Thursday, February 21, 2008

ESL... A Traumatic Experience!







I’m sure it was very tough for many people who didn’t speak English to learn this language. However, for me it wasn’t just hard, it was a traumatic experience.

I remember when I just started going to my English courses at La Guardia CC. I had this professor who liked to talk to each student individually the first day of class. When it was my turn I “tried” to tell her I felt uncomfortable being in the third level and I wanted to move one level down. (I don’t know why they put me on this advanced level if I only knew a few words).

Well, the thing is that after she finally figured out what I was trying to say, she started talking and talking and… talking (only God knows what she said). I was just looking at her asking myself, “Doesn’t she notice I’m not getting any word coming out of her mouth?” (After all, that was the reason for which I wanted to change the level). At the end I said “ok” to whatever she’d told me as if everything was clear to me, but when she looked at me, she noticed I was still confused, so she said slowly: “You… here… tomorrow… ok? When I heard that my face turned into a big smile, and it wasn’t because I actually wanted to be in that class, but because with four words I had finally understood what she said in ten minutes.

5 comments:

MalmsteenRulez! said...

I understand how you feel. I remember my first day of ESL class in 8th grade. I spoke a little English back then. It was tough to understand my teacher. Good thing he was a really nice guy.

Anonymous said...

First of all, your posts are very interesting, and your grammer is very well, it seems like you wrote and spoke english all your life. I agree with you because I have met a lot of people whose second language is english and I have seen how they struggle to get their point across. I always do my best to help them, but it also encourage me to learn their language also.

She She said...

I can't even say I understand what that experience was like, unfortunatly the only thing that may come close is when I had to take a foreign language class for a semester or two. I happy that you were able to push through and here you are now. Its all about staying positive and believing in what you want to do.

Iddan said...

Well I can't really understand seeing as the only language I speak is English. But that is a great lesson to learn though. Most of the time we get our points across better when we say less.

Adam said...

Despite having difficulty learning english, it seems that you speak good english now. I bet you worked hard to learn english. I admire people that can speak other languages besides there native language because I can only speak one language.