12 - A Great Accent Alone Isn't Great EnglishWhile we were window-shopping at the mall some years back, my wife Leonor nudged me on the ribs and whispered: “Love, did you hear what that girl over there was saying on her mobile phone?”
“No,” I replied. “Why, have you been eavesdropping?”
“Of course not!” she protested. “I just overheard her. She was speaking so proudly and loudly with an American English pronunciation, call-center style.”
“So what’s so special about it? Most call-center people need to speak like that. They must sound like North Americans to the North Americans, so a pleasant neutral American accent is drilled into them by their call-center English trainers.”
“I know that, and in fact I wish I had her nice English accent myself. But the problem is that her English grammar is simply horrible.”
“Like how?”
IMAGE CREDIT: ZEUS2017.BLOGSPOT.COM“Well, for one, she just couldn’t seem to put her verbs in the proper form. For instance, I distinctly heard her say,
‘Text me when it will to finish.’ Isn’t the verb form ‘will to finish’ weird? She mixed the future tense and the infinitive. The correct form should be the simple future tense
‘will be finished,’ right?”
“Of course, but maybe her mistake was just a fluke. You know how it is with us Filipinos. We often think out our thoughts in Tagalog or in our regional language first, then translate them into English. There’s bound to be some grammar mishap somewhere sometimes.”
“But I think that girl’s English problem is more serious than that. I also heard her say,
‘I will go here with my balance.’ It should be ‘come’ instead of ‘go’ because she’s referring to a movement towards and not away from where she was, but she seemed blissfully unaware of the difference between the two.”
“That’s awful!”
“So now you’re convinced she has a serious English problem?”
“You’re probably right, but I’m afraid there’s not much we can do about that.”
“Why not? For a start, I can tell her right now to read your book,
The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors. I’m sure she’ll learn a thing or two from it.”
“Don’t be silly, Leonor,” I admonished her. “That kind of hard sell simply won’t work. She’d really hate you for it. You might even get slapped in the face.”
“Well, love, it’s just a thought. But there must be a way to make people like her realize that great English pronunciation doesn’t necessarily mean great English. Excellent grammar and usage must also go with it. Why don’t you write about that sometime?”
“Maybe, but in fairness to that girl, she’s not alone with that grammar problem. It’s because many people don’t take their English grammar seriously enough. They are made to believe they can acquire good English simply by listening to how it’s spoken and by just memorizing the various English stock phrases. But good pronunciation is really only the icing to the cake, so to speak. To be really good in English, you need to be competent in your English grammar and usage. Only then can you be sure of speaking or writing properly in English even in unstructured communication situations.”
“So what do you suggest should English-challenged people do to improve their English?”
“Well, they need to go back to the very basics of English grammar and master them. They must learn how to put together the various elements of English in a grammatically systematic way—its words into clear, logical sentences; its sentences into clear, logical paragraphs; and its paragraphs into clear, logical expositions or compositions. Then they also must learn enough of the English idioms so they won’t be forever speaking or writing in stiff or stilted English.”
“Isn’t that a rather tall order?”
“It is, but if you want to speak or write in English well enough, you really have no choice but to do it.”
(July 12, 2008)
