In Love with English

Unlike most of my friends, I fell in love with Eng­lish after I joined Infos­ys in octo­ber of 2004.During my third year of engi­neer­ing at GITAM I won­dered when most of my friends were try­ing hard to push tons of words in to their minds and were cram­ming wordlists for GRE and CAT kind of exams.But then I did­nt find any rea­son for myself to join that jun­ta. I dont know any stan­dard Eng­lish word.And my Eng­lish was not bad.It was not good either.[ For­get GRE/CAT. At that time man­ag­ing to get through engi­neer­ing with dis­tinc­tion was a great aspi­ra­tion for me. I did it of course] It is after join­ing Infos­ys I real­ized the ben­e­fits of com­mu­ni­cat­ing in good English.And it is then I start­ed putting my con­scious efforts to achieve that objec­tive of mas­ter­ing Eng­lish lan­guage.

My approach and way of learn­ing Eng­lish is very dif­fer­ent and unique.For me the pur­pose of learn­ing good Eng­lish has lot more to do than just to give some exams.I believed in the prin­ci­ple of repeat­ed usage. I installed a dic­tio­nary in my office desktop.From the on when­ev­er I encoun­tered a new unknown word in any mail or poster or in some sub­ject mat­ter , I used to refer that dictionary.Thanks to dic­tio­nary softwares.You need not spend much time scrolling pages.Just type the word and get its meaning.If you keep on look­ing at the same word for over too many num­ber of times, that word per­ma­nent­ly makes its place in your mind.You need not again put con­scious effort to remem­ber or mug that word specifically.All I did is to refer dic­tio­nary innu­mer­able times.That has been very help­ful for me.

Eng­lish lan­guage is like an ocean. Espe­cial­ly its vocabulary.It has vast vocab­u­lary( ask the CAT aspirants.The mak­ers of Eng­lish sec­tion of CAT exam paper keeps on com­ing up with new words year after year.No clue where they find them) so I thought I should keep myself more engaged with vocabulary.As long as I am in office any unknown word is just a click away.But when I was at home, I was tired of scrolling pages in the heavy Oxford dic­tio­nary and I real­ized that I am spend­ing more time scrolling the dic­tio­an­ry pages.Then came the idea of Dig­i­tal Dic­tio­nary [ It looks like the old gen­er­a­tion CASIO Dig­i­tal Dairy with QWERTY key­board which peo­ple used to store phone num­bers and address­es before the advent of mobile phones].Nobody is sell­ing dig­i­tal dic­tio­nar­ies in India.In every shop the moment I say dig­i­tal…, sales peo­ple used to bring those out­dat­ed CASIO dig­i­tal dairies with greater enthusiasm.After fac­ing few such set­backs I decid­ed to get it from US.Then to my res­cue came my sis­ter Usha and her friend Anjali to Trivan­drum for their intern­ship. And the point is that Anjali is an NRI and she was plan­ning to go all the way to US and come back , all with­in a week span. See what a per­fect oppur­tu­ni­ty for me to get DD.I thought God has sent them to meet me only to get DD for me and I cap­i­tal­ized on that situation.I still remem­ber how I tor­tured her till she went to US and came back with DD.Carrying a DD is like car­ry­ing all the words with you.Its a very good gad­get to own and use.It is enabling me to learn in a dif­fer­ent way like nev­er before.I learned many words with the help of that.Whenever I see a new word let it be on road or at rail­way sta­tion or on the huge sign boards used for adver­tis­ing or what­ev­er may be the place I can demys­ti­fy the word then and there. Now I have dic­tio­nary at my office in my desk­top, at home in my lap­top and my DD will always accom­pa­ny me on the go.

But vocab­u­lary is just a part of Eng­lish language.There are oth­er areas with their own set of chal­lenges like gram­mar which keeps on chang­ing from time to time, writ­ing skills are there to be learnt and of course read­ing and com­pre­hend­ing pages of print are oth­er areas of para­mount importance.Last 2 years have been won­der­ful learn­ing expe­ri­ence and have shown sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in me.Now I am now look­ing for­ward to enter these areas as well so as to keep my learn­ing com­plete and meaningful.Writing this blog also is the part of my learn­ing excer­cise.

While clos­ing I want to men­tion few peo­ple who have helped and are still help­ing me in my efforts to improve my Eng­lish lan­guage skills.First one to men­tion is my best friend Theja.His Eng­lish is too good and see his blog to get thrilled.He has been very help­ful and encour­ag­ing .He was patient enough to read my ver­bose and pro­lix mails, cor­rect­ing them and sug­gest­ing the best despite his busy schedules.Everytime I talk to him few new words will be added to my vocabulary.Everytime he writes a mail to me it will bring new words along with the news.Next comes anoth­er friend Bhanu who always hits me back ruth­less­ly with the gram­mar mis­takes I commit.Then comes anoth­er friend Sun­dar in his own style who sug­gests best of the books avail­able for good read.I feel very much blessed to being asso­ci­at­ed with these kind of peo­ple. If you too have some com­ments please feel free to post them in com­ments sec­tion 🙂 After all, suc­cess­ful peo­ple and lead­ers are also known for their best of the best com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills. When they talk every­one will lis­ten, When they walk, every­one will fol­low. Its just a mat­ter of time before I too become one among them.Just watch.