Taking English for granted

Did you know that English is one of the top three most common languages spoken in the world? First is Chinese, which has an enormous number of speakers at one billion. Next I have seen Spanish, English, and Hindi in a variety of different orders. Most prevalently English was in the second-place spot. It makes sense. English is the language of technology, science, medicine, travel, politics, as well as being an important language in other studies. If you enter into any of these fields, you must have a firm understanding of English before you can find any true success. As a result, people in foreign countries are hungry to learn English. That works well for me, because I’m looking for people to teach. And there is so much to teach in the English language!
English doesn’t appear to have any real ‘weird’ sounds in it. As a native speaker of the language, you’ve probably never considered it unless you worked in speech therapy or a similar field. However, I hear some common ‘difficult’ sounds to my students, most of whom are Mongolian, all of them Asian.
The sound I have heard the most difficulties with is the consonant digraph th. It appears more time must be spent to make this sound correctly rather than just cheat and pronounce it as a hard t sound. It isn’t so noticeable when a student is having a common conversation with you, but if something comes up where you ask “What place did you win in the race?” and the student answers, “Turd (third)!” it becomes obvious that something must be done to help them learn it correctly. Put your hand about six inches from your mouth. If you pronounce the th sound correctly, you won’t feel any air hit your hand. If you say a hard t sound, you’ll feel a min-gust of wind hit your hand. This is one method of practice we’ve used.
Another tricky sound seems to be the f sound. I commonly hear ‘pinished’ (finished), ‘pirst’ (first), and so on. I don’t have any magic solution for this one. Mostly drill and practice with them – listen to me and repeat it.
Aside from pronunciation, articles (a, an, the) are also another troublesome area. Have you ever had someone talk to you about you using the third person plus an article in front of it? I have one adorable student who had an entire conversation with me, about me, talking to me in the third person using an article in front of my name (except she used ‘Teacher’ rather than ‘Sheridan’). It was kind of unnerving and went something like this:
Student: So, The Teacher will go to Korea over holiday?
Me: Yes.
Student: And what will The Teacher do while she is there?
You get the idea. It’s got a strange feel to it.
People of one language use too many articles in the wrong places, while other language speakers don’t use enough. It makes sense, however, if you investigate the language they come from. For example, the Korean language doesn’t have anything like an article. The article business is 100% new for them. Other languages give a gender with the article, like Spanish where you have el and la, male and female respectively. Mongolian has articles, but the grammar of a Mongolian sentence is completely different than the sentence structure of an English sentence.
In my opinion, learning a second language is a complicated undertaking. I think more Americans need to do it.
In the USA, I would venture to guess that the most common second language is Spanish. And I really don’t want to hear anything more about “if you’re gonna live here, learn the language.” Please. With the resources and talent and opportunity available in the USA, we should all be able to speak another language. I would dare say, however, that one key to a foreign language is missing in the USA – the opportunity to use it. In rural South Dakota, you’re not likely to have a lot of chances to speak Spanish unless you venture outside your comfort zone.
At any rate, if English is your native tongue, don’t take it for granted. People want what you have, and what’s even better, they’ll pay you to learn it. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Although I didn’t do any official research for this essay, it’s good to back your word with other info. I did some google searches for “most popular world languages” to find out more about that, and I also searched for “consonant digraphs” if you are looking for more information.
Have a good night! Hasta la vista! Saikhan amaararai! Aufedersein! Bon voyage! Arrevederci!
Kum na si dah (actually that means Thank You in Korean, but anyway, I digress…)