What's it like hearing your own language being taught to foreigners?

Oliver Roberts was a fly on a wall an English language school in Joburg and found that the lingua franca is a labyrinth

According to Samuel Beckett, words are all we have. The Irish writer probably meant something very profound and very gloomy by this but still, it's a simple truth that we take for granted.

In the beginning there were sounds. Neanderthal grunts and shouts to express a feeling or explain the best way to bash an animal over the head. Then, somewhere along the way, we invented words, sentences. Suddenly we could attach a thought, object or action to some or other word that a lot of other people could instantly understand. Our lives were made simpler, and more complicated. Great things happened because of a thing called "language". Bad things too. Words became the most powerful entity in the world.

Still, language is just a bunch of sounds that we've assigned things to. We shape our lips and flap our tongues and a noise comes out that allows us to understand one another. It's really weird, actually. And there are few instances where this weirdness is more apparent than when you're hearing your own language being taught to people who can't speak it.

What happens during an English class?

"Rubbish" is the word and someone has pronounced it incorrectly. The teacher is using phonetics to explain. "It's rrr not arrr," he says, tongue beating the roof of his mouth. "Rrrubish. The mouth is shaped like so."

I'm at the Essential English Language Centre in Parkmore, Sandton. Four foreigners, all young women, are sitting in a classroom, note pads and textbooks in front of them. On one wall is a poster that says, "English gets you talking!" We're here to discuss vowels and consonants, regular and irregular verbs. I don't have to think about any of these things. In fact, it's all quite meaningless to me. After all, I can speak English in my sleep. My mouth has never existed without it. For the four students, however, it's like they're trying to decipher a secret code.

"Definite article for specific places," says the teacher. "Let's look at that."

One of the students reads a fill-in example from her textbook.

"He is meeting Ellie at station," she says.

"Remember what we spoke about last week," the teacher says. "There's a word missing there, isn't there?"

The student rubs her temple. It's a puzzle and she's looking for the missing piece, trying to visualise the word that locks in with the rest of the sentence to solve the cryptogram.

"He is meeting Ellie," she says, "at the station?"

"Correct," says the teacher.

One of the posters is called a "concept map".

I'm back learning things I forgot and rules that I remember anyway. Like tenses. Past. Present. Future perfect. Past perfect. Remember past participles? I didn't know that there are 12 or more tenses in English but, really, I've known all along.

"Okay, example eight," the teacher says. "When is he going to the dentist? On Friday morning. Example nine: What is he doing on Saturday morning? He is going shopping to buy Ellie's present."

The students are looking at the writing on the board like it's an equation.

"It does sound a bit strange using present continuous for future arrangements," admits the teacher. "For example, 'What is he doing on Sunday afternoon? He is driving to Wales with Ellie.'"

Next, the teacher has them doing a Scrabble exercise. Letters are printed on the bottom of one of the pages in the textbook. See how many words you can make. The students know letters, sure, but turning them into real words is something else.

"I'm stucked," one of the students whispers.

Why the English language is a labyrinth

"When you break English down to its smallest components it becomes bewildering," the teacher says during a break. "Students struggle with prepositions. They find it incredibly difficult because there are so many in English. In, at, on, around. It's quite complicated. Tenses as well. Present perfect and past perfect. In many other languages those kinds of tenses don't exist or have a different meaning."

Still, one student, from French-speaking Benin, tells me English is not that complicated. "French for me is difficult, really difficult than English because in French you have more rules and the grammar is not as easy as English."

Another student, from Algeria, who speaks Arabic and French, says her ability to understand English depends on which country she's in. "In America I could understand their English but when I came here I couldn't understand a word anyone was saying. South Africans have a very hard way of speaking. Also, I get tired when I speak English. You have to kind of sing the words. Like, 'Hellooo' or 'Good mooorning!' It's really strange."

English classes aren't just for foreigners 

Essential English also offers courses for locals. According to the centre's director, many of these students are people who have been placed in management or even senior level positions, yet struggle to communicate fully in English.

"Second-language speakers in South Africa are immersed in the English-speaking environment most of the day," she says.

"They'll come in and say because of the poor standard of education they had in the past they didn't get a solid foundation in English. They're finding that they're struggling with writing skills or don't feel confident speaking in a meeting. Some of them feel that they have so much to contribute because they're good at what they do, but they're just so self-conscious in meetings. They're afraid they're going to use the wrong word or not structure their sentence properly."

One of the biggest problems locals have is that while they're trying to speak English they're still thinking in Xhosa or Zulu or whatever their first language is. Translating this takes a long time. Sometimes they know what they want to say but they can't get the word.

Today there are six students in the local class. One is a bank teller. Another works in the property evaluation industry. One of the men says he's here because he knows that in the future he may be asked to take on a director's role. You can't be a director if you can't express yourself well in front of other people, he says. He's also dating a white girl and says he can't always explain things to her.

Some people will travel six hours in a day to learn English, like the female pastor from Mpumalanga who drives to Joburg once a week for a one-on-one lesson. She wants her grammar to be perfect when it reaches the ears of God.

"She called me yesterday after a sermon," the director says. "She had to hand me over to her daughter. She'd spoken so much that her voice had gone."