While starting a car, we face trouble only in the beginning. But once it starts, the car runs smoothly on the road. Same is the story of speaking English. They say that speaking English is just like driving a car.
When we start speaking English we also start getting butterflies in our stomach. We fumble badly and grope hard for words which surprisingly cease to flow out naturally from our mouth. We get so desperate for exact words and sentences that sometimes we also fail to recollect the meaningful thoughts and grammatically flawless sentence structures. We appear suffering virtually from suffocation and strangulation. We also suffer from a string of psychological blocks of what and how to start speaking English.
With the fast sweeping wave of globalisation across the nations in the world, the importance of English as an important lingua franca has even more increased in the modern age of the 21st Century. Additionally, speaking English fluently has proved to be one of the essential parameters of success in the most of the job and career opportunities available in the country and abroad as well. It has also become a sine qua non of lucrative pay package and a golden passport to bright promotion prospects.
So, overlooking the task of mastering the art of speaking English may prove to be very fatal. The most important question arises here – after all, how can we learn to speak English, that too very fluently?
You must have wondered to find that the children start speaking their mother tongue without having any knowledge of alphabets, grammar and very good stock of the vocabulary of language. What magic does enable those innocent children to speak their mother tongues so effortlessly and smoothly?
In fact, a child learns to speak a language by carefully listening and imitating to what their parents, peers pals speak. Next, the children do not have any hesitation, constraints and fear or so-called phobia which the adults are so naturally and commonly vulnerable to.
Following are some of the points which may considerably help us to speak English very much fluently:
(a) Don’t ever underestimate yourself. But at the same time, you must be aware of your weaknesses. Take sincere steps to correct them. Knowledge of basic rules of grammar of English is the stepping stone… simply master them. We cannot do without it.
(b) Don’t lose confidence when you speak in front of a person or a crowd of audiences. Lose confidence and you would never succeed to speak the language that you would like to be fluent in.
(c) Read newspapers and magazines in English regularly and search for different sentence structures and difficult words in them. Look up the meanings of those difficult words in a very good dictionary and try to retain them in your mind.
(d) Consistently enrich your word power. For this, always keep a good dictionary and a Thesaurus with yourself.
(e) In the beginning, start speaking with shorter sentences. This would definitely increase your self-confidence which would boost you to gradually switch over to speaking longer sentences, later on.
(f) Watch talk shows, news and current affairs programmes on television and try to learn the modus operandi of speaking of English.
(g) Pronunciation is called as the soul of a language. Learn how to correctly pronounce the words. For this, you don’t need to be a phonetics expert. Just keep in your mind important ‘Pronunciation keys’ and finally you are the winner of the race.
(h) They say, “Practice makes a man perfect.” So, keep on practising and practising. Speak, speak and speak – this is what that has helped all famous speakers become the fluent speakers.
–By Shreeprakash Sharma
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of AFTERNOON VOICE and AFTERNOON VOICE does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.
