Grief & healing: Improving English is a lifelong endeavor

My beloved Baheej spoke several languages fluently. His life path meant he needed to know four languages. He had his own ways by which he learned and perfected them. He started studying English in school but mostly learned using his own techniques.

These included talking with local people, listening to neighbors and reading daily newspapers and novels. And his special secret was that when he came across a word he didn’t know, he looked it up in a dictionary.

I have many of his favorite books where he had underlined words and noted their meaning in the margins, after he had looked them up.

English was his third language and eventually it was flawless. He always beat me at Scrabble!

We all know that we learn a lot of good habits from our dear ones. And one I learned from Baheej is to look up the meaning of any word I hear or read that I don’t know or am not sure of its meaning.

Recently I just did that — I heard the word “garrulous” on TV. I wasn’t sure what it meant. Turns out It means “excessively talkative, especially about trivial matters.”

It’s easy to check definitions these days — just Google it. Baheej used a dictionary of course.

The funny truth is that we can even improve our first language, our native language. And English has a huge vocabulary so there’s often more to learn, or to clarify.

And this is also true of grammar, such as using the right tense or correct word usage in a particular sentence. Luckily such usage matters — such as who vs. whom, I vs. me, correct tenses — can also be easily checked online.

English has lots of pitfalls that make it difficult to master including:

• Large vocabulary

• Words that have more than one meaning depending on context

• Colloquialisms

• Idiomatic phrases

• Regional accents and speech mannerisms

• Contractions

• Slang

• Exceptions to the rule in spelling

• Use of archaic or old fashioned words

It’s a challenge, even if it’s a first language.

So the point is: There is always something to learn, even in very familiar territory.

Of course this is not only true with language, but just about everything.

• Susan Anderson-Khleif of Sleepy Hollow has a doctorate in family sociology from Harvard, taught at Wellesley College and is a retired Motorola executive. Contact her at sakhleif@aol.com.