Photo: Collected-
How I got my speaking English rolling
Zulfiqar Parvez-
People often ask me how I learned to speak English. Actually, it all started back in school. I had a grammar with a red cover, and I memorised a particular sentence from that. It was an overly used expression, “I do not believe you.” I used to use it too many times in my speech, almost to the point of making it a cliche.
We used to live in a rented house back then, and the house owner would often come to pay us a visit just to see how things were going. He was on one such random visit on the day I was playing cricket with my friends in the backyard. Something happened which led me to tell my friends, “I do not believe you.” The man overheard me saying that to my friend and came up and asked me why. I kept mum as I had no clue as to how to reply. The only English sentence I could say I had already said that. Anything beyond that was all Greek to me.
He made me realise very lovingly that if you are trying to speak English, you should be able to do it round the clock and should not just speak one or two sentences every now and then. This had a great impact on me, and within the next seven days, I memorised all the words I had in my textbook for class eight. I started speaking using the words I had learned. This is where I faced the difficulty. I was in a school where we had no assigned English teachers as such. Back home, there was not really the environment and none to help me with that, my parents having studied up to class eight.
The only thing I had was an indomitable will-force. I had both the passion and the patience required to learn a foreign tongue. My father being out of the country, I used to live with my mother, and I had a room to myself with a big mirror with which I started practising. I somehow got the idea that I would pair with my image reflected inside the mirror and would talk on random topics every day for a certain period of time when none would be around.
I started doing this back in 1998 and continued this ridiculous but otherwise effective practice till 2001. During these three years, I did it every day for three hours, and it was only after a long time of rigorous hard work like this that I managed to achieve whatever fluency I have today, which, I hope, is not that bad given that I have never been outside the border.
There were moments of extreme test of my patience that I had to go through. My mom once took me to a psychiatrist, thinking I was probably going nuts, as she had this apprehension when she overheard me talking to myself from the other room she used to sleep in.
I had the eagerness to learn a new word, so much so that if I would ever find a parchment written in English lying on the street, I would pick it up thinking this might contain a word which I did not know and if I do not learn it now, I might not come across the same word in another ten years.
I used to run after foreigners just to have the pleasure of having a word. I was, I must say, greatly encouraged by a friend of mine who could speak well even when we were in class seven. I used to think, if he could do that, why shouldn’t I? I was also influenced by Harsha Bhogle, a cricket commentator from India. I used to follow this man when it came to style and accent.
I used to watch a lot of movies and was a very good listener of English music. I started doing commentary in English, which not too many people took in good light. But I did not bother about these people because I knew that here in Bangladesh, if you are doing or trying to do something positive, people around you will not be trying to encourage you, they will always be trying to pull you down with your trousers, and I guess that partly explains why Hadudu is our national sports. It is this propensity to ignore people and the comments they pass that has got me wherever I am today.
Here are some do’s for those willing to learn to speak English.
1. Think of English as just a language. Don’t treat it as even a second language because that leads you to become extra cautious while speaking and in the process, speaking with smoothness gets difficult.
2. Try and learn the applications of the words you come to pick up through a regular habit of reading texts, magazines, newspapers, articles or any creative writing in English.
3. Pair with yourself. Be your own partner. Talk on random topics. Choose a topic beforehand at times so you can have much to say on that.
4. Standing before a mirror and taking your image reflected inside the same for someone else can do a lot to improve your English. This gives you a chance to develop a certain kind of body language that proves handy at a later stage. I did this for three years, and that too for three hours a day.
5. Don’t think you have nothing to talk about since you don’t have anyone to practice with. It is good to have someone with a certain knack of speaking but in case you don’t, resort to imagination and whisper to yourself and try and talk about or comment on everything happening around you.
6. Don’t just spend too much time learning or memorising words from the dictionary. Learn their usage in particular contexts. Meaning, remember, more often than not, is context specific.
7. Be passionate about it and have the patience to let the change come over you with time. Don’t get impatient, and stop practising out of impatience if you find you are failing to be fluent or accurate. Fluency is not even the right term to use. Your English needs to be smooth, soothing to the ear. You don’t have to be speaking at the pace of a delivery from Shoaib Akhtar. Haha.
8. If you can maintain both fluency (smoothness) and accuracy at the same time, well and good. If you can’t, go for accuracy and stop thinking about being too fast.
9. Read extensively. Listen to English to the same degree. Remember picking up the right pronunciation has a lot to do with what kind of English you listen to. Ensure you have the exposure to real English, whatever be the extent.
10. Make it a point to spend a part of the day, I prefer doing it at no particular hour though, speaking English. Your shyness will go away only when you get confident of your English, and that can happen only if you can make it almost a part of your life.
Zulfiqar Parvez is Head of English at Tanzimul Ummah International Tahfiz School.
