Prepositions Plus Further English Matters That Cause My Downfall

You may have no idea how I end up getting buried under the weight of my wrong grammatical turns and past lexical errors.

Cranking out a blog post and doling out comments on co-bloggers’ sites can give me trauma when after pressing the Send button, I discover, to my terror, either a grammatical blunder or a spectral misuse of an English term. Hardly a way is there to take things back so the accompanying mark of shame could only follow me for years to come.

My attempts to work a few good expressions into my composition tend to backfire, moreover, with disconcerting regularity — as my adventurous nature continues to soldier on to my spirit for bold writing. You gotta understand, I’m a wanna-be writer.

A previous blog pal’s sophisticated implementation had switched on my fascination for phrasal verbs, yet to this day I keep blanking out on their apt usage. He once wrote: “Play on, my friend.” Well, that one definitely made me scratch my head.

And please don’t start me with idioms: “Why keep flogging a dead horse?” (Seriously, why would anyone want to do that…to a lifeless horse?).

Nor should you remind me of the innumerable cases of redundancy in my blog posts which I’ve yet to find both time and expertise to mend.

When writing, I get in a bind inevitably as to my choice of prepositions. Let me give you a few examples: Should it be —

on a street or in a street

on the beach or at the beach

angry at or angry with

at WordPress or on WordPress or in WordPress?

Then there are the prepositions I have tried to work into my compositions until I am literally blue in the face:

across, upon, along, beyond, amid

I believe they stylishly elevate your sentences by a few notches. Take an illustration:

“A smile spread across her face.” — more tasteful compared to the prep “over,” don’t you agree?

“Her reputation fell in value amid suspicion of her chicanery and promiscuity.” Amen.

Perhaps I’d better enumerate my additional issues with the English language that keep consigning me into a vague degree of semi-literacy:

• The use of would and could still boggles me the same way a nude dude should. (Hey, I simply aimed for some rhyme there)
• Past perfect has always been painful for me. Because my past had never been perfect in the first place.
• Relatives can indeed be a pain in the #%$. Don’t nod your head — I’m talking about relative clause and relative pronouns here.

An ESL teacher that I am for a neighboring Asian country, imagine my toil and the bunches of knots on my students’ foreheads the minute I spell out to them grammar jargons such as subjunctive, modals, infinitive, and gerund. Ouch.

I remember somebody once said to me, “Let’s chill out!” To which I replied, “Come again?” Yeah, like I’m supposed to be hip in catching all cool expressions.

I’d hate to admit there’s more to bring up with regards to my punctuation, idiomatic and vernacular boo-boos 😦 .  Maybe in the end, we could all agree it’d be best if I just scoot off to a remote island in Southern China and learn Cantonese instead.

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I am a poor, poor (old) girl. Nevertheless, I love singing along to this wonderful song “Rich Girl” by one of my fave artists of the 1980s — the duo of Daryll Hall & John Oates, who also happens to be the top act of the said decade. C’mon, sing this with me.

My Transition from Accounting to Teaching My Favorite Language

One fateful afternoon, my father asked me point-blank, “What would you like to take up in college?”

I sat there pondering his question without any reply. At the tender age of 15, I still didn’t have a clear sense of who I was and what I wanted to be. I managed to come up with an answer though. “I can be a teacher perhaps?”

“NO!” my mother responded with alarm. “Do you want to end up a spinster hag who doesn’t even have time to shine her leather pumps because of all the stress she gets from teaching her students? Besides, teachers get very low pay. You know that.”

Father agreed with Mom.                                                             

“Ok then, I’m going to be a rockstar.” Hell no, I didn’t say that and I was glad I didn’t. No way would I dare tell them about that crazy teen-age dream of mine. Both my folks would have laughed themselves to tears.

“How about becoming a…secretary?” I suggested instead.

“No, no. Secretaries usually end up sitting on their bosses’ lap and become mistresses.” (Hey listen, that was my Mom’s perspective. Not mine. So please don’t hate me)

My Dad finally declared, “You are going to take up Accounting and that’s it. At least, you’ll be assured of a job as an accountant. They’re always in demand anyway.”

That had been the trajectory of my working life ever since, until I gave up the business field for good some eleven years ago. In hindsight, how I wish I could turn back the hands of time and had a different conversation with my parents that fateful afternoon.

my fist job in a leading newspaper publishing firm 20 years ago

I majored in BS Accounting in college but was never happy and did not prosper at all in that field. My scholastic grades were fine but I’m not brilliant with numbers and it was not among my passions. Anything that isn’t natural for me tends to drift away on its own. The debit and credit of a business transaction was easy to grasp but secretly I had wanted more to analyze the debits and credits of specific human conditions. I believe I could have become a good psychologist.

