I really enjoy watching Ted Talks. It contains a great bunch of useful information and inspire you to discoveries.

Recently, I've wathed an exciting Ted video about confidence in speaking a foreign language. This is the first part of my retelling the whole story.

A Ted speaker named Marianna Pascal is a teacher. She's been training Malaysians and thousands of Southeast Asians for the past few years. So, she discovered a surprising truth. How somebody communicates in language has very little to do with their English level. It has to do with their attitude towards English.

There are a lot of people with very low English level, but they're able to communicate with a proper level of calm and confidence. The teacher gives one example from her teaching practice. She trained staff members that time. One participant of her, let's call him, Faizal has that very low English level. He was a factory supervisor. During her lessons Marianna notice a great ability of Faizal to settle problems. He just sat and listen to anybody attentively, and then he could respond at a very low level of English. He could express his thoughts beautifully, with that calm, clear confidence.

The teacher set the question what so different is about people like Faizal. She underlines that finding the answer is really important not only to you. But also to your children, to your community and to the future of Malaysia.

She added that getting to know the answer to the question gives you an opportinity to do something, starting today, if you want to speak with that calm, clear confidence.

To show how that thing works she gives us one more example, where she compared speaking English with playing the piano. She took us 10 years back. Her duaghter dreaded going into piano lessons. She absolutely hated them. When she needed to attend some of this piano lessons, she was filled with that sort of dread. It was connected with one thing. Her piano teacher and she know exactly how her music should sound. Her success was measured by how few mistakes she had made. It was all about not screwing up. So, Marianna Pascal talked about these similarities between playing the piano and speaking English. She talked that Malaysians went into conversations with the same feeling of dread.