I feel sorry for Vietnamese parents who have to spend so much on IELTS

I remember sweating every time I opened The Times. Articles on travel, gardening, entertainment, celebrities, and social culture were written with such skill and nuance that even after checking the dictionary endlessly, I still couldn't fully understand them.

Often, these articles used local expressions or references to plays and idioms that I had to search extensively on Google just to make sense of.

When I read my nephew's textbook, I noticed the sentences were very dense. A single concept would be expanded into multiple directions, described with wordy passages. The authors avoided listing too many numbers, yet tried to sound both objective and detached.

These texts aim to impress a general science-interested audience with diverse vocabulary, syntax, and metaphors. A short paragraph can contain a vast amount of scattered information with little connection between ideas. It requires heavy memorization and makes it easy to lose track or misunderstand the next paragraph due to the complex relationship between ideas.

A simpler example: open a random article on English Wikipedia and try reading it. You'll find that understanding the general idea still takes effort. That's "real English," because real life is complex.

Out of curiosity, I recently tried the 2025 national high school graduation English exam. After finishing it, I concluded that there are three key conditions for doing well: understanding vocabulary, understanding sentence structure, and the ability to infer.

If subjects like Math and Physics are games governed by theorems and laws, then English is a game where the "rules" are embedded right in the wording of the question. The answer is often hidden nearby, usually with one or two hints in plain sight.

The logic of the reading texts tends to follow a clear pattern. So depending on your abilities and background, each person can apply those three conditions—vocabulary, structure, and inference—to reach the correct answer in their own way.

Some people complain that the exam uses too many difficult words. That's fair. But in truth, we don't need to understand every single word. For instance, "burn the midnight oil", I may only recognize "midnight." Or "sleight of hand", I can still catch "hand." I look at the tone: is the author praising or criticizing? If there’s a "but," I know to expect a contrast.

For unfamiliar vocabulary, I ask eighth or ninth graders, they tell me these words appear in intensive exam prep materials.

So why does the exam still feel difficult?

First, because parents love their children but may not fully understand what students are going through. Adults go to work; students go to school. Working adults face countless distractions. And knowledge in books can fade if not practiced regularly. Students often don't have time to absorb and remember everything deeply before they graduate.

Second, today's students learn differently. English now requires all four skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. But time and teaching resources are limited. Kids speak quickly and casually, while we used to memorize each word methodically and then forget it anyway.

In my opinion, sentences, no matter the language, should be simple and concise, not flowery. I graduated with a degree in a different foreign language, and never took the IELTS test because it's just too expensive. I truly sympathize with parents who have to spend so much money on IELTS preparation.

I've never attended an English center. I only studied for seven years with those small English books, black-and-white print on yellowish paper. We read, practiced grammar, and did exercises. Those books had flexible and varied sentence structures, so I became familiar with complex syntax and could understand their meaning.

Later, I got another textbook—more decorative, but also filled with overly elaborate sentences that required a lot of memorization and fill-in-the-blanks. My mother even bought me a massive Vietnamese-English dictionary published in 1995. It was as heavy as a brick.

Back then, there was no developed Internet, no Google, let alone Google Translate or ChatGPT. But we studied those textbooks diligently. Even if the sentences were long, I could still get the general idea.