Mô tả thử thách bạn đã vượt qua — IELTS Speaking Part 2

The challenge I'll talk about is learning to speak English without translating in my head first. For years I could read English fine and my grammar was decent on paper, but the moment someone asked me a question, I'd build the whole sentence in Vietnamese and then translate it. It came out slow, and it came out wrong, because Vietnamese and English don't line up word for word. Why was it difficult? Because it wasn't a knowledge problem. I already knew the grammar rules I was getting wrong. It was a speed problem, and you can't fix speed by studying harder. That was the frustrating part — the usual method, which is study more, made no difference at all. What I did in the end was quite boring. I recorded myself answering the same question every day for about two months, then listened back. That was uncomfortable, honestly. The first recordings were painful to hear. But listening back is what showed me the pattern: I always paused in the same place, right before the verb, because that's where Vietnamese and English word order split. How do I feel about it now? It's not finished — I still translate when I'm tired or nervous. But it's gone from most sentences to maybe one in five. And I learned something more useful than English: when a problem doesn't respond to more effort, the method is wrong, not the effort.