“How do I learn English?” This is probably the question that I get the most when I am speaking with others. In Ethiopia, like many places in the world, the ability to speak English opens up different job opportunities and is often a requirement to further your education. At the same time, outside of major cities (and also within them) access to education is not equal, and many students struggle with learning English. Many teachers use outdated methods and resources and only a small fraction of students make reasonable progress during their time in school.
This is obviously not the student’s fault, and often the teachers have few alternatives or the drive to implement pedagogical systems they have learned in theory into the classroom. Still I see students feeling the impacts of this decision and many want to find more
What Resources Exist
An early resource that I found while learning afaan Oromoo was the relatively large number of resources published for people trying to learn English. Many of these are no better than phrase lists, with little thought put to the order of conversation or useful language examples. Honestly, many students thought that reading the dictionary would be a useful way to improve but could not read a basic story, so I am unsure how reading an entire dictionary would help. I know I was just posting about reading a dictionary, but I have a very functionally fluent reading ability and I also have linguistic interests in the language. I see reading the dictionary as assisting those skills rather than creating those skills where they previously did not exist.
People often tried to create their language journey on their own without using the resources of their fellow language learners. For example, if they could not speak to a native English speaker, such as myself, they would choose not to speak in English. I tried many times to get my friends who were interested in learning English to talk to one another rather than just me.
The Best Resources
Talking in English amongst yourselves is an excellent untapped resource. This can be difficult as you may feel silly at first since you could say the same thing in afaan Oromoo with ease. I felt similar when I first started learning afaan Oromoo but made the most progress when my teacher made the class speak in afaan Oromoo. Both you and your friend are trying to learn English and you find time to practice in conversation you will see results.
Many easy level English books or bilingual English and afaan Oromoo books exist. Finding the ones you like may be difficult but they are useful. These are often easy books and may not be of interest to older learners, but they ensure that one understands the basic sentence structures and vocabulary.
Another good option, is actual textbooks for afaan Oromoo, such as the Handbook of the Oromo Language where you will see conversation in both languages (even if the afaan Oromoo spelling is a little bit awkward). Another great book along the same lines is Haasawaa afaan Oromoofi Inglizii by Yonas Angose.
A final resource I would like to encourage is that of the BBC. The BBC has thoughtful lessons set up for learners of English across different topics with explanation in afaan Oromoo for how to use the words and phrases in conversation. As a person learning afaan Oromoo I also found these helpful for myself. Here is an example of one of the lessons about first impressions where both audio and transcript are given
The Future
My hope is that the amount of quality resources will continue to grow. Each year I find new books on the market. Some books are good and sometimes older resources are better. I want quality YouTube videos to be created instead of the phrasebook style popular now. As the international Oromo community interacts with people in Oromia, maybe more resources will become available.