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Penguin Books Ltd - Manish Gupta

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178 pages

English

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English Bites! My Fullproof English Learning Formula is the story of a man who goes from being tongue-tied in school to becoming a smooth-talking banker. Through a series of hilarious personal adventures and misadventures, Manish Gupta provides easy solutions to problems faced by language learners. So, whether you re a vernacular speaker, a GRE/GMAT/CAT/XAT aspirant or just a language nut, English Bites! will expand your vocabulary and improve your verbal ability. It may even help you love the English language a little more! Add over 1000 new words to your vocabulary and figure out easy and effective ways to expand your word bank. Combine etymology, mnemonics, jokes and anecdotes to better your understanding of the English language. Differentiate between similar sounding words and learn to use them right. Improve your general knowledge with trivia that spans brand names, automobiles, fine dining, love, money, banks, science and B-school jargon.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 décembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	7
EAN13	9788184757781
Langue	English

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MANISH GUPTA
English Bites!
My Fullproof English Learning Formula
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
1. Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh
2. Borrowings from Sophomores
3. Discovering Mnemonics
4. My Friend Avinash
5. The Tata Nagar Wheeler Dealer
6. Pursuit of Excellence at XLRI
7. Capital Square
8. Tummy Tuck
9. Coffee and Conversations
10. My Rendezvous with English
11. Dr Pandu Piplani
12. Conjugal Subjugation
13. Family Expansion
14. My Material Has Run Out
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
1. Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh
2. Borrowings from Sophomores
3. Discovering Mnemonics
4. My Friend Avinash
5. The Tata Nagar Wheeler Dealer
6. Pursuit of Excellence at XLRI
7. Capital Square
8. Tummy Tuck
9. Coffee and Conversations
10. My Rendezvous with English
11. Dr Pandu Piplani
12. Conjugal Subjugation
13. Family Expansion
14. My Material Has Run Out
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
ENGLISH BITES!
Manish Gupta is a banking professional. When not crunching numbers, he examines the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of the English language. He also likes trivia, travelling, adventure sports, delving into human psychology and giving professorial discourses to colleagues, family and friends-practically anyone who can give him a patient hearing. An engineering graduate from Punjab Engineering College (Chandigarh) and an MBA from XLRI School of Business and Human Resources (Jamshedpur), he lives in Mumbai with his wife Deepali, a medical professional, and their daughters Tamanna and Prakriti.
Manish can be reached at mystruggleswithenglish@gmail.com
To My parents My wife Deepali My sister Ruchi My parents-in-law My daughters Tamanna and Prakriti Aspirants of CAT, XAT, GRE, GMAT and Students from the vernacular medium
1
Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh
On the face of it, all was going well for me at school. It was a five-minute walk away but we preferred to cycle the distance in under two. The school advertised itself as an English medium school, the only one to do so in my neighbourhood. Those were the 1980s and our parents were beginning to appreciate the role of proficiency 1 in English in gaining economic prosperity. The fact that their kids studied in a convent-a word that had come to mean a good English medium school-was casually slipped into conversations but hadn t yet acquired the exalted 2 status of precipitating 3 distress in those being conversed with.
This school was located in the small, sleepy town of Rohtak in the north Indian state of Haryana. Our teachers had grown up studying in the vernacular 4 and were likely to break into their mother tongue for topics that did not strictly fall within the boundaries of the course. It worked well for us as there was no real pressure to learn to converse in an alien tongue suited merely to the narrow world of academics.
Our English teacher, Mr Verma, was different though. He destroyed our fragile 5 confidence with pleasure and lowered our self-esteem to levels where we couldn t even face ourselves in the mirror. Over time and after a lot of effort, we got better. We finally mastered the art of combing our hair without stealing even a glance at the looking glass!
Mr Verma would ask us to provide him with a list of our extracurricular interests and randomly call three students to make short speeches before the rest of the class on any of those topics. Each morning was spent in fervent 6 exhortations 7 to the almighty and this continued till the selection of the three lambs for the day was done.
There were enough days in a year when all our prayers and promises came to nought, and I was pulled up right to the front. I would experience a sudden loss of all confidence, courage, and fluency and stammer away at Playing with my pet dog Rambo and my pet cat Lucy or How to win at Monopoly and marbles or Kitchen gardening techniques of grafting to multiply English rose plants and cacti and so on.
