Common Mistakes - Non-Native Common Mistakes - Native Finding a Teacher Greetings
Business Greetings Inflection and Stress
It's important to avoid English teachers with strong regional accents or dialects. This is because you will tend to take on their vocal and dialectic patterns. Each English-speaking country tends to have a classical, standard or non-regional accepted dialect. So if you're in the United States, you should select a teacher with the non-regional American dialect, such as someone who was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. The classical Canadian dialect is roughly equivalent to the classical American, so if you're in Canada try to find a teacher who isn't so given to saying "oat and a boat" for "out and about". Similarly, if you're in England, you should find a tutor with the standard British dialect, such as a West Londoner.
However, certain countries are considered to have strong dialects throughout. These include Scotland, Ireland, and Australia, among others. It's fine to travel to these countries, but selecting a tutor from their natives may saddle you with an accent you don't want. You'll also find yourself struggling with your own accent (almost nobody who comes to English as a second language after the age of three ever learns to speak it perfectly!) and the end result is that you won't be understood.
Also, a native speaker of your own language can, in some cases be superior to a native speaker of English, since someone with a knowledge of your native language can help to translate English into your language. However, don't restrict yourself to non-native instructors. It's important to listen to the way English is spoken by natives and to repeat what they say.
Other ways to learn English:
Books are wonderful things. However, learning English out of a textbook is practically impossible. When teachers hand out textbooks to a classroom, they intend for the books to be used as an assist to the class, not as a sole guide. Worse, the English in textbooks is not the English that is spoken by Anglophones, so it will send you astray. Use books as a reference only, to help to correct mistakes in grammar, syntax and context. Never rely on books as pronunciation guides. To know how a word is pronounced, you must listen to it being spoken by a native English speaker. The more, the better!
The next best way to learn English is by listening to material recorded in English This includes film, television, radio and music. Watching films in English with subtitles in your own language is one of the best ways to start. Listen closely, watch the translations and try to see if you notice patterns. (I.E. every time the subtitle says, "que" the actor says "what".) Repeat back what you hear the actors saying. This won't give you a strong grasp of the grammar being used, but it will give you a lot of the colloquial speech and idioms that are regularly used by native speakers. Watch out, though, because incorrect speech is heavily used in film, and you need to be aware of what the error is and why it is being used (i.e. because the character is an uneducated hick.)
English classes on tape or DVD are also available, and will give you a stronger grasp of grammar and vocabulary than watching films in English. If your English skills are strengthening, many recorded English courses will leave you with an artificial and stilted speaking style. The best English courses show actual native speakers speaking normally, just as they would speak if they were not being filmed. Avoid courses that show people over-annunciating; "HOW - ARE- YOU - TO - DAY?" "OH - I - AM - FINE - THANK - YOU." Nobody speaks this way when the camera isn't rolling!
Another very good way to learn English is through song. People are much more likely to remember words they heard in a song than things they heard spoken. It's also lots of fun. I have only one caution, and that is that since English is a Germanic language, and doesn't have the rhythms of Romance languages like Italian and Spanish, it sometimes has conflicts with the rhythm of the music. For this reason, English-speaking song-writers are famous for interjecting incorrect grammar and nonsense syllables to get the rhythm back on track. We have seen two of these examples on previous pages in this tutorial. So go ahead, sing your heart out. Just don't assume that the grammar is correct until you check it out. A famous example:
The Theme from Mahogany by Diana Ross
Do you know where you're going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
Where are you going to?
Do you know?
Here, the preposition "to" is added to the end of the question. Grammatically, the word is extraneous (when omitted, the preposition is implied). However, musically it is necessary to establish the rhythm of the song, and to get the first line to rhyme with the second (to, you).
Next Page: Informal Speech