Oyin Ogunbowale
Despite being taught from foundational levels — from the kindergarten stages, that is — and still considered to be the official language in Nigeria, the English Language remains one of the most difficult. For one, its rules can be so unpredictable that learners find it difficult to master.
The English Language may seem like an easy subject for some students. It is, however, a hard nut to crack. This is because there are challenges attached to understanding it. This brings me to the issue of Tenses, a vital topic in English language. It is not just limited to the present, past and future tenses. Its application also matters a lot.
This is an issue quite a number of people face while conversing with others. Take for example the verb “eat”. A person who is not that sound may say: “I eat rice yesterday’ or “I eated rice yesterday”, instead of ‘I ate rice yesterday’. This also spans the past, and past participle. The idea of ‘eated’ may come in because of the speaker’s familiarity with regular verbs like wait, cook and watch, whose past tense forms are waited, cooked and watched.
Essay writing and letter writing is another area that provokes challenges in English language. While the former is sub-divided into narrative, descriptive, argumentative and expository essays, the latter is sub-divided into formal, informal, and semi-formal letters. Although essay writing is taught from the primary classes, some still find it difficult to write them well. Yet, letter writing is more structured or technical, and not following the guidelines to writing it may render the letter inaccurate. The guidelines to writing a letter includes indicating the address of the sender/recipient, salutation, title, body, conclusion and closing. Skipping any feature among the guidelines has rendered the whole letter incomplete and inaccurate. Hmm. Just imagine: they say letters D and S must be capital in ‘Dear Sir,’ but F must be small in ‘Yours faithfully’!
Fortunately, with the help of various search engines and the newly developed AI apps, these challenges can be curtailed.
Consider pronunciation palavers too. One can be very much confident while pronouncing basic words like facade, epitome and sacred. However, in most cases the pronunciation is not correct. In many cases, people say FA-KADE, E-PI-TOM and SA-KRED instead of FASSAD, I-PI-TO-ME respectively. This triggers the issue of diction and phonetics, including having to deal with what words are pronounced with the long and short vowel sounds. This, of course, includes their transcription. Imagine pronouncing a word one way, and the transcription is telling otherwise. Alas! Something has gone wrong somewhere. Indeed, many times, one is at the mercy of long vowel sounds, short vowel sounds, monotones, diphthongs and other phonetic sagas.
Truly, when it comes to the issue of diction and pronunciation, one can boldly affirm that English is really dynamic. Here is another word which majorly everyone mispronounces in Nigeria: ‘route’. The vowel sound is the long /u:/, but many mispronounce it as the diphthong /au/, which, they say, is American pronunciation.
