Yin-Yang English

Mistakes that we are all making:

Yin-Yang English is about to help us to speak with clarity and confidence.

Many of us, I am included of course, are so busy studying new vocabulary, one is that not practical, we won’t need all the words in our every day language, even open a Chinese dictionary, how many words we do know? 🙂

Another good reason what we are doing is not smart, when we need to speak, these words seem so far away, we can’t use most of them, we aren’t that confident to use many of them.

So why do we just learn things that are useful, that can help us speak fluently, so people can understand us and we can understand them. So many years I am in UK, there are still things I don’t understand, I don’t feel ashamed, only I wasn’t doing the right thing. Thought watching English movies would help me, so I watched so many of them, thought going to study group wasn’t enough, going to university would help me for sure, still written English and reading English, could not make wonderful conversations. I blamed culture, it is not culture, it is nature. I learned this no long ago, just before I was about to give up ‘I just not made to speak English. That is not the case. All we have to do is training ourselves to do the right thing.

The right way

For example, people didn’t understand me when I dropped some consonant in a word, or added a noun in a word because the consonants cluster problem which Chinese doesn’t exist, as a Chinese speaker I would naturally try my best to use the way how I speak Chinese to speak English–like TEX is not TEXT; CAR is not CARD or MISSED is not MISS. My friend kept catching me of me dropping the end T, D and ED. Or I was told and I know many Chinese speakers are also do is we add an extra noun like this PARKED I would say PARKERD or BELT we could say BELert.

I might want to say GOAL but instead I might say GO. I might want to say HUT but instead I might say HAT, or I want to say HEART but instead I might still say HAT. Also there were (are, at times but I can catch myself now) times when I wanted to say PAIN I said PEN, yes these are the challenges we have to overcome if we want to say English effectively, and not to confuse our English speaker friends.

You will learn clear speak all the vowels and consonants clearly without any guessing work, for example, to say long i: right it is not just say short i longer, like when 小沈阳在一年春晚问他有英文名没？他说有。把小沈阳拐弯拉长的说。我们要想把i：说对需要舌头前半身尽量往山哥贴去，下巴上托，嘴角往两边拉开，像微笑。再慢慢让i：声在舌头和上颚的缝隙流出。我们会一个个认识音节，用例子和对比把它们说的不再穿帮。

Speak as a native:

If we want to speak like a native or just for clarity, there are a few elements we have to take care of, such as: Pace, pitch, volume, rhythm, breath, posture, gesture, intonation or stress so on.

For example, we have the habit speak English faster than how English is designed, because Chinese is a fast rate language, we would automatically speak fast to reach our point as how Chinese would do it, don’t worry we will cover this in pace.

Just one more thing, English is stress language but Chinese is a syllable timed language, meaning we will created confusing in our listeners’ ear if we speak English as how we would speak Chinese.

I will try to cover all things that are important to speak English clearly to enable us to be a confident speaker, speak with clarity instead scared our audiences away, for pouring too much information or no important at all, because we don’t take care the intonation element.

Best wishes!

With love and gratitude!

Lily.