How to speak English when you can’t speak English

Being a non-English speaker in a place filled and based on the English language, there’s bound to be challenges that one will have to face.

And if there is anyone who knows what it’s like to not have English as a first language, it’s Haruka Inoue.

“Imagine you landed on the moon and there’s twenty aliens around you. And their speaking as fast as they can. It makes no sense.” she explains, trying to emphasise the difficulty of having a different first language.

She continues, discussing her struggles that she went through when she first moved to Jakarta and her inability to communicate with anyone other than the kids who also spoke Japanese.

On the TEDxJIS 2016 stage, Inoue engages the audience’s attention with her own personal story filled with humour and challenges of how she came to learn English and stand up on the stage that she stood on that day.
She engages the audience by getting the audience to participate in her talk, asking questions like “Are you speaking English as a second language?”, or “Are you Japanese?”, getting the audience to raise their hands when answering ‘yes’ to her questions.

Throughout the talk, Inoue begins to dig deeper into the idea of what gives students, or just everyone, the confidence to start speaking English. When she first moved to Jakarta, she felt as if she was “locked in a room and the teachers were shouting ‘speak up more, speak up more.’” She explains how she felt like she was trapped, unable to do anything and afraid of everything.

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” she says, speaking up for the other students who felt that way when teachers pushed them to say something.
She then suggests the importance of making second language speakers of English feel comfortable through the exchange of smiles. She tells her own story of how in ninth grade she was asked about Japan “with a smile.” She emphasises the fact that this smile made her who she is, and gave her the confidence for her to start speaking English.

She repeats this over and over again, until both I and the audience realise, that the smile was everything for her. It made her beginning into becoming a student and an aspiring actress who no longer had the struggles most foreign kids had.

It’s her TED talk that I find truly interesting, and through the frustrations, the challenges and the laughs she shares with us, the audience, in her story, I can’t help but feel inspired and want to help those who struggle with English as well.

“I’m so, so typical.” She says, finishing up the last words of her talk.

“So if I can do something, you can do it, too.”