Friday, March 07, 2008
Let's learn English together.(This is a quite a lengthy post, so go grab a cookie and a drink!)
Let me say this right from the start:
I do not claim to be an English Teacher, nor do I strive to be one.I do not look down on anyone either.So what's the fuss about learning English?
It's simply good learning attitude to better oneself.I've had friends correcting my grammar or pronounciation straight in my face too, in case you're wondering. While I agree that the primary purpose of learning a language is to communicate, I can hardly see any harm in speaking it "properly". And by "properly" I'm refering to
conventional standards.
More reasons to speak better English:
1. It's quite embarrassing when we don't understand what our date from some top 5 JC is saying and you have to go "huh?" x 99.
2. Imagine you're in a social gathering and you were
aggressively arguing with someone whether the word
dyslexic is pronounced as
dis-lek-sic or
die-slek-sic. And it ends up that you're wrong.
3. Your younger sibling comes home from school and asks you:
Hey kor, how do you spell the word exaggerate?
j
(Try it. Cover the screen NOW and try spelling the word.
I've seen so many people spelling it with double x's, g's, and r's.)
j
4. You can't decide whether to use "had been", or "has been" in some paper you're writing.
I'm not really fooling around when I suggested the above situations. They are very likely to occur, and I'm going to confess that I've experienced all of them before. Let's face it, it can be damn paiseh sometimes when we mispronounce some words in front of others.
So, have I got any of you interested by now? Well for those of you who aren't really keen, why don't you follow through and try to spot my various spelling, grammatical or punctuation mistakes yeah? =) here we go.
Three Simple Tips to improve your English, spoken and written.1. Find out what you do not know.Make it a point to go find out what a word means when you have no idea what it means, or how you should be using it. For the observant ones, you'd have noticed that I've bold-ed some of the words used in this post so far. Go do abit of searching. You're online anyway.
Try this website if you're clueless where to start:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/For those who are slightly more diligent, keep a little pocket notebook in which you could scribble words which you encountered in the day, say when you're reading news. (That's if you do read news. I know most of us can't really be bothered with reading the papers.)
And ask someone if you don't understand something. Well if all else fails you can ask me, though I hardly consider myself qualified. But hey, I would go find out from someone else if I don't know for sure too. =)
2. Start reading.Speaking of reading the papers, you don't have to purchase a physical copy of the Straitstimes (although that is strongly encouraged) in order to keep yourself
abreast with the latest happenings. You can simply go to (yes, yet another website, haha):
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/Try to get into a
routine. Be realistic, don't aim for the skies. Start by clicking on whichever piece of news you find interesting. If financial and world news sound absolutely alien to you, try local news. I'm sure reading about Mas Selamat can be quite
intriguing. Just kickstart the habit of reading. Trust me that as you read more, you'd certainly start forming more
coherent sentences. Reading news is like killing two birds with one stone.
This is another online source of local
perspectives I frequent:
http://theonlinecitizen.com/Apart from reading news, which I admit can be quite dry at times, try novels if you seriously loathe current affairs. Here are some authors you can give a go if you enjoy the same genre of fiction books as me.
a. Fantasy: David Eddings, Mercedes Lackey.
b. Politics and Law: Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham
These four are like my all-time favourite authors anyway.
3. Be open to criticism.Last but not least, don't feel paiseh when your friends correct you. I remember Cheryl was telling me that the word "schedule" is pronounced as
ske-jule, and not
share-dew. She's like 9 years younger than me, and I stand corrected. There's really no need to feel unhappy or upset. I understand that it can be quite
unnerving when your friend corrects you in front of everyone, but try to see the positive side?
On a personal note, to all my friends: Please continue to correct me. =) And for those of you who are already doing everything mentioned above, you should be reading something else apart from my blog! lol
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Ok, I know I said 3 simple points, and I ended up writing that whole chunk of stuff. -laughs- I hope the effort I've taken to compose this entry would give you the encouragement to start adopting a more positive learning attitude when it comes to the
mastery of this language.
To practise what I preach, I shall attempt to have some novel "Word-of-the-day" or "Quote-of-the-day" kind of exercises here at MTM (Marvinthemental can be quite a mouthful to say/type) in future.
Let's start today people!
ps: do you remember the difference between the words "practice" and "practise"? I think I learnt it in Primary 4 and that sure is a looooooong time ago. =)- Marvin
