I Will Never Speak English Like You
I wonder how many people that write here on Medium are not-native English speakers. Please say “Yay” in the comments!
My father started teaching me English at the age of 4. The appreciation to that came about 20 years later. And I’ve spent those 20 years of learning and practising, I am still afraid to write in English. It’s a weird thing because I think in English, but the fear of being judged for my grammar and spelling mistakes is just enormous. But this story is not about fears and spelling, Grammarly has me covered here.
Yesterday I was reading a wonderful book called “The Red House” by Mark Haddon when I came across the word “Flapjack”, which I haven’t seen before, but figured out it was some kind of food, probably a sandwich.
On a daily basis, I come across a couple words that I need to look up in the dictionary and it actually feels like I am a child who is discovering the World again. When it comes to writing I probably spend more time looking for the right word to use, that would reflect my idea in the most precise way and often it feels like I don’t have enough words.
The average person has between 70–80 thousand words in the arsenal, but that applies to native speakers who have been building that amount of words since the moment they said their first word. The linguists believe that to maintain a conversation in almost any regular topic (we are not taking into account quantum mechanics, etc) a person only needs about 3000 words.
The Oxford 3000 Wordlist was created to help English learners all over the World to learn the most used and useful words to have an actual conversation. But just think about it — 3000 vs 70000, it is an enormous potential for learning, even it may seem unachievable. Learning is a lifelong process, especially when it comes to foreign languages, as the languages change and evolve, which makes it even more difficult to keep up with native speakers.
As a non-native English speaker, I have developed a tender passion for the language and every new word that I come across gives me a simple pleasure of discovering the World over again, even if it is just about learning about flapjack.
If you are looking for a language partner to discover the world of a foreign language you can find it at swaplanguage.com.
