Chapter 8 The Language

When I arrived in England I thought that I knew English. After I'd been here an hour I realized I did not understand one word.

In my first week I learned a little of the language, but after seven years I knew that I could never use it really well. This is sad, but nobody speaks English perfectly.

Remember that those five hundred words the ordinary Englishman uses most are not all the words in the language. You can learn another five hundred and another five thousand and another fifty thousand words after that and you will still find another fifty thousand you have never heard of. Nobody has heard of them.

If you live in England for a long time you will be very surprised to find that the word nice is not the only adjective in the English language. For the first three years you do not need to learn or use any other adjectives. You can say that the weather is nice, a restaurant is nice, Mr So-and-so is nice, Mrs So-and-so's clothes are   nice,  you had a nice time and all this will be very nice.

You must decide about your accent. You will have your foreign accent all right but many people like to mix it with another accent. I knew a Polish Jew who had a strong Yiddish-Irish accent. People thought he was very interesting.

The easiest way to show that you have a good accent (or no foreign accent) is to hold a pipe or cigar in your mouth, to speak through your teeth and finish all your sentences with the question: 'isn't it ?'People will not understand you, but they will think that you probably speak very good English.