Your English Is Not Behind
Why comparing yourself to other learners can slow you down more than the language itself ever will.
There is a particular kind of discouragement that does not come from the language itself. It does not come from a difficult grammar point or a word you cannot remember. It comes from looking sideways. At the person in your class who seems to pick everything up effortlessly. At the learner on a platform like LingQ whose word count is three times yours. At the colleague whose English sounds more natural, more confident, more fluent than you feel yours will ever be.
That comparison is almost always the beginning of a story that ends with “maybe I am just not good at this.”
It is also almost always wrong.
Everyone arrives differently
Two people can start learning English on the same day, follow the same method, put in the same hours, and end up in very different places six months later. One might have a richer vocabulary. The other might have a more natural accent. One might construct sentences with more grammatical precision. The other might speak more freely, with less hesitation, even if the grammar is looser.
Neither of them is ahead. They are just different.
What shapes those differences has almost nothing to do with ability and almost everything to do with background. Someone whose first language shares roots with English, like a Dutch or German speaker, will find vocabulary and sentence structure easier from the start. Someone who grew up listening to English music and watching English films has already absorbed thousands of hours of input before they ever sit down to study. Someone who uses English at work every day is getting reinforcement that someone in a monolingual environment simply does not have access to.
These are not advantages that some people earned and others didn’t. They are just different starting points. And different starting points produce different trajectories.
The shape of your English is your own
Beyond speed, there is the question of what kind of English learner you become. And this is something that rarely gets talked about.
Some learners develop an exceptional ear. They pick up rhythm and intonation naturally, and their spoken English sounds almost native long before their grammar or vocabulary catches up. Others build vocabulary first, reading voraciously, absorbing words and phrases, and find that speaking lags behind what they can read and understand. Some have a remarkable instinct for grammar, constructing precise and accurate sentences, while others are more creative and expressive but looser with the rules.
None of these is the right way to be a language learner. They are just different strengths, shaped by different habits, different inputs, and different personalities.
The learner who reads a lot tends to build a rich, precise vocabulary. The learner who listens a lot tends to develop better pronunciation and rhythm. The learner who speaks a lot, even imperfectly, tends to develop fluency and confidence faster. Most learners do a mix of all three, but the balance is rarely equal, and the results reflect that.
If your spoken English feels behind your reading comprehension, that is not a flaw. It is information. It tells you something about where your input has been focused, and where you might put more attention.
The trap of looking sideways
Online learning communities are full of people sharing their progress. Word counts, streaks, hours logged, milestones reached. Most of it is genuinely encouraging, and seeing other people succeed can remind you that the process works.
But it can also quietly become a source of shame if you let it.
You see someone who has read twice as many words this month. Someone who has been consistent every single day. Someone whose progress seems to be moving faster than yours.
What you cannot see is that they might be retired with four hours a day to read. Or that they started six months before you. Or that they are learning English as their third language, having already been through this process twice before. Or that they are simply in a season of life where everything is calm and focused, whereas you are managing a job and a family and whatever else the week has thrown at you.
Progress is not a race. And even if it were, you would not be running it under the same conditions as everyone else.
The only comparison that matters
I have written before about looking back at old photographs and noticing how much your eye has changed. The same thing happens with language.
Go back and read something you wrote in English a year ago. Listen to a recording of yourself speaking, if you have one. Think about the conversations that used to feel impossible and now feel ordinary. Think about the content you could not follow six months ago that you now consume without thinking about it.
That is the comparison that tells you something real. Not where you are relative to someone else, but where you are relative to where you were.
Progress in language learning has a habit of becoming invisible the moment it arrives, because the things that were hard simply become normal. You stop noticing them. The vocabulary you struggled to remember gets absorbed and disappears into the background. The grammar pattern that tripped you up stops tripping you up. None of it announces itself. It just quietly becomes part of how you use the language.
Which means that most learners are further along than they feel. The discomfort of the current edge is so present and so loud that it drowns out everything that has already settled into place behind it.
Different speeds, same destination
Some learners reach conversational fluency in a year. Others take five. Both are normal. Both are fine. The speed at which you travel does not change where you end up, and it says nothing meaningful about your intelligence, your dedication, or your potential.
What matters is that the input keeps coming. That you keep reading, keep listening, keep having conversations in English even when it feels uncomfortable. Tools like LingQ and Glossika are useful precisely because they make it easier to keep the input consistent, even in a busy life, even on the days when progress feels invisible. That consistency is what the process runs on. Not speed. Not talent. Just showing up, regularly, over time.
If you want a space to speak and be heard, without judgement and without comparison, you can find a teacher on iTalki, or book a session directly with me. We will talk about where you are, not where anyone else is.
Try This
Find something you wrote or recorded in English from at least six months ago. A message, an email, a voice note, anything.
Read it or listen to it.
Notice what has changed. Not what is still imperfect. What has changed.
That gap between then and now is your progress. It does not care how fast someone else is moving. It is just yours.
Have you ever caught yourself comparing your English to someone else’s and felt discouraged? What happened when you shifted the comparison to your former self instead?
If this post helped, a like lets me know and a restack helps it reach another learner who might need it.
Tools mentioned in this article:
LingQ — read and listen to English content you actually enjoy, with instant word lookup, making daily input practical no matter how much time you have
Glossika — daily sentence repetition that builds the speaking habit and the feel for natural English rhythm
iTalki — if you’d like to put your English to use in a real conversation, you can book a session directly with me
Thanks for reading. I’m Richard, based in Auckland, New Zealand, an English fluency coach who believes fluency is something you absorb, not something you’re taught.
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