We tried to console ourselves that while the medium of instruction in our school was English, the medium of understanding, memorizing and responding was the vernacular. In other words, we thought in the vernacular and then translated our thoughts into English when asked to explain something in class. Naturally, this took longer than normal conversation would-without the advantage of fluency, we were often left groping 8 for the appropriate English words to adequately describe our thoughts and ideas. These frenzied 9 efforts at quick translations were exhausting, and I can t even begin to describe the relief of getting back into the comfort of the mother tongue during lunch breaks and small gaps between classes, when the next teacher was slightly late and we had a few moments of freedom.
Expectedly, my skills in all departments of the English language-speech, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation-were limited to the academic aspects of life. Good academic performance at school ensured that I could opt for the sciences stream in Class 11. By this time, my sister Ruchi, who was four years younger to me, had successfully weaned 10 herself off her passion for table tennis and plunged 11 into the pursuit of academic excellence.
This led to a small conference at home attended by close family and friends. The mission was to decide which of the two teenagers would earn the privilege of staying longer at home, and which one would move to a hostel after Class 12. It was agreed that if there were one engineer and one doctor in the family, we could become more self-sufficient at repairing human bodies and home appliances, should they decide to malfunction at any time.
There was no engineering college in my city though it was full of professional institutions, especially medical colleges devoted to all treatment modalities 12 such as allopathy, ayurveda, and homeopathy. Since I had managed to lower my average science score in my matriculation examination, thanks to poor marks in biology, I readily volunteered to explore the freedom of hostel life in an engineering college outside my beloved city.
And so it was, at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, in the second phase of my academic career that I came across several long-suffering specimens of my species. We shared our sorrows, empathized 13 with one another, spoke a common language and bonded well. And we could not help noticing other specimens, individually blessed by the enshrined 14 deity of the English language. They spoke so fluently in this foreign tongue, at times using words and expressions alien to us, that we felt like children of a lesser god.
Some of these ladies and gentlemen were also rather enthused 15 with the Western concepts of life and extremely keen to pursue higher studies in the hallowed 16 halls and laboratories of American universities. Others, who wanted to gather material riches and climb corporate ladders, dreamt of management courses in elite management institutes in India or abroad.
I certainly did not want to be left behind. Even before ragging season had ended, I started to gather information from seniors on management institutes in India and overseas. I sought out ways to make it to the Holy Grail 17 - any reputed institution in the US. I soon found out that the latter meant taking tests called GRE (for MS) or GMAT (for MBA). And clearing these tests depended, to a large extent, on one s proficiency in English vocabulary, reading comprehension and grammar.
On the advice of my seniors, I made a quick trip to the bookstore in Sector 11 market and purchased Barron s GRE , a popular guide book. Charged as I was, I began in right earnest to cram its innumerable word lists. Little did I realize that I had to start learning English from scratch. The more I crammed, the piteously 18 less English I seemed to know!
How confusingly similar some words appeared to be! Such confusion between cavern-tavern, mannequin-manikin, plaint-pliant, childish-childlike, jaunt-jaunty, esoteric-exoteric, underline-underwrite, geminate-germinate, idle-idyll, wriggle-wiggle My head swam and my heart sank!
And this was just the beginning. I was in for a ton of nasty surprises. For instance, I encountered 19 some strange words that had more than one meaning. You may retort 20 that there are several such examples in English. It is, after all, a language that has travelled and evolved a great deal, rapidly taking in words and concepts from other cultures. However, unlike the usual instances of multiple meanings for a particular word, these strange words had multiple meanings that were exact opposites of each other!
Take the word cleave . To adhere closely to or to follow faithfully is what it means. Strong-willed people can be expected to cleave to their principles in adverse times. However, the word also means to part, split, cut off, or divide! So, one can cleave a branch from a tree.
Which meaning is correct? More important, how does one know which of the many meanings is correct in a given context? Looking back, I realize that much of the confusion was caused by similar sounding words and also by subtle differences in the enunciation (pronunciation, articulation).
As I learnt new words, I discovered more of these contronyms : moot is debatable (capital punishment is a moot point) and also not worthy of debate (that the earth revolves around the sun is a moot point). Consult is to ask for advice (he consults the doctor once every six months) and also to give advice (he consults for several multinational corporations on their China and India strategies). Custom is something that is usual (in India, it is a custom to touch the feet of elders as a sign of respect) and also special (the Bentley was custom-made for the son of a rich industrialist).
The list goes on: scan is to examine carefully (the doctor scanned the reports for any evidence of relapse 21 of cancer) and also to quickly glance through (he scanned the