Astounding Words

English is an international language. It has so many grammar rules and each rule with many exceptions. Usually, we write English without paying much attention to these rules and exceptions. But, its good to know as much as grammar as possible especially the exceptions. In this article, I am mentioning some of these unusual facts and rules of English language.

1. A word starting with letter ‘Q’ has ‘u’ as its second letter.

2. If abbreviation ends with same letter as the complete word itself then dot (.) is not placed. For example, we write Dr instead of Dr. for Doctor and Prof. for professor and not prof. But, people unknowingly write Dr. for Doctor.

3. Strange but common. Most of you know that following sentence contains all the alphabets of English language:

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

4. Use word ‘Do’ to emphasize an action. For example, you can write ‘I do go there’ instead of ‘I go there’.

5. Try guessing a word with no vowels in it. Read this article from the beginning and you can find it. Yes, the word is ‘Try’. There are many more such words like ‘Fry’ and ‘My’. Usually, such words contain letter ‘y’ in them.

6. Relationship before a name is written with capital letter and if afterwards then with small letter. For example, “He is Uncle Sam” and “He is Sam, my uncle”.

7. Use of ‘a’ and ‘an’ article depends on phonetics of noun before which they are placed. So, ‘a’ is used before the word ‘user’ and ‘an’ is used before the word ‘honest’.

8. Use of article ‘The’ has many exceptions like ‘the’ is not used before names of the countries except the ‘Netherlands’ and the ‘US’.

For appropriate use of articles, capitalization rules and other English language rules, I recommend you to read articles available at:
Purdue University Online Writing Lab (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/). You can also visit www.usingenglish.com for learning English grammar in a better way.

Syed Feroz Zainvi has obtained M.Tech. (Comp Sc & Engg) degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (INDIA). His areas of interests are distributed computing, computer graphics and Internet Technologies. Currently, he is involved in Software Project Planning, Development and Management. His other interests include writing for magazines and contributing utility softwares on Magazine’s CDs. He also have flair for teaching computer science with new teaching methodologies.

His web-page URL is http://www.zainvi.tophonors.com

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Do you want to learn a foreign language? Have you already spent a huge amount of time and money on classes, books, audio courses and CD-ROMs to no avail? You are not alone. Every year, millions of people get disillusioned with their progress after starting with plenty of enthusiasm. Do a search on the net for language learning products and you will find many that offer guaranteed results, easy formulas, no memorising necessary etc. But they just don’t work. At least not for you, you think. Here are some guidelines to make your language learning experience more effective and perhaps more enjoyable.

Lighten up!

The one big thing that stops many people from successfully communicating in a foreign language is the fear that they will get laughed at for their mistakes or bad pronunciation. For shy people, this is a major handicap, and can be likened to the fear of public-speaking, which ranks high in the list of fears. You will be surprised at the patience, toleration and even admiration that you will get when you make an effort to speak the language of your interlocutor. I still fall into this trap when speaking French, but most people are usually really complementary, and tell me that they wish they could speak English as well as I speak French! Learn to laugh at yourself, and you will find that others will laugh with you, not at you.

Memorise key sentences

Yes, I said memorise. Advertising that tells you that memorising is not necessary is simply false. I think that they want to tell you that you don’t need to learn parrot-fashion, which is a tedious pursuit. The opposite of memorising is forgetting, and that is even less acceptable! To speak a language means learning words, not reading them once then immediately forgetting them.

You need to learn by heart some correct sentences. By correct I mean a grammatical structure. If you are busy learning new words, you can substitute them for words in your correct sentence to produce other sentences. This is essentially how babies learn to speak, and is far more efficient than learning rules of grammar. Your brain is just not able to make the co-relation between a rule of grammar and using it in conversation. If you have a good vocabulary on the other hand, and you know how to say for example “I didn’t know you were coming” then the chances are it will be easy for you to say “I didn’t think he was working” in your target language. The grammatical structure is the same in both sentences.

Read and listen as much as you can

You have to practise speaking a lot to master a language. But what can you say if don’t know any words? Not much, and that’s the frustrating part. Listen to the radio in your target language every day and read the local newspapers. It’s so easy to do today with the internet. If you are just starting, you won’t understand very much, but it is still really important to do it regularly, in order to “tune” your ear to the wavelength of the language you are learning. Repetition is the key here. Over a period of time you will start to decode what once sounded like a constant stream of language where you couldn’t even tell when one word ended and the next one began. Your passive understanding will eventually turn into active speaking if you keep at it. Good luck!

Jonathan Lewis is a teacher of English as a foreign language in Provence, France. He learned to speak French the best way - by living in the country and practising everyday. He has a site about that helps students to improve their learning abilities, apprendre anglais and a blog about learning English. The advice he offers is invaluable for anyone wishing to learn a language, not just French.