What the teachers are fixing is your confidence, not your grammar
People going abroad to study for the first time tend to worry about the same thing: my English is bad — will the lessons be awkward? Yen-Ju Pai, a Taiwanese student on the TALK4 Hybrid A course and abroad for the first time in her life, answers it plainly.
At the start, she could not speak either
"In my first classes I was honestly afraid my English was not good enough and I hardly dared to speak."
It is worth noticing that she did not skip this part. Most accounts start at "and then it got better", which leaves readers thinking everyone else was born willing to talk. She admits the fear first.
Then she worked out what the teachers were after
"After practising for a while I realised that as long as you are brave enough to open your mouth, it does not matter if the grammar or the pronunciation is imperfect — because what the teachers want is for us to have confidence."
The second half of that sentence is the important one. This is not "I talked myself into it"; it is "that is how the teachers run the room." Their first goal is not to make your sentence correct — it is to get you to say another one.
Filipino teachers have a natural advantage here: they learned English as a second language themselves, so they know what it feels like to be corrected into silence.
"They are very patient, and they give advice aimed at my particular problems."
"My particular problems" is something only a one-to-one lesson can afford to give: not one set of feedback for the whole class, but the exact place where you are stuck.
Outside the classroom is where English becomes ordinary life
"Being around classmates from Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia gave me many more chances to use English. You need English to get through an ordinary day here, so it stopped being knowledge from a textbook."
Listing the countries one by one carries far more weight than the phrase "international environment". Your classmates do not speak your language, so inviting someone to eat, asking directions, saying how your day went — all of it has to be English. That is practice time nobody had to timetable.
English was not the only thing she took away
"This period has not only improved my English — it has made me braver and more independent."
Handling your own life abroad for the first time is its own training: you have to ask about the form you cannot read, report the thing that broke, go somewhere unfamiliar by yourself. English is the tool in all of that, but the thing that changes is the person using it.
Her course runs twenty weeks. When she wrote this she was only at the beginning of it.
Another Taiwanese student, on how a lesson actually runs
If this would be your first time too
Treat "my English is bad" as the reason to go, not the reason to wait. You will be corrected — but you will not be asked to be perfect first. Those two things are very different.
Interested in the course?
Enrolment, start dates and quotes for Talk Academy are handled by partner agencies in each country. Tell them your level as it is, and how many weeks you have.