.

I wasn’t learning English simply because I was supposed to.

I wanted to know what was on the other side of it.

English became part of who I was

By the time I finished high school, English had become one of the defining parts of my education.

I took part successfully in local and regional English competitions and was admitted to university, where I studied English Language and Literature in Budapest.

University gave me a much more formal understanding of the language.

But something was still missing.

I had studied English extensively.

I knew grammar. I had a substantial vocabulary. I could read difficult texts.

Then travelling gave me something that books could not.

Conversation.

Real people speaking naturally, at their own speed, with their own accents, shortcuts, references and ways of expressing themselves.

It was another stage in my relationship with English.

I was no longer simply learning about the language.

I was experiencing how people actually used it.

From learner to teacher

Another significant milestone came when I obtained my CELTA qualification.

I then started teaching at the language centre where I had done my training.

When I graduated in 1998, continuing to teach was the most natural thing to do.

So I did.

And I have been teaching English ever since.

Over the years, my work has taken me through very different teaching contexts and, after moving to Spain, into working extensively with professionals from different sectors.

That changed the questions I was interested in.

How does someone who knows a lot of English actually use it under pressure?

Why can someone understand something perfectly but struggle to say it?

Why can a learner know a grammatical rule but not access it when speaking?

Why does pronunciation sometimes affect how a message is perceived?

Why do some explanations suddenly make something click for a learner when other explanations don’t?

And perhaps most importantly:

What actually makes English usable?

Teaching has kept me learning

After more than 25 years of teaching, I don’t see teaching as simply transferring knowledge from teacher to learner.

Every lesson gives me something to observe.

A question.
A misunderstanding.
A surprising response.
A moment when something suddenly becomes clear.
A recurring pattern.

Over time, those observations accumulate.

They make me question assumptions about language learning, look for connections between things that are often taught separately, and experiment with different ways of making English clearer, more memorable and more usable.

In other words, my English-learning journey never really stopped.

It changed form.

First I was learning from books and tapes.

Then from teachers.

Then from travel and conversation.

Then from teaching.

And now, I continue learning from the people I teach and from the questions that teaching keeps generating.

Why Createnglish?

Createnglish grew out of that journey.

It is a place where I can share some of the things I’ve discovered along the way — about English, pronunciation, rhythm, communication, learning and the often-hidden mechanisms behind them.

Sometimes the interesting thing is a word.

Sometimes it is a sound.

Sometimes it is a pattern.

Sometimes it is the difference between knowing something and actually being able to use it.

And sometimes an idea needs a completely different way of looking at it before it makes sense.

That’s what has kept English interesting to me for all these years.

I started learning English because, somehow, that first lesson made me feel:

This is for me.

More than 25 years of teaching later, I’m still finding out what that actually means.