Hello and welcome to another blog of mine while I thank you for reading my previous ones, you did right?

Well, I know I said English but this one's gonna be “How to *any language”. But Indians don't really care about any other languages except English. While Hindi is a child's play, students generally want to learn english too because english and hindi are the two languages officially used in India (remember that India has no national language🤔).

Actually this problem relates to my life very well because I seem to be good at (not ‘in’) english, But my friends, and most of the other students aren't. They always wonder how some of us remember every rule of english so perfectly. And that's where they fail.

There is actually no need to remember the rules and meanings of the english language if we want to speak it. For example we are taught reported speech/indirect speech/narration and we are taught two rules, the special rule and the general rule (sounds like the general and special theories of relativity, doesn't it?)-

General rule-Verb changes  accordingly if the reported speach is in the past and there is no change if it is in either present or in future.

Special rule-In reported speech, the first person changes into subject, second person changes into object and third person doesn't change.

But, before remembering these rules, just look at them carefully, these are just some obvious things which are being told like rocket science.

He said, “I play cricket with you”.

→He said that he played cricket with me.

Is there anyhing that could confuse you? ‘play’ changes to ‘played’ because for him it is present but now for me it is past, ‘I’ changes too ‘he’ the person he is talking about is ‘I’ for him and ‘he’ for me and ‘you’ changes to ‘me’ because of the same. What he said was is in his respect but it changes in my respect. And that's all.

Another really important thing is vocabulary. My english teacher says that we should have friendship with dictionary. According to him, we should always keep looking for the meanings of newer words. Seriously? In my opinion, we should rarely check the dictionary. Dictionary is like a cheat list which we use in case a new word kills our brain cells in an attempt to understand it. All we should do to know the meaning of a word is to see it's use.

That little monkey ate all delicacies he could get.

Suppose that you don't know the meaning of delicacy and here you have a sentence which uses the word. The best way to undersatand its meaning is to contradict all possibilities to a few. First of all, relate it to any other word you know(definetly not all words have been assigned uniquely). You might know the meaning of delicate which means soft and weak but it doesn't seem to relate the sentance in any way. Next, the monkey eats it, so it must be a food item, shouldn't it? And definetly, not all food items could be called with such a special name. So delicacy must mean some special food and that's all. There really was no need to consult a dictionary and you understood it better than you would using a dictionary.

You definetly don't think about the meaning of words before using them in your language, think about it.

If you ask about the meaning of gerund and participle to an english speaking person, most probably they wouldn't know the meaning. The way students generally study english, they are heading towards becoming an english professor and nothing more. Speaking english and becoming an english professor are different, aren't they?

English, actually, is a language and not a subject to be learnt. It can be taught like a subject, but unless we treat it like a language, we can't learn it. And to learn a language, we must listen to and speak it. Okay, talk in english, but to whom? To yourself, of course, not by mouth but inside your mind.

And a helpful thing for you - I learnt english just by watching hollywood movies in english (with subtitles, of course) and hence by hearing and reading fastly and all the rules have automatically been installed in my mind without my knowledge.

A tip-Try to speak what feels like being right and don't think about grammer everytime.

Hoping that it wasn't long enough to bore you, I hereby bid you a good bye. Following me might be a good idea.