An American or an Italian will never feel bad for not knowing Telugu or Hindi. An Indian in the South never feels bad for not knowing Punjabi or Gujarati. An Indian in the North does not feel terrible for not knowing Telugu or Tamil. Strangely many Indians feel very inadequate when they are unable to speak in English language. Let us first get rid of this feeling of inadequacy. English is not our mother tongue.

We learnt our mother Tongue without the need for any special coaching. We learnt just by listening to others speak and slowly we learnt to respond. This happened in our early childhood. Most schools and colleges teach English by teaching grammar first. This is a major trap. It is this that makes you think that English is too hard. To be able to speak in English, shun English grammar by all means. It is common to find people who are very good at English grammar but are not good at striking a simple conversation. There are also scores of others who have no knowledge of English grammar but can speak English very fluently. There are many of us who do not understand the grammar behind the language that we inherited from our parents, our mother tongue. Don’t we speak comfortably in our own language? The Indian language that you already speak has a very complicated vocabulary and structure, but you mastered it with ease. In comparison English language is less complicated both in speech and in writing. Perhaps, it is because of this reason that Indians were able to learn English very easily.

The schools made you write first, read next, and speak last. You learnt your mother tongue in the reverse sequence. Your spoke first, read next and wrote last. I want you to adopt the same strategy when learning English.

At Soham Academy of Human Excellence, we took this approach of learning English in ways that mimic the way we learnt our mother tongue!

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