THE ART OF SPEAKING AMERICAN ENGLISH by Stephen Stratton Page A

couple of very important things: the tendency to skip over words you do not know or have trouble pronouncing is eliminated, and, you simulate actual conversation, especially when it comes to dialogue between story characters.
    2 . Forgo Using Dictionaries and Electronic Translators
    Just picture yourself watching a movie and someone in the room pauses the show every few minutes to get something to drink, eat, or search the dictionary for some word they heard spoken in the movie they did not understand. You would find this extremely frustrating to say the least, as it would make it practically impossible to enjoy the story. You put your brain through the same taxing affair when you depend on a dictionary to do whatyour imagination is supposed to do for you. In the words of my erstwhile and excellent Japanese professor, “If you don’t know it, guess!”
    3. Apply All Techniques Covered In Previous Sections Of This Book
    Think of the gears in a wristwatch; all it takes for the sensitive mechanism to go awry is for one single cog to break. The aforementioned techniques, for all intents and purposes, are the gears that turn and their cogs that mesh in the process of learning to speak English like a pro. Use them all.

The Layering Effect
    The tendency to get bogged down in too many facts too fast in the processes of learning is compounded by a number of today’s accepted methods of language acquisition that encourage students to tackle every part of speech at the same time. Inadvertently, some parts of speech, such as adverbs, are largely neglected.
    In stark contrast, children gather information in stages, a kind of layering effect , each layer coalescing with the one that came before, building an ever stronger foundation, which leads to rapid improvement in listening comprehension, writing skills, and conversational skills. I have seen this firsthand in Japanese children I teach in the U.S. and Japan.
    Fortunately, it does not take much effort on the part of the adult student to obtain similar results by applying the layering effect to their daily reading. Focus on one part of speech at a time. Though to some degree it is a matter of preference, a good start is to pay close attention to adverbs.
Adverbs
help the reader wonderfully visualize the force and nature of verbs. Consider the following with and without adverbs; the later paints a far vivid picture of the tense atmosphere in the meeting room.
    A.
He stood up in the middle of the meeting and said he did not agree with the new company policy
.
    B.
He abruptly stood up in the middle of the meeting, and angrily said he did not agree with the new company policy
.
    Focus on
adverbs
, your first
layer
, for two to three months or until you feel confident to try using them more often in daily conversation. By then, you will be ready to move on to
adjectives
and other parts of speech, repeating the same process. Keep in mind that you are
not studying
but rather absorbing the language, which will help you to relax and enjoy literary works, a necessary factor, by the way, to mastering any language. On your mark, get set, go!

The Sandwich Principle: Remembering Articles the, an, And a
    Arguably, one of the most pesky features of English is the necessity for articles the, an and a . If you have a favorite sandwich – hopefully you do - etch a picture of it in your mind and keep it there at all times when speaking, reading, and writing English. The regular homemade sandwich is made up of two slices of bread, and meat, lettuce, and cheese in between. Let us pretend an article and the noun it ultimately modifies are two slices of bread, and what you find in between, verbs, adverbs and adjectives, are the meat and cheese, etc. There is hardly a paragraph in English that does not contain many of these article/noun sandwiches. Keeping your
favorite
sandwich
in mind at all times, you will be less likely to drop needed articles.
    How many “sandwiches” are in the example paragraph