IF you are asking, "Can I improve my English?" or "Can I learn to speak and write in English correctly?" the honest answer is, "Certainly you can, but you must be willing to make the necessary effort."
Stop and ask yourself just why it is you wish to improve your English. To begin with, first judgments of men and women, superficial if you like, but enormously important are necessarily formed almost entirely from their personal appearance and their casual speech; and the discriminating will judge much more quickly by the standard of speech than by the standard of appearance. You have often heard comments such as these: "She looked like a lady, but did you hear her talk?" "He is impossible; he says, 'I seen' and 'we was.'" Or, perhaps, it was a favorable opinion: "He must have excellent backgrounds; he speaks perfect English."
Opportunities for friendships and for advantageous contacts often rest on such instantaneous verdicts as these. In business the casual good impression is so important that slovenly, slang-ridden speech may erect a permanent barrier between an ambitious worker and success. Communication is the essence of business. Exact, concise, effective speech is a necessary tool for much of the world's important work.
Indifference and carelessness keep many persons under the heavy handicap of incorrect, clumsy speech. It is well to admit that their trouble is caused by indifference and carelessness rather than by a lack of opportunity to learn or by a want of ability. The essential rules of correct speech are available everywhere and are scarcely more numerous than are the traffic regulations of a large city. Anyone can learn to speak correctly who can learn to use a typewriter or to play a complicated game or to drive an automobile. But he must desire to learn the one as keenly as he desires to learn the other, and he must in the beginning give to each performance the same kind of concentrated attention. That is, he must rid himself of those twin impediments, indifference and carelessness.
Personal values richer than either the social or the economic ones may lie in the sure knowledge that we have mastered our mother tongue. A man's whole personality may be impaired because of an uneasy sense that his crude speech reveals him as an uneducated person. Self-confidence is necessary for self-respect, and a feeling of inferiority is more than merely uncomfortable; it is unsafe.
Also, speech and thought are closely related. If we lack a command of language, we are in danger of being incoherent, not only to others, but also to ourselves. Learning to use words effectively, framing exact, intelligible sentences, will improve our thinking and make it clearer and more precise. The study of English quickens, too, our appreciation of its use by others. The pleasure we obtain from great literature, a pleasure always at hand and durable to the end of our lives, can be fully enjoyed only when we have trained our minds to recognize and to understand the vividness and exactness and beauty of fine English.
