Many learners share the same picture. One day you’ll move to an English speaking country, the language will be all around you, and fluency will arrive on its own. You’ll order coffee in English, chat with the neighbours, read the street signs, and one morning realise you dreamed in English.
It’s a lovely picture, and it leaves out how people actually live once they move.
Living abroad and living in English are different things
I teach plenty of students who have moved to English speaking countries. Some have been there for years, and their English is still quite basic. When we talk through their days, the reason is usually easy to see.
At home they speak their mother tongue with their partner, often on purpose, to keep the language alive for their kids. That’s a lovely thing to do, and I’d never suggest otherwise. Their friends come from the same language community, so weekends happen in the mother tongue too. Some work in businesses run by people from their own country, so the working day is in the mother tongue as well.
Add it all up and they hear very little English. The country around them speaks English, but their day doesn’t. Moving abroad can be a wonderful thing, but it’s no silver bullet.
The reverse is also true. Some of the most fluent English speakers I’ve met have never set foot in an English speaking country. They built their immersion at home, one change at a time, until English was a normal part of daily life.
Immersion comes from what fills your day, and you can arrange that anywhere.
Moving abroad does help
An English speaking country gives you a big head start. English is on the street, on public transport, in the shops, and on the radio. Everyday errands like going to the supermarket or buying a coffee become short conversations with real stakes, at natural speed, day after day. Those small exchanges add up, and they’re hard to copy at home.
The bulk of the work is still yours, though. Reading, listening, and speaking practice have to happen on purpose, and you can do all of it wherever you live, whether that’s your home country or a new one. A move abroad gives you more chances to practise, and the learning still depends on you taking them.
Immersion comes down to volume
People link immersion with fluency because of volume. When you live inside a language you meet it constantly, in the conversation overheard at the supermarket, the menu at the café, the radio in the taxi, the chatter at work. None of it feels like study, and all of it is input.
Your brain is good at spotting patterns. Give it enough English and it starts to notice how sentences are built, which words sit comfortably together, and how a question sounds different from a statement before you’ve sorted out the individual words. All of this happens without conscious effort, and the volume does the teaching.
So the real question is whether you can build that volume without being surrounded by English. These days you can.
Change the default language of your day
Rather than adding English on top of a day that’s otherwise in your first language, change what plays by default, so English is what’s happening unless you choose otherwise.
Start with your social media. Swap a few accounts in your first language for English ones on the same topics, like news, comedy, cooking, or sport. You’ll scroll as usual, only now it counts as input.
When you look something up, try searching in English. A recipe, a product review, whether you can freeze cooked rice. You were going to spend ten minutes reading about it anyway.
Your evenings can shift too. The show you watch, the music you play while cooking, and the Sunday afternoon YouTube spiral all work just as well in English.
Each change is small. Together they change what your home sounds like.
Feed your ears
Listening is the easiest channel to keep running all day, because it doesn’t compete with anything else you’re doing. A podcast while you get dressed, commute, exercise, cook, clean, or walk turns the background of your day into English.
A modest estimate gives five to seven hours of listening a week from time that used to be silent or filled with your first language. That’s twenty to thirty hours a month and hundreds over a year, from someone who never sat down to study.
Pick content you’d listen to in your own language, like football, true crime, psychology, business, comedy, or cooking. When you’re curious about the topic you stay with it, and you take in more.
Read in the gaps
Reading needs more attention than listening, so it can’t run in the background. Fifteen minutes is enough, though, and almost everyone has fifteen minutes somewhere. The morning coffee, the lunch break, the ten minutes before sleep, the wait at the doctor’s.
LingQ helps here because you can import whatever you want to read and tap any unknown word for an instant definition. The reading stays smooth even when the vocabulary is tough, which is what you need in short windows.
Think in English now and then
One of the simplest habits costs nothing. When you notice yourself narrating your own day in your head, try doing it in English. “I need to buy milk. What should I cook tonight? That cloud looks odd.”
Do it occasionally and keep it casual. Nobody is grading these thoughts. Over time this blurs the line between your first language and English, and English starts to feel like it lives alongside your first language, which makes listening, reading, and speaking a little smoother.
Sentence practice with Flexling
Listening and reading fill your head with English. Saying it out loud is a separate skill, and it’s the hardest one to practise when your days are mostly in another language. This is where Flexling fits in.
Flexling is a sentence based app. You hear natural English sentences, repeat them out loud, and spaced repetition brings back the ones you need to see again. Its shadowing mode works hands free, so a walk, a commute, or a drive can double as speaking practice. You can add sentences from your own life, like the ones you’d use at work or with your neighbours, and choose between Australian, UK, US, or mixed English audio, so your ear gets used to more than one accent.
For learners who live abroad but spend most of the day in their mother tongue, this is a simple way to turn time you already spend walking or driving into English time. There’s a free plan too, and it’s generous enough to try properly before you pay anything.
Speaking with real people
A home setup can’t fully reproduce the unscripted exchanges you’d have in an English speaking country, like the cashier, the taxi driver, or the person asking for directions. A regular conversation with a real person gets close, and even once or twice a month it wakes up the English you’ve been absorbing. You can find a teacher on iTalki, or book a session directly with me.
If you do live in an English speaking country, look for pockets of English in your week. A hobby group, a class, a volunteer role, or a regular chat with a neighbour all add up, especially when the rest of your day is in your mother tongue.
Between sessions, talk to yourself. Narrate what you’re doing, rehearse a conversation you’re about to have, or describe your day on the drive home. Every sentence you say, even to an empty room, turns passive knowledge into active speech.
The Dutch and Nordic example
The EF English Proficiency Index has ranked the Netherlands first among all countries for years, with Denmark, Norway, and Sweden regularly near the top. None of them is an English speaking country. Subtitled rather than dubbed television is widely credited as a big part of the reason, because people grow up hearing English from the sofa every evening.
They built immersion without moving anywhere, and the tools available to you now are better than anything they had. Lingopie turns your screen time into input with clickable subtitles. Podcasts are free and endless, English reading material is everywhere, and a conversation with a real person is a booking away.
Try This
Pick one change from this post and make it today, like putting a podcast on for your next walk or swapping a few social media accounts for English ones.
If you live in an English speaking country, first jot down how many hours of yesterday were in English. The number is often smaller than people expect, and it shows you where to start.
If you have a question about your English, something you have been stuck on or curious about, let me know in the comments. I read every one, and I might turn your question into a future post.
If this post helped, a like lets me know and a restack helps it reach another learner who might need it.
Richard, English fluency coach in Auckland, New Zealand, who helps learners fit more English into the day they already have.
Tools I recommend:
Flexling — hands free sentence practice that turns walks and commutes into English time
LingQ — read anything you like in short windows, with instant word lookup
Lingopie — turn evening screen time into input with real shows and interactive subtitles
StoryLearning — compelling, story driven English listening at just the right level
iTalki — real conversation to put your home immersion to use, or book a session directly with me
Some links in this blog are affiliate links. I earn a small commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. I recommend these products because I believe in them.
Absolutely lovely, I am training to jump from the B2 to C1, I live in Spain, and it's very hard to keep one foreign language in this country. Because almost anybody speaks it, I have two mother tongue languages: Spanish and Catalan, and they're the most used all the time outside. I keep watching English videos for a lot of years were in reality I improved very little my listening, moving abroad can help but nowadays, It's very hard to keep one or more foreign languages. I appreciate your tips and I will try them.