Sunday 22 July 2012

What did you put on my table?

Today I'm gonna start writing posts in English. I couldn’t imagine that possible when I was at school going through all these grammar books conveyors of pages and pages of illustrations representing very peaceful characters handling -only with a few wrinkles on their front head- all sorts of incredible daily situation. Like: Bob explains to Ted that Mike had been running for almost half an hour in order to get into the bus number 68 which stopped after 5 mins in front of his garden where Jim asked to borrow Mike’s special scissor to cut the rosebush of his other neighbour leaning inside his property. 

My approach to them (these characters) was: okay, I am going to observe you guys, to figure out what you really mean under the plain features of your faces trying to get familiar with your vocabulary but once the exam is done..that’s it, I am not going to see you again especially in case of fun. Bye. 

But after these guys left, some other people knocked at my Door. And I will be always grateful to them for coming. Their words brought big boxes with a totally different specific weight in terms of charisma, even if sometimes they were banging and crashing or passing through the windows. They crowded my lounge and even if from an external point of view I could look like hell, what happened to this guy, inside I was smiling. 
They were my favourite English-writing authors and poets Conrad, Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, TS Elliot, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake etc.. etc.. 

But still, I could not get really confident using their language without concrete experience. 

That’s the main reason why I went to England to work in a restaurant for some months. There, facing a good variety of British accents, I finally understood how to look like a person who really gets the message. And seeing that what I brought on the table was not very far from the customers’ intentions, I growth self-assurance. 

Later on, I started working on ships where a sort of International English is constantly spoken and through hours of conversations with friends I got used to some slang expressions or at least to figure out their possible meaning. Now, I often find myself thinking genuinely in English and with this I mean those kinds of streams of words that cannot really be translated happily. 
So, why not writing in English on my blog? 

Let’s celebrate with this song:



                                                         See you.

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