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How I Found Myself Effortlessly Dreaming and Thinking in English

 |  ESTIMATED READING TIME:  3 MINUTES

Here’s the video that inspired this comment.

Thinking, and even dreaming in English have always been my thing, and I didn’t even have to learn about any of it anywhere; it just came naturally to me, knowing that I’ve lived in Morocco my whole life, and I’ve never taken any courses — online or otherwise — of any kind. It all comes down to what Eminem said, “You can do anything you set your mind to, man.”

By the way, for those who feel like they can’t think in English, and they end up intrinsically doing literal translation, you should always look for equivalents in other languages. For instance, “What goes around comes around.” = “كما تدين تدان.” Don’t just wing it, and hope for the best.

I’ve been learning English on my own since 2006 (I was 12 at the time), and I still look up new terms, idiomatic expressions, proverbs, etc, every other day. Sometimes before I even write a comment, I verify certain collocations, and the more I’m right, the more progress I realize I’m making — it even becomes easier to guess an unfamiliar term right through context alone. There’s no shame in checking the dictionary every now and then; even legendary musicians do that. Also, remember that it’s not a competition, and you can be your own ideal critic if you learn to not settle for less by not being satisfied with impressing people alone, because people are very easy to impress. I’ve been called a genius — for different reasons — more times than I can count, and many people who interacted with me thought I was either a native speaker or I studied in England, note that the latter doesn’t make that much sense, because I’ve always had an American accent (mind you, I never let compliments stop me from getting better and better). Thing is, I didn’t put in any significant effort in order to sound like a native speaker, because as a kid, I was used to learning things the right way (you could say that perfectionism is ingrained in my DNA), so it just made no sense to me to speak in a broken English.

One other thing to note: There’s a fine line between “accent”, and “pronunciation”, and most people who don’t care end up actually mispronouncing words horribly. One of the reasons I dropped out of university even though I was top of my class: the professors there had the most horrible pronunciation, and yet they had the nerve to talk us down, saying stuff like, “You need to read more.” Yeah, says the guy who pronounces “Mirage” as “My-Ridge”. Get outta here! 😂 By the way, that same Rameses-II-looking professor literally said to me once, “Don’t use difficult words, Ahmed; just simple English.” When I told my cousin — who happens to be a high school English teacher — about that, he was like, “Don’t ever make a professor use a dictionary while grading your exam paper, because they’ll hate you for it.” Thing is, I don’t remember using any difficult words, and I doubt they even grade the papers themselves, which makes it even worse, because imagine a guy who treats English like math grading the paper of someone who sounds exactly like a native. They may have a Master’s degree, sure, but I bet you a million dollars that if I read a single essay of theirs, it’d be crawling with all kinds of mistakes that would give someone like me brain cancer. 😂 Being detail-oriented is such a rare feat, so I know exactly what I’m talking about.

By the way, Ibrahim, YouTube recommended your interview with “دروس أونلاين” out of the blue, knowing that I never look up English-related stuff on YouTube ever. I decided to give that interview a shot yesterday, and I’m glad I did, which led me to your zAmericanEnglish channel. It goes without saying that what you’re doing is very admirable, and as a guy who had to hustle for 5 months to get a TOP RATED badge on Upwork, I can only imagine the dedication it must’ve taken you to achieve something like this. You have my utmost respect, brother. Cheers!