Dear Jinhua and Caroline,
It all depends on how you define “hopeless”. As a foreigner, you can still achieve a high degree of fluency in your spoken English, what I’m saying is that you may not be able to remove all your foreign accent, no matter how hard you try
. That is just a fact of life that can not be altered. I have been speaking English for twenty-six years, and I still have a slight accent, especially when I get excited or nervous, it becomes quite obvious then. My son was born in Canada and he has no accent at all. English is basically his mother tongue and he’s rapidly becoming unable to express adequately in our Chinese dialect. He will be in
grade seven this coming September and I am doing my best to push him to take Chinese as his foreign language in Junior High school, but he says he likes French
better.
Having a pair of musical ear can certainly enable you to discern the slightest variance in the intonation and cadence of people’s pronunciations, such that you
can imitate and improve your own oral English accordingly. But it’s rare that
people are gifted with such ears. You should just be thankful and consider yourself lucky.
I think it usually takes decades for a person to become fluent in a second language. It may take longer if you want to be able to simultaneously think and speak
in that language, and this is what is required when you’re doing public speaking. As Mary said before, as long as you don’t have an excessively strong accent
and you can speak with a decent degree of fluency, then you’re well on your way to communicate effectively with any native English speakers. Well, in my case,
it only applies to North American English, because oral British, Irish or Australian English can still drive me up the wall!
It’s unfortunate that Canuck’s Comment is not capable of helping the forum folks here to improve their oral English, but it can still help the users think in
English and transpose those thoughts into writing. As long as you have some basic understanding of the English syntax, in an indirect way, this forum still helps you improve the fluency in your oral English.
I can see some real progress in my own writing after participating in this forum
over the past year, the result is quite overt. The enhanced written ability helps me tremendously when I write emails, reports or prepare financial disclosure
notes in my job. Further more, since I feel the need to better express myself in
this forum, it drives me to actively seek and learn new vocabulary, and after seeing how a strong command of vocabulary can transpire into beautiful and thought provoking writing, such as those demonstrated in Mary’s, Tim’s and Uncle Ben
’s articles, it gives me a substantial boost to keep on reading and learning.
Caroline wrote an intriguing article on “writing in English”, let me respond to that post in the following paragraphs. I’ve talked to quite a few Canadian colleagues of mine on how to improve my written English, and the consensus is that
I need to read more and write more. In order to improve, we have to read other
people’s writing, and learn from their tact in using various words to express ideas. I’m fortunate to live in an English speaking country and surrounded by the sea of English books. I do far more reading than writing, simply because I find great pleasure in reading English books. In fact, I just “squandered” another twenty-two Canadian dollars yesterday on a book called “Happiness Makeover”.
On average I must spend two hundred dollars and buy six to eight books a year.
My experience is that you should read books that are published recently if you want to learn contemporary English. Older books use some old English that are no
longer in use today, and I can’t see that as very practical. Being obsessed with old cliché is certainly something I tried to avoid. During my reading, I use
Kingsoft dictionary software to find every vocabulary in the book; I then try to
learn all of those vocabularies, and I also make notes and abstract sections in
the book that I think are profound and significant. These notes enhance my memory and understanding of what I’ve read. In the past year and a half I have been studying approximately fifty vocabularies a week, and I find it helps my reading as well as my writing.
Caroline, I can appreciate your situation when you say you could hardly feel any
progress. When we reach a bottleneck, it resembles reaching a plateau and suddenly the progress comes to a complete halt, but if we persist on proceeding, as we must, it’s quite certain that we will reach the foothill of another sky-scraping mountain, then prominent progress is at hand once again, and higher altitude
is within reach. So I really think we must read, in order to write better, and
the ratio should be at least 3 to 1. Prolific reading can give us a good sense of how to use our words appropriately, and avoid awkward writing. In a few odd occasions I even buy a book not because I like the topic but because I like the author’s writing style. I find more value from learning the writer’s knack, than
his thoughts.
Before we can write well, we must be able to write smoothly and fluently. I think avoid using obscure words that we’re not sure of is the key. I remember the professor of my “Business writing” course once said, a glibly written article using simply words is still better than an article fraught with glitzy words, but
with awkward syntaxes.
For one thing, feeling discontent and insatiable about our English is surely the first step toward real improvement. It provides strong urge for unceasing pursuit and learning. We all need this kind of impetus to propel us to remain studious, and may be, some day in the distant future, we may just accidentally become erudite, like those lucky bunches whose mother tongue happens to be English.
It would be deceiving to think that my English is very good. It’s all relative.
I have been living in the sea of English for a good number of years, and it’s
only natural that my English appears to be slightly more fluent than yours. But
nothing can change the fact that my mother tongue is not English, and like all of you, I too have a long way to go.
Let’s hang on to that feeling of discontentment, let’s rekindle that burning desire of striving for excellence, and let’s tirelessly keep on pedaling. I’m with you all the way.
Neil
