關於愛，我是個小學生。

Linguistically speaking, there are two worlds in English learning: the school world and the real world. Unfortunately, the school world is never like the real world. In the school world of English, students study their textbooks full of grammar “rules” and books full of individual vocabulary. Students learn such rules as “never use a sentence fragment”, "avoid run-on sentences”,"never begin a sentence with ‘and’", and such like that, but they relatively seldom practice daily dialogues, due to the demand and trends of English testing cultures, in Taiwan at least.

Take 'plural' rules in junior high school in Taiwan for instance, making plural nouns is simple: 1 computer - 2 computers. Pretty straight forward, right?

Wrong!

When it comes to making nouns plural, there are no clear-cut rules. The exceptions to the rules exceed the rules themselves, for example: If the plural of box is boxes, why is the plural of ox - oxen? If the plural of safe is safes, why is the plural of wife- wives?

It gets even worse…1 foot becomes 2 feet, 1 man becomes 2 men, 1 child becomes 2 children. But if 1 goose becomes 2 geese, why doesn’t 1 moose become 2 "meese"?

Some nouns keep their singular forms when they become plural: 1 fish – 2 fish, 1 sheep – 2 sheep. Some plural forms are based on rules from foreign languages, and follow no rule whatsoever: basis – bases, criterion – criteria... 

Yeah, fantastic grammar world, right?

Nevertheless, in the real world, native English speakers do all of these things every day, only that they use them 'subconsciously'. They frequently speak in fragments, frequently use long run-on sentences, frequently begin sentences with “and”, and frequently end sentences with prepositions. But they DO NOT mind the rules. The rules have by and by 'imprinted' in their brains. If  you learn only these rules and seldom practice them into real use, you would soon forget them easily and have them bear in your mind, not as a tool, but a heavy burdon.

Spoken English is not the same as textbook English. This is a fact that few students understand.  They simply don’t realize that the English they learn in schools is not the English that native speakers use in normal conversations.

Also, real spoken pronunciation is also quite different than what you learn from schools and textbooks. In a normal conversation, native speakers tend to mash words together.  In school, you learned a few standard contractions… but in fact, they create a huge number of non-standard contractions all the time. They connect some words together, and we cut other words shorter.

When you combine all of these differences, you get conversations that sound totally different than what you learned from school and books.

Unfortunately, this is a source of extreme frustration for many students. Any student who has visited North America will tell you that the English spoken on the street is nothing like the English they learned at home or in school.

Here’s the ugly truth: English textbooks are mostly written by conservative academics who have very little identification and updated cognition and understanding of the real world. Likewise, most teachers are more submitted to the real test-oriented world, rather the real English-speaking world to help their students prepare for real English conversation. That's actually the common phenomenon in Taiwanese society. It is inevitable; it is ugly, but it is true, isn't it? Students spend years in school vainly learning English from textbooks. They waste years taking tests and memorizing rules that are not really rules at all - if they would like to use this method to reach conversation versatility. They are totally two different ways and functions after all. It’s a tragedy. However, it’s an avoidable tragedy. The solution is also to place your trust in yourself - not only in schools. You also have to dedicate yourself to learning real English conversation - the real English spoken every day by real native speakers. Thus you can learn English via both ways, different paths, but heading to the same goal - mastering English from all aspects.