English for Adult Learners

I have taught English from the other side of the desk. For a year I worked as an English language assistant in Le Havre, on the Normandy coast, teaching English to French students. That followed an Erasmus year in Madrid and a First Class degree in Spanish and International Relations, and it ran on the same small habit: a notebook for every word and pattern that did not behave. Standing at the front of a classroom changes what you notice. The mistakes were not random. The same handful of things tripped up learner after learner, and almost none of them were the things the textbook spent its time on.

English is the strange case among major languages: the grammar is genuinely easy, and the rest is genuinely hard. There is no Foreign Service Institute hours figure that applies to you here, because the FSI rates difficulty for native English speakers learning other languages. Learning English is a different shape of problem, and it pays to be honest about where the difficulty actually sits.

The grammar is light. Nouns do not change for gender. Verbs take almost no endings (I work, she works, and that final s is nearly the whole story in the present tense). There are no case endings to drill. An adult coming from German, Russian, Polish or Spanish often finds the grammar a relief.

The difficulty is everywhere else: in spelling that does not match sound, in phrasal verbs, in articles, in the stress-timed rhythm, and in the sheer number of near-synonyms. These are the things the apps under-serve and the things that actually decide whether you sound like a competent adult.

Where English is actually hard

Four areas account for most of the struggle, and they are worth naming because they are not where beginners expect the pain to be.

• Spelling and sound have separated. Through, though, thought, tough, thorough share five letters and sound nothing alike. English froze its spelling roughly when printing arrived, then kept changing how it was spoken. You cannot reliably guess a word's pronunciation from its spelling, so you must learn the sound and the spelling as two separate facts.
• Phrasal verbs run into the thousands. Get alone gives you get up, get over, get on, get by, get out of, get away with. These are not optional slang; they are how native speakers say ordinary things. Learners who avoid them sound formal and translated.
• Articles resist rules. A, an, the, or nothing at all. Languages without articles (Russian, Mandarin, Polish, Japanese) find this one of the hardest things to ever fully master, and it is a lifelong tidy-up rather than a single lesson.
• English is stress-timed. The rhythm rides on stressed syllables, and the unstressed ones get crushed into a flat uh sound (the schwa). Speakers from syllable-timed languages (Spanish, French, Italian) sound clear but foreign until they let the weak syllables collapse.

The pattern across all four is the same. None are about rules you can revise on a Sunday. All are about volume of exposure, which is exactly what most app-based study fails to deliver.

How long does it actually take?

There is no FSI number for learners of English, so the honest baseline is the CEFR guided-learning-hours estimate used by Cambridge and most exam boards: very roughly 90 to 100 hours per level at the lower end, rising steeply at the top because each level is wider than the last.

A realistic schedule for an adult with a job, studying around 30 minutes a day:

The hours are guided-learning-hours, meaning structured study with a teacher or course. They assume you also do self-study and real listening on top, which most adults under-count. The exam mapping is the practical one: B2 First and IELTS 6.5 are the levels that unlock most universities and skilled work; C1 Advanced is what language-sensitive professions expect. C2 Proficiency is a rare achievement and most adult learners should not target it. C1 is where you operate fully; C2 is where you sound like an educated native, which is a different and much longer project.

British vs American English

Most learners assume there is one English to learn. There is not, and the British/American fork is the first real decision an adult makes. The good news is that it is a smaller fork than the Spanish one: the grammar is over 95% shared and the two varieties are fully mutually intelligible. The differences are real but bounded.

The headline differences:

• Spelling: British colour, centre, organise, travelling vs American color, center, organize, traveling. Pick one and be consistent, because mixing them looks careless in written work.
• Vocabulary: lift / elevator, flat / apartment, lorry / truck, holiday / vacation, trousers / pants, autumn / fall. A few hundred everyday words diverge.
• Pronunciation (rhoticity): most American accents pronounce the r in car and hard; most British accents (including standard Received Pronunciation) drop it. This is the single biggest accent tell.
• Grammar, lightly: Americans say gotten where the British say got; the British more often use the present perfect (I've just eaten) where Americans accept the past simple (I just ate).

Choose by where you are headed. British English for the UK, Ireland, much of Europe and Commonwealth workplaces; American English for the US and for most of the internet, software and entertainment. Then treat the other variety as listening practice, because you will be exposed to both constantly.

What the apps get wrong

The big apps optimise for daily engagement, not adult learning outcomes, and with English the gaps are specific:

• Listening volume: reaching B2 listening takes hundreds of hours of input. Apps deliver perhaps 40 to 60 hours of audio across an entire English course, most of it slow and over-articulated, which is nothing like real speech.
• Speaking practice: the speech-recognition exercises check whether you said something, not whether a person could understand you. Real production needs a real listener.
• Phrasal verbs and collocation: apps teach single words in isolation. English is built from chunks (make a decision, not "do a decision"; heavy rain, not "strong rain"). Learning words one at a time leaves you fluent in the wrong combinations.
• Spelling and sound get split: apps rarely teach the sound of a word alongside its spelling, so learners build a silent reading vocabulary they cannot pronounce or recognise when spoken.

The fix is not to drop the apps. It is to treat them as one input among four (graded reading, listening at volume, speaking with feedback, and structured grammar) rather than as the whole course.

The B1 to B2 plateau

Most adult learners reach B1 in 12 to 18 months and then stall, often for a year or more. The plateau is structural, not a motivation problem.

The mechanism is the same one I watched in the classroom. A1 and A2 reward you for learning common words and surviving simple exchanges. B1 is where the curve bends, because B2 asks you to follow native-speed speech, handle abstract topics, read for pleasure, and deploy phrasal verbs and collocations as a native does. The skills that got you to B1, mostly memorising vocabulary and simple sentence frames, do not get you to B2. The switch that works:

1. Volume listening (podcasts, TV and film in your chosen variety, at natural speed)
2. Free reading at level (graded readers at B1, then real novels and journalism at B2)
3. Speaking with feedback (a tutor or partner who corrects you, not the app)
4. Phrasal verbs and collocation, learned as chunks rather than single words

The learners who break the plateau in six to nine months do all four. The ones who stay stuck for two years usually do one or two and quietly assume the rest are optional. They are not.

Where to start on Kilo Lingo

If you are at A1 or A2, start with the Core 1,000 English words and the English grammar hub, which covers the article system, tenses and the patterns that trip learners up. The English stories use only Core 1,000 vocabulary, so reading practice is achievable from your first week.

If you are working toward B1 or B2, follow the English curriculum in order, then push your listening and reading volume above what feels comfortable. That gap, between the input adults think they need and the input they actually need, is where almost every plateau lives.