In 2019, two researchers at Harvard and MIT published a study of the free online courses their universities had offered. Millions of people had signed up. For the courses of 2017 and 2018, about three per cent of them had finished.
Out of every hundred people who enrolled, ninety-seven stopped somewhere along the way — after the first video, after the first difficult assignment, after a busy week that turned into a busy month. Life is full, and a course is easy to abandon: nobody notices when you leave.
This is the hundredth reading in this collection, so let us be honest about who is reading it.
When you began, a sentence like The Rain Is Starting was a challenge. Since then you have read about a dog who waited at a station, a bridge that a woman finished, a comma that cost five million dollars and a clock that ran ten minutes fast. You have met twelve tenses, and you can explain why I have lived here for ten years is right. If you had stopped at lesson forty, you would not be reading this paragraph. You did not stop.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: you are no longer a beginner, and you should stop thinking of yourself as one. You are one of the three per cent.
What happens now? Not until you use a language does it become yours. A toolkit that stays in the box rusts. So read something in English every day. Write five sentences and check them against your own list of favourite mistakes. Talk to someone — a stranger at a bus stop, if necessary. You will make mistakes. You might feel foolish. Do it anyway.
A year from now, you will have forgotten some of the rules in these hundred lessons. That is fine. Rules are scaffolding: they hold the building up while it is going up, and then they come down. What remains is the building — the English you have built, sentence by sentence, text by text.
Most people who start never get here. You are here.
Well done. Now close this page, and go and use it.