An engineer emailed me before a €20 million construction project. Stakeholder meetings, negotiations, contracts, all coming at him fast. His English wasn't quite where it needed to be.
He had two options in front of him. One was a 12-week one-on-one course built around his actual project. The other was a three-day intensive somewhere quiet, small group, all meals included, €4,500.
He picked the three days.
He won't be the last. Barely a month goes by without an engineer asking me whether some three-day miracle is worth it. So: do intensive English courses work? This episode takes apart the three things engineers get sold when they want to fix their English fast — the three-day cure, the native-speaker trap, and the price-tag illusion. Then I tell you what actually works instead.
Spoiler: I have opinions.
What you'll learn in this episode
Not the way they're sold. You can learn about a language in three days. You can't learn a language in three days. An intensive gives you a short spike, then a fast fade. Without spaced practice afterwards, most of it is gone within weeks.
No. Language sticks through repetition over time, not one concentrated burst. That's memory science, not opinion. Think about how you got good at anything technical — you used the tool, hit a wall, fixed it, used it again the next Monday.
Native-speaker status doesn't predict teaching quality. Being born into a language doesn't mean you can explain it. Around 80% of English teachers worldwide are non-native speakers. What predicts quality is pedagogy, experience, and the ability to explain why the language works the way it does.
Phrasal verbs are great for the coffee kitchen and risky in a spec. "We figured out the issue" should be "we identified the issue." "The system broke down" should be "the system failed." Phrasal verbs sound casual, stay vague, and translate badly between non-native speakers. In a risk assessment, that ambiguity becomes a safety problem.
Price is almost completely unrelated to results. Engineers are sharp buyers everywhere else — you'd never approve a €4,500 component without reading the data sheet. But with language training, smart people fall for the price-quality heuristic and treat the price tag as a spec.
Shorter sessions spread over weeks. Real work scenarios — your emails, your meetings, your stakeholders. Practice on live projects between sessions. A teacher who can explain why. And the one to sit with: forget fluency, aim to be understood.
Resources and Links
- What's the Point of Fluency? — the longer version of "aim to be understood"
- How to Keep Learning English When You're a Busy Engineer — the spaced-practice question, answered for real calendars
- Why You Can't Understand Native English Speakers (Even With a Certificate) — the other half of the native-speaker problem
- What Is Technical English and Why Engineers Need It — why the coffee-kitchen version won't carry a tender document
- The Foundation — one-on-one coaching built around your actual work, over 12 weeks
- The 25 Minutes — short, focused one-on-one sessions for engineers with tight calendars
- Unstuck Your English — free, and a decent place to start
- Get the newsletter
Connect with Olivia Augustin
Olivia Augustin is a civil engineer and certified English as a 2nd language and Business English teacher. With her one-on-one lessons and group courses, she teaches non-native English-speaking engineers the kind of English that gets the job done.
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