Tips and Tricks for English Communication
If you can read this and you’re an ESL student, chances are you know better than anyone just how confusing English communication can be.
- Confusing grammatical rules that are always changing for no reason at all.
- “I before E except after C… but not always!”
- Lots of words that sound the same but have different spellings: their/there/they’re, dessert/desert, gray/grey.
- Lots of words that sound different but have the same spellings: dove/dove, close/close, bass/bass.
- Lots of words with silent letters: honest, salmon, Connecticut, dumb, lamb, yacht.
But you’ve made it through that. You’re pretty comfortable taking a test, catching all the rules, and spelling things correctly, right? You can even understand spoken English, for the most part. For most people, though, the hardest part of English communication is the conversational aspect. It’s hard enough dealing with the weird rules, and all the regional accents of this enormous country, but then people start using these weird phrases, called idioms, that don’t seem to make sense! An idiom is a collection of words, an expression that means something other than the literal meanings of its words. For someone who learned all his or her English in a classroom, understanding American idioms is really hard, because the exact definitions of each word don’t give the full meaning.
If you’re comfortable enough, you can ask the native speaker what a particular idiom means. Just don’t expect a very helpful answer, because that person grew up with the idiom and probably never really thought about it like that before. A good tip for understanding American idioms and improving your English communication is to ask another former ESL student for help. Someone like that, who was once in yours shoes and now understands English communication, will be able to relate to your situation and give you the best methods and tips for learning American idioms. They can speak on your level, from the perspective of someone learning everything with a “blank slate.”
Additional Resources
See What Wikipedia Says About IdiomsBusiness Jargon Dictionary
Common Day American Slang