Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Conversational English

I don't want to sound "peter-ish", but I do speak English far better than I speak Tamil, my native tongue. My vocabulary is very good and so is my diction.

But when I converse with native Americans, it makes me realize what not being a native English speaker means. They play with words in a manner that doesnt come naturally to me.

Here is an example. This is an email from some guy in my company to a graphic design intern: "I'm attaching the presentation I showed you. I’d love for you to take a stab at reformatting it, and cleaning up the graphics so it tells the story. I’d encourage others on the team to similarly send you any internal presentations that might need similar graphic love."

That 'graphic love' part....I would have never thought of putting it that way, but it is such a nice way to put it, albeit simple! And this was just one instance... I hear such bursts of word-plays very often from native speakers.

Point of all this being that it makes me feel there is no language that I can speak "really-really" well :).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think you just got to take some liberty in speaking and writing.. instead of being correct in your communication :).. it adds beauty to your speak ;)

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