Dear all,
I am new to this forum and have been following your frankly discussions with great joy.
For some reasons, I have got the feelings that a lot of people in Hong Kong reject the use of English simply for convenience reason.
My experience in mastering a foreign language is that one has to think the language and incorporate it in his / her daily life. One has to practise it if he/she really wishes to improve the proficiency of the language.
The other day, I was discussing with a friend from Hawaii about speaking English. We shared the views that everywhere people speak with an accent and one's command of English should not be judged on the basis of his accent. Yet, what makes Chinese speaking people difficult to speak fluent English is that the Chinese and English languages belong to two distinctive linguistic tribes and that processing of the two languages is likely to overtax the speakers' fluency, resulting in sharp punctuations among words as our brains are accustomed to learn and speak Chinese from the very beginning of our life. I suppose the same problem of fluency applies to many non-native English speakers, particularly people in Asia whose languages are spoken in a way so much different from the languages in Europe.
There is no way and no need to correct one's accent as I consider it a reflection of the cultural background of the speaker. With respect to the matter of fluency, I would like to make the following suggestions and hope that they are of any help to those who encounter tremendous problems in speaking English:
- do not feel panic, speak slowly and try to maintain the flow;
- think English before and during the speech : allow a few seconds to think of the key words / idea in English before you start a sentence. Your thoughts should always be ahead of your speech;
- waltzing with your words in a flow, do not make a sudden stop as this is quite often when speaking Chinese;
- listen to how native English speakers make presentation and see what you can learn from them; and, last but not the least,
- practise it as much as possible.
Do not feel embarrassed when you make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. I make a lot of grammatical mistakes too.
Luar
[ 本帖最後由 Luar 於 2006-8-31 04:30 PM 編輯 ]
