"What can I do to improve my English?" — this has to be one of the questions I am asked most often.

I usually stop what I'm doing, look at the person asking it, and try and think of a polite thing to say to them. Something that will allow me to go back to doing whatever it was, without making them terribly angry.

Why?

Because there is no single, simple, hard and fast answer to that question.

Please, foreign English teachers across China are not the keepers of some magic potion, which they will only dispense to willing acolytes under secret circumstances. We can't mysteriously help people speak English.

Of course, when I first set out to teach English to a classroom of middle school pupils, I didn't know that, either.

I thought I really did have a solution to the English learning problem, and that the kids would be miraculously able to instantly understand everything I said.

That mindset lasted for about 5 minutes into my first lesson, when it dawned on me that my students didn't have a clue as to what I was saying.

So I went away, and thought about the problem. I discussed it with other foreign English teachers at the school, who seemed, for the most, to be equally in the dark about why we weren't really making any headway into actually improving the students' English skills.

Then I tried a different tactic — I went to see one of the school's Chinese English teachers. I sat down with her, and discovered that I was not alone in my problems, she couldn't cram the English language into the kids, either.