Master English FAST: An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English by Northbrook Julian

Author:Northbrook, Julian [Northbrook, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northbrook Languages Ltd.
Published: 2017-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Big “C” of Speaking Well

W hen I was fourteen years old, I went on something called the French exchange. A French student came and stayed at my house for two weeks, then I went and stayed at his. So it was a kind of homestay exchange.

There’s a good chance you had something like this at your school. (One of the schools I taught at many years ago had a sister-school in Australia and did an “Australian Exchange.”)

Now, when I said I wanted to do the exchange, my teachers were really surprised. I was the laziest student at the school. I didn’t study. I didn’t participate. I didn’t do anything. But when they said, “Two weeks in France,” I thought, “Great! I get two weeks off school.”

So, for totally the wrong reasons, I applied. And for some reason that I still don’t understand now, I got a place (which pretty much confirmed my suspicions that my teachers were all stupid).

Several months later – there I was, in France, with a host family who thought I was there to practise my French.

The only French I knew was, “Bonjour,” and for some reason “mon petit cochon” (my little pig). At a stretch, I could combine them to say: “Bonjour, mon petit cochon!”

The amazing result of three years of French education.

So what was I going to do in France? Work hard and try to learn the language? Like buggery was I. Remember – I was only there to get out of school for two weeks.

I didn’t even try.

I spent the whole two weeks speaking to my host family in English. At first they were kind of surprised…but they soon got the idea. Well, they got loads of English speaking practice, and I didn’t have to make any effort to learn French. So everybody was happy…apart from my teachers.

My host mother spoke English pretty well, but something about the way she spoke was…I don’t know…odd.

Even then I was quite aware that the way she spoke English was very different to the way that people in the UK spoke English. But it wasn’t that she spoke bad English. She made mistakes with her grammar and sometimes pronounced things wrong. But those things were very minor. Rather, there was something else about her English that wasn’t quite right. Not the way she said things, but what she said, and the assumptions that she seemed to make.

At the time I didn’t really understand it, but it was like we were on a different wavelength – speaking the same language, but not really connecting. The way that people in France think is very different to the way that British people think. The values that my host family had—both cultural and personal—were quite different to my own. The result was that the way they spoke was very different to the way I spoke.

Then years later when I met my wife (who is Japanese), I noticed the same thing with her. And I noticed it again with my students after I came to Japan and started teaching English.

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