“I’m Bad at English” Is a Lie You’re Telling Yourself
I had a student once — I’ll call her Mai — who apologized to me four times in a single hour. Not for being late, not for missing homework. For her English. “Sorry, my English is so bad,” she said, right before producing a sentence that was, structurally speaking, better than what half my native-speaking friends text me.
That stuck with me. Because Mai wasn’t describing her English. She was describing a story she’d decided to believe about herself, and then she went looking for evidence to prove it right.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: “I’m bad at English” isn’t a fact. It’s a conclusion. And conclusions can be wrong.
Think about how that sentence usually gets built. You mess up a verb tense in front of someone. You blank on a word you definitely know. You reread an email three times because it sounds “off” to you, even though it’s fine. Each of these is a normal, boring part of learning a language — the kind of thing that happens to every single person who has ever picked up a second language, including the ones who are now fluent. But instead of filing it under “learning,” you file it under “proof.” One bad moment becomes an identity.
And once it’s an identity, it starts running the show. You stop raising your hand. You rehearse sentences in your head five times before saying them out loud, which makes you sound less natural, not more. You avoid situations where you might get caught being imperfect — which, unfortunately, describes every situation where actual learning happens.
I’m not going to pretend confidence fixes everything. It doesn’t. You can be confident and still mix up “borrow” and “lend.” Confidence isn’t a substitute for practice, and I’d never tell you to just “believe in yourself” and skip the actual work — that’s the kind of empty advice that gets people nowhere and makes them distrust anyone selling it.
But here’s the pivot: the belief and the skill are two separate problems, and you’re currently only working on one of them. You could spend the next six months perfecting your grammar, and if you still walk into every conversation believing you’re “bad at English,” you’ll edit yourself into silence anyway. The belief has to get dismantled on purpose. It doesn’t fade on its own just because your vocabulary grows.
So try this. Next time you catch yourself saying “my English is bad,” stop and ask what you actually mean. Usually it’s something specific and fixable — “I mix up prepositions” or “I freeze when I have to speak fast.” That’s a skill gap. Name it like one. “I’m bad at English” is a life sentence. “I mix up prepositions” is a Tuesday afternoon problem.
Mai, by the way, stopped apologizing around week six. Not because her English got dramatically better in six weeks — it didn’t, not really. She just ran out of patience for a story that wasn’t true.
Stop telling it too.
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