My parents didn’t finish college. Both non-academic and non-readers, they didn’t put much emphasis on the value of real learning. Sure they expected their three children to get good grades, even excel in school. But the true essence of education was never imprinted in our young minds and not considerably felt in our home. There was more weight given on exterior matters like money, looks, possessions and other people’s approval. Reading materials were also non-existent except for a few ho-hum magazines and comics in our domestic language. There was no role model for me to emulate. No inspiration. I wish there was someone who had properly evaluated my real strengths and weaknesses and subsequently led me to more meaningful career lanes.

as an ESL instructor today (photo taken a few days ago)

I’ve got a different day job now (as if I had a night job in the first place :-)). A pioneer teacher in an English academy that commenced some six years ago, I got taken on at an age that was way past the hiring age in our country – which is 35 years old. Right timing I guess. Being an ESL teacher, I get to teach students from other Asian countries who need a crash course in English out of their country’s dire need for some measure of fluency in that language.

Here’s the good part. Whenever I’d be given students who have more than rudimentary English skills, I get to teach TOEFL, Intermediate -> Advanced Grammar, Advanced Vocabulary, English Collocations etc. That’s the time when rousing myself up in the morning gets to be a breeze as I look forward to the day that will have me teaching and learning at the same time. I confess it’s Advanced Grammar that has been the most challenging of all because I myself am still a work in progress in this area. As you might have noticed, I slip in grammar here with uh, discomforting regularity.

More often, I am assigned in speaking classes because these neighboring Asians like the way I speak. Imitating native speakers’ enunciation has been painless for me as I’ve watched western movies, TV news/series all my life. The more effort I exert to accentuate my speech in American style the more impressed they become. The happier we all get as well. You see, I love English so much whether I get to read it, speak it, write it or simply hang around with it.    

So I guess things still worked out fine in the end. My job as an ESL instructor is more pleasurable than the ones I held in the field of business. It’s not that financially augmenting likewise but I get to work with words and for once in my life, I am surrounded by books (Yipee!) and could only wish for ample time and stamina to peruse them all.

My work now also facilitates a more sedate existence as I live by the axiom the simpler my life gets, the happier I become. Simplicity has always been good for my psyche I believe.

 

On Why Filipinos Are Good In English

My students have always kept asking me, “Teacher, why are filipinos good in english?” Indeed, the Filipino people are among the best english speakers in the world. We’ve always done well in the field of Languages. That can explain why many of our provinces here have their own dialects.

We may lack the fluid sophistication of native speakers who can naturally express themselves with refreshing intangibility and a spirit of friskiness. Nonetheless, we can definitely hold our own.

The Philippines had been colonized by Spain for nearly 300 years (compared to the U.S. occupation for a mere 40 years) and yet less than 10% of our population could speak Spanish, considering the fact that in college, we were required to complete 16 units of Spanish until (thank heavens) it was scrapped 15 years ago.

The English language sustains our planet for now. There is no other language in this world that can knock it down from its throne. It sits on the top of the heap without any real competition.

We do almost everything here using english. We watch the foreign news, patronize American books and magazines. We’ve got no problem making copious use of dictionaries and thesauri. As long as we get our message across, we’re gonna do just fine.

And how we love Hollywood films. It doesn’t matter that we struggle a bit to catch up with the actors who talk too rapidly. We always manage to enjoy the whole film. And do you know how crazy we can get about American and British pop music?

I regret the fact that I failed to cut through the jargon and couldn’t combat the Gremlins of grammar when I was still in school. Eighty percent (80%) of our subjects in school are in english. In elementary school, we labored on our english subjects using mediocre Philippine grammar books that left us more confused than enlightened. But we habitually persevere and do our best to study the language real hard. All for the love of English, I believe.

Far too many college graduates who are having a hard time finding a good job end up becoming ESL instructors. If you’re reasonably schooled in the Philippines, there’s no way you can’t teach English to non-native speakers.

It doesn’t matter that we can’t pronounce a word perfectly, though we are probably known to be the most flexible earthlings on this planet. You want american accent? No problem. British accent? Umm.. sure, we’ll try.

Fluency in english is a symbol of good education and affluence in this country. It’s a reflection too of your intellect and how well you’ve done in life. It’s even mandatory for the upper class to sound like American native speakers at all times, even in the comfort of their own homes. If you are really rich, lacking in Tagalog (our national language) is a natural phenomenon. That’s just the way it is here.

 But not having english as our second language in this country is unimaginable. More than ever, it is fundamental to our lives, our success and our happiness.

Part 2 of this post can be read at the link below:

https://justmarj.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/yes-filipinos-are-indeed-good-at-english/