Inglés para viajar II: 21/12/2017

Hoy leeremos el capítulo octavo de How to be an Alien:

Chapter 8 The Language

When I arrived in England I thought that I knew English. After I’d been here an hour I realized I did not understand one word. In my first week I learned a little of the language, but after seven years I knew that I could never use it really well. This is sad, but nobody speaks English perfectly.

Remember that those five hundred words the ordinary Englishman uses-most are not all the words in the language. You can learn another five hundred and another five thousand and another fifty thousand words after that and you will still find another fifty thousand you have never heard of. Nobody has heard of them.

If you live in England for a long time you will be very surprised to find that the word nice is not the only adjective in the English language. For the first three years you do not need to  learn or use any other adjectives. You can say that the weather is nice, a restaurant is nice, Mr So-and-so is nice, Mrs So-and-so’s clothes are nice, you had a nice time, and all this will be very nice.

You must decide about your accent. You will have your foreign accent all right but many people like to mix it with another accent. I knew a Polish Jew who had a strong Yiddish-Irish accent. People thought he was very interesting.

The easiest way to show that you have a good accent (or no foreign accent) is to hold a pipe or cigar in your mouth, to speak through your teeth and finish all your sentences with the question: ‘isn’t it?’ People will not understand you, but they will think that you probably speak very good English.

Many foreigners try hard to speak with an Oxford accent. The city of Oxford has a famous university. If you have an Oxford accent, people think that you mix with clever people and that you are very intelligent. But the Oxford accent hurts your throat and is hard to use all the time.

Sometimes you can forget to use it, speak with your foreign accent and then where are you? People will laugh at you. The best way to look clever is to use long words, of course. These words are often old Latin and Greek words, which the English language has taken in. Many foreigners have learned Latin and Greek in school and they find that (a) it is much easier to learn these words than the much shorter English words; (b) these words are usually very long and make you seem very intelligent when you talk to shopkeepers and postmen. But be careful with all these long words — they do not always have the same meaning as they once had in Latin or Greek. When you know all the long words, remember to learn some short ones, too.

Finally there are two important things to remember:

1 Do not forget that it is much easier to write in English than to speak English, because you can write without a foreign accent.

2 On a bus or in the street it is better to speak quietly in good German than to shout loudly in bad English. Anyway, all this language business is not easy. After eight years in this country, a very kind woman told me the other day, ‘You speak with a very good accent, but without any English.’