Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

yda
y Life
98
5. COLOR COMMENTARY
I know from what my mother has told me that I was a 
very late talker. Like not, she thought something was 
wrong. I wasn’t saying anything, um, until one day I 
busted out
with a whole sentence. Um, so she’s like, “Oh, 
thank goodness, nothing’s wrong.” So I think that my 
daughter, Aida, is speaking much earlier than I ever did, 
and I think part of the reason is—well, part of the reason 
is she’s the only child we have and I was number two, so 
that might have contributed—but in the, bigger compo-
nent is the fact that she has all this sort of language stim-
ulation all of the time, and she’s constantly going back 
and forth, and she really gets it. Maybe she was just also 
genetically predisposed to being verbal, I don’t know, but 
I think that sort of compilation of characteristics has 
made this 
chatterbox
, which is what she is. I’ve, I-I think 
that she may become, um, a 
play-by-play
, do 
color com-
mentary
, because that’s what she does all day long: “OK, 
I’m sitting now, OK, let’s go,” and everything is, she does 
little commentary of everything that we’re doing: “OK, 
we’re sitting now. Now where are we going? We are going 
to the store.” Everything . . .

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6. GROWING UP BILINGUALLY
MAN:
English—actually I grew up, uh, with English lan-
guage. Uh, we were colonized by, uh, after the Second 
World War, at the end of the Second World War. Uh, 
Cameroon was one of the countries that was parti-
tioned between Britain and France, and so it made us a 
de facto, uh, bilingual country. So, I grew in the English 
section, studied entirely in English. And, of course, we 
spoke the dialect at home, but when we went to school, 
we, uh, studied in English. But going to the university, to 
the university, we had to go to the French section. Uh, 
there’s ten provinces in Cameroon. Eight of them are, uh, 
French speaking and two of them are English speaking, 
so you have to go to the French side to go to university, so 
then you’re supposed to be bilingual, so we started study-
ing French while going to primary school in the English 
section to prepare for university in the French section, 
so. Uh, English, I grew up learning English, but French I 
had to study as a second language.