Speaking More Better!

Having spent a considerable amount of my time teaching English and learning Chinese, language (and the studying or learning of) is almost always on my mind. I find myself trying to think in Chinese or thinking about my own language in new and challenging ways when asked a good question about English (I’m surprised how often we know so little about our own languages because we rarely stop to think about them).

I would love the opportunity to study Irish (Gaelic), Persian (Farsi), Japanese, and Latin but I doubt I’ll have the chance to even nibble at any of them in my life time. But languages fascinate me--I think they should be pushed harder in the US curriculum. My accomplishments in the field are few and small: a few summers ago I became fluent in Pig Latin... And get this: my twin brother and I spoke our own exclusive language as toddlers before the outside world came in and tore it away from us, forcing us to switch to English. Because of my last name, we often jokingly refer to it as “O’Connish.” Even today, my friends refer to the peculiar way that my twin and I speak English as “O’Connish accents.” We have a tendency to speak very fast and slur our words together, and sometimes even pronounce words in our own unique ways. When we are very comfortable or excited we often switch to this fast-paced English and our friends often complain. Some of the friends we’ve had for a long time even claim to “understand O’Connish.” But I digress. Although the “original” O’Connish has been lost, some names remain: Doogan and Dogan, which were our names for each other; Nahna – my older brother Marty, and Gahk – my oldest brother Erik. I wish more of this “language” could have been recorded!

Anyways I think this blog post is supposed to have some sort of point, something for the reader to take away, so I’ll argue something: the most important thing to practice when learning a language is speaking, speaking, and speaking! What good is mastering the grammar of a language when you lack the confidence or ability to speak it (well it’s good for research and academics I suppose)? I would rather be comfortable speaking a language even if my grammar was subpar than be a master at writing or reading it while being a lackluster speaker. However, speaking a language is also the hardest part—it takes practice, patience, and courage. But as Nike says, swoosh. Oops I mean just do it.

-Michael O’Connor