Do English Learning Groups On Facebook Help

Peace everyone, I hope you are having a great day. In this video I’ll be talking about English learning groups on Facebook and whether it’s worth joining them or not. So when I first embarked on my English learning journey, I was eager to find resources that would help me improve quickly and so one of the things that I did was to join English learning groups on Facebook.

Obviously I was new and very desperate to shorten my learning curve and I thought Facebook groups could help me achieve that. I’m pretty sure that every one of you watching this can relate to where I was at that point. I mean when we are starting something new whether that’s learning a language or starting a business or something else, we just want things to happen fast.

One day we start learning English and we want to be fluent the next day. I had that attitude in the beginning. I wanted to be fluent in a month and I’m sure you guys have the same attitude towards English as well but learning a dynamic language, a language that’s constantly changing like English is an extremely long and difficult process and we also have to deal with many obstacles along the way like the frustration, loneliness etc.

These emotions do hinder our English learning progress. Let me just give you an example as to how that happens. After learning English for a month, we tend to step into the real world like watching English TV shows or reading English newspapers etc.

Thinking that since we have dedicated an entire month to learning English, we are now fluent and we should be able to understand English that is used in TV shows and newspapers. So what happens is that we barely watch a TV show for a few minutes or read a few lines of a newspaper and we get frustrated and disheartened right away and we lose motivation because we didn’t understand almost anything that was said in the TV show or written in the newspaper which bursts our bubble and makes us think that we don’t have what it takes to master English language and that we should give up. This happened to me too and what I did to keep myself motivated was to listen to English podcasts and YouTube videos where teachers speak slowly and use basic vocabulary so that English learners like us can understand their speech and get confidence and be motivated.

Anyway so after a week or so of learning English I went on Facebook and joined a whole bunch meaning a large number of different groups hoping that I would learn something from these groups. At that time I didn’t even know how to learn English like where to start. English is sort of a complicated language with a vast vocabulary so when we are starting out we should definitely get some help from someone like a teacher or someone like me who is not necessarily an English teacher but has been through the same process so someone like me definitely knows their way around English meaning they know the efficient way of learning English.

When I began learning English in early 2020 I didn’t have a guide. I was totally out on a limb meaning I was alone and without help or support which is why I wasted a great deal of time on some useless resources like these Facebook groups that we are talking about here. I mean these groups are kind of delusional.

They claim to help us in learning English but there is no valuable information in these groups. We are only provided with quiz questions some fill in blanks and other useless stuff that contributes nothing to our language development. I actually learned the hard way that we need to use the base form of any verb after the verb did when we are talking about the past.

For example we can’t say I didn’t knew that would be incorrect. The correct way to say it is I didn’t know. Imagine nobody posted this simple basic grammar rule in any of these groups.

I learned it after making a lot of mistakes. I remember watching a movie I can’t tell you the name and a guy said did you know and that really confused me. I thought to myself that there must be something wrong with these guys or this movie or whatever but the reality was that I was wrong not the movie.

However I really had a hard time accepting the fact that my English wasn’t good enough. Now the problem is that some of these groups have millions of members as you can see here. This makes us want to join these groups because we think to ourselves that these millions of people who are member of these groups can’t be fools right.

If these groups didn’t have valuable information then why would they have so many members. But the truth of the matter is that there’s rarely any valuable information in them and most of these members are just amateurs who don’t take learning English seriously enough. As you can see here I’m scrolling through these English learning groups on Facebook.

Do you see any valuable information? Nothing. People are just goofing around here. There aren’t many serious English learners.

Occasionally somebody posts something valuable but that’s a rarity. Now I would suggest leaving these Facebook groups so that other English learners don’t get fooled by the large number of members that these groups have. You might be thinking I use Facebook a lot what should I do after leaving these groups.

Well don’t worry if you use Facebook frequently and want to learn English through it you definitely can. There are some alternative ways that you can utilize to learn English through Facebook. One of them is to follow motivational or quote sharing pages or other pages and groups where people post in English.

This way just by reading their posts you learn how sentences are formed, the differences between certain synonyms, common collocations. For example you can’t say do a crime that would be incorrect. You have to say commit or perpetrate a crime.

Likewise when meeting someone you can say how are you doing which may seem incorrect but it is actually the correct way of asking someone about their well-being and life. So languages like English are full of complexities like the ones that I have just mentioned and in order to be able to fully communicate in English we need to learn all that stuff all the ins and outs of the language. The best way to do this is to observe how native speakers communicate.

Facebook pages and groups where people post in English can definitely help us with that. If we immerse ourselves in English for a long time like reading, listening and speaking in English we will eventually develop intuitive understanding of the language. This means that we will automatically know whether a certain sentence is correct or incorrect.

Just like with our mother tongue the language that we are born speaking where our intuition stops us from making mistakes. It’s our intuition that helps us to speak without worrying about the grammar rules and making mistakes but practice and learning are still essential to develop this intuition. So it is best to follow these pages and join groups that I’ve mentioned and leave English learning groups where there is rarely any valuable information.

Even though the large number of members may impress you. Now I’m not saying you should only follow these motivational or quote sharing pages. You can follow any page you like where people post in English.

That could be about games if you have a weak spot for games. Meaning if you like games or pages about news or anything that you are interested in. It is not just limited to these groups that I’ve mentioned.

So that’s all I wanted to share. I hope I’ve covered everything about Facebook English learning groups and if you have found any value at all in this podcast episode you can like and share it with your friends or family who are learning English.