Getting rid of old habits for better language fluency & communication / Angeline Ranjethamoney Vijayarajoo (AP, Dr), Afni Anida Adnan and K. Arutchelvi

Have you ever wondered why people or even perhaps our good selves, often make language errors due to old habits forming and the resistance to get rid of these? A quick example comes by way of this question. How often have you heard someone saying, “Repeat again”? The thing is most of us are aware that this is inappropriate as it is redundant. Yet, many of us have gotten into the habit of saying this and the more we do this, the more we hear this, from ourselves and others, we get into the habit of saying it and almost believing in its truth. Hence, the moral of this is, in order to speak fluently for better communication, it is important to get rid of old habits, which we know to be erroneous and to embrace using phrases correctly. Habit forming takes time, but breaking an already established habit takes even more time and includes a proactive mind and the concerted effort, patience and endurance by an individual to achieve the desired result. This is a challenge for all of us, and if we want to change for better language fluency and communication, we can apply ourselves. Another example is when even teachers say “Today, we are going to discuss about pollution”. We all know that discuss is a word (verb, actually, but we’re not going into grammar here) which is never followed by ‘about’ (a preposition – again, we’re not going into grammar here). In a way, one is repeating oneself as discussing implies talking ‘about’ something. Yet, we hear this in spoken language and tend to pick it up, so it becomes a part of our spoken language. Back to the moral of the story: We need to speak accurately, and one way is to get rid of old habits which display errors. In this case, knowing that an expression is wrong, yet using it habitually as if it were right, is a bad habit and becomes’ old’ as we keep using it over the years. Therefore, it is time to be mindful of the way we speak to ensure that we correct ourselves instead of following our old ways of using inaccurate and even wrong expressions in spoken language.