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English in my Country vs. English in USA When I was 12 years old, I started to learn English back in Colombia, but it was so complicated to me, at the point that I only could say few words with a horrible accent. Learning English in Colombia was like if i would never need it in the future, and I never thought I would come to United States, so I wasn't worried about my English skills, and to make things worse, the classes I had in English were very mediocre because of the way teachers taught them, and I was always thinking about what to do after classes, like playing soccer, take a nap, or hanging out with my friends. When I was in eighth grade, a requirement to pass the year, was passing English, but I was so bad, because when someone is not interested in something, they do not pay much attention, as it was in my case, and I only wanted to pass the class and that was it. The most complex phrases I learned were some like these, but listen carefully, because they are a very complicated phrases: "I play in the park," "My car is red," "Sandra has blue eyes," "My teacher's name is Martha." As you can notice learning few sentences in English weren't very helpful, besides when I had English classes the teacher never spoke English, so it was harder to learn it. With the homeworks, when I couldn't do them, I asked to my best friend, I mean my classmate to give me a hand, and he just passed me the homework and I copied them before class. But I wasn't the only one, only a few of us did it. Just 99 percent of the class. That was so funny because when the teacher correct the homeworks, almost all the class had the same answers, and the teacher always seemed to think, "Umm, what's going on in here?" But he knew it, it was just that he never said anything to us, and he acted like if nothing were happening, at least that's what I thought, but he took revenge at the end of the year. A few weeks before the year ended, I had a final exam of English, and
I failed the exam. I failed the class too. In that time I thought the
exam was impossible, because the teacher asked me about grammatical structures,
he gave me verbs in present and I had to put them in past and things like
that. I knew I was going to fail the exam, because since I never paid
attention, of course I knew I would fail it. After I got here in Boise I was so depressed, because of many reasons, but the main reason was the language, I only knew those phrases and the numbers, and every time a person said something to me, it was like if they were speaking Chinese or something like that. I remember the first day of high school in Boise, I asked to a person how to go to the gym, and she told me the directions, I still don't know what she said, but I believe she told me something like: "First, go straight ahead until you find a door, open it and then turn to the right. You'll see the gym sign, and there is the gym." That's what I think she said, because she talked too fast. When she finished, I was looking at her face like "What did you say?" And I thought, if the English is this hard I better go back to my country." And right after I told her, "Sorry, no English," so she laughed so hard, and I wanted to cry. Three years have gone by, and even though I have gotten used to the language quite a bit, I still learn a lot of words daily from another people, sentences structures and slang. I know that I haven't learned English perfectly, but at least I always try my best and sometimes I try to be less mediocre than I was in high school, improving my English skills and thinking about my future with this language and this country. Sometimes people laugh about my English, but it just that I don't pay attention to them. Instead, I keep the critics in my mind to try to get better in those weaknesses, and improve my English. -Alex |