Why I'm thankful I learned English as a child...

Last night, my friend Mariela from work came over to the house. She wanted to practice English pronunciation with me, Joe and Kelly because she is taking an English class at the university. I happily agreed to help her out – I mean, how hard could it be to teach English? I speak the language; I should be able to help someone out with a little pronunciation, right? Wrong…sort of.

It turns out that I take a lot of things for granted as a native English speaker – things that are hard to teach because I didn’t learn them from a book. Instead, I learned how to speak the language from immersion – reading, writing, and speaking in a way that has amounted to years and years of continuous, subconscious practice.

When you learn English (or any language) that way, it is hard to explain some of the oddities and rules of that language because you’ve never thought about them yourself. For example, just looking at pronunciation, we spent some time discussing the fact that letters have many different sounds in English, which is different than Spanish and something that is quite difficult. In Spanish, the general rule is that “o” always sounds like “oh” and “a” always sounds like “ah.” However, last night as we were going through some practice sentences in English, I realized that the same does not apply in English. In the word “do”, “o” is pronounced as oo, which is the same as in the word “you” and “two” even though the spellings are completely different. It’s also hard to explain why in the word “so”, which looks exactly like “do” except for one letter, has an “oh” sound rather than “oo” but the word “sue”, spelled completely differently, rhymes with “do.” Dizzy yet?

There are also sounds in English that are different than sounds in Spanish – sounds that a Spanish speaker may never have had to form before. For example, since “h” is silent in most Spanish words, sounds like “th” and “sh” are not used in Spanish words. That makes the pronunciation of something even as simple as “the” difficult for someone like Mariela. This, too, was hard to explain or get past. I would pronounce “the” like normal, and she would say something more like “duh” (which, admittedly, is how some native speakers pronounce it. Da Bears). Then I’d repeat it the same way as I’d said it before, and she’d repeat it the same way as she’d said it before, and on and on. I’d try to show her how I was making the “th” sound but beyond that, it’s really a matter of practice. I get it, too, because the sound “rr” in Spanish, which you are supposed to roll as if purring, has never been easy for me. No matter how many times I hear someone else make that sound, it still doesn’t come naturally for me.

In short, it turns out that teaching English is not as easy as I thought it would be, and it made me realize things about the language that, though obvious when pointed out to me, never really occurred to me before.