Do You “Speak” English?
When it comes to learning English, we learn all components of it: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. You start learning English with writing and reading, and maybe a little bit of listening. You learn a little grammar (which is crucial to our learning process). Then years go by, you feel good about yourself. You understand some English. You can read and write in English. And you understand when your friend throws you a few English sentences on facebook. You think that finally you can speak English. Of course there is no way of telling whether or not you can speak English after years of study since there's nobody who you can speak English with in Indonesia. You think “I can read, write, and understand my friend's English. I must be able to speak it”. All of a sudden, just like waking up from a long dream, one day you try to really speak the language, when the opportunity presents itself, just to find out that you are not any better than a six-grader when speaking English.
You are in disbelief and disappointed in yourselves, in our education system, and in life as a whole. Then you think "How can that be?". "After all those years of study I still can not speak English?" You try to speak English with your Indonesian way of thinking and translate things that you think are right according to the Indonesian language. You take Indonesian phrases and words and translate them straight into English. Every time you try to speak English, deep inside, you are not happy about the result. When you speak English, there are a lot of things that you have to think and translate in a very short time. Time keeps on ticking. Unlike in writing, you don't have time for all that thinking when speaking it. You can not hit the pause button on your remote control and take time to think about grammar and hit the play button again to resume the conversation. People are waiting for you when you are trying to find the correct way to say things. You are aware of that. That makes you nervous and you mess up your English even more. The more you are aware that people are waiting or might be bored by you, the more nervous you get, thus, the more you mess up. But, somehow you don't let that nervousness and disappointment show. What do you do next? You try to hide your lack of English by not speaking it too often or by only saying short sentences, short sentences that you are already familiar with.
The good news is that you are not alone. A lot of other international students in the U.S. have a hard time speaking the language. Many of them did really good on the TOEFL test. They know a great deal about grammar. But they simply do NOT really speak English. And people normally ask you "Do you speak English?", not "How much do you know about grammar?". After a few years in the U.S. some of these international students get a lot better, however, believe it or not, a lot of them still speak English at about the same level as they did when they first came to the U.S.
You avoid conversations in English instead of correcting your weaknesses. The result; you are the same person you were a week ago, or a month ago, or a year ago, or even 10 years ago. You keep repeating the same mistakes over and over for 10 years. Mistakes that could have been easily corrected in less than 5 minutes. That's because you never took the first step in this 10,000 mile journey. If you come across a tiny problem in any of your conversations then you look for the answer. Once you have found it, which cannot be too hard to do, than you are already better than you were yesterday, an hour ago or even 5 minutes ago.
Go to the English Forum for any English-related questions! I, personally, will help you with the answers.
There is no magic in learning English. Just because you are in the U.S, doesn't mean that you automatically speak good English! Being in the U.S. Does not make you a better English speaker! It is not automatic! It takes time and consistency to learn English. If you learn one thing a day, you will have learned 10 things in 10 days. If you learn 2 things a day, you got 20 things in 20 days. You are the one that sets the pace of your learning process. Get your brain and tongue used to English with practice. It is NOT that hard.
Click here for conversation practice tips
I made up the following conversations for practice. The language in these conversations are based on real life dialogs among Americans. These words are commonly used in every day conversations. I will not use words, idioms or phrases that only sound good and smart but not commonly used in daily conversations, idioms that are in my English books years ago. Every now and then I will throw in some very common slang. So, for the time being, forget about those fancy words and phrases. Stay focused! Get the important things first. Get used to using these words or phrases in your practice.
Notice that some words or phrases are written in bold letters. These are words or phrases that I think you might need to pay extra attention to and keep in mind.
Have fun and be better than yesterday :)
