By: Izabela

Izabela — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 18:41:54 +0000

When I graduated from middle school at 16 (I wasn’t behind, it’s that late in Poland) I had been learning English for 6 years. I knew my English probably wasn’t as good as my grades, but I was quite content about it. Then I went to the USA for an exchange program and as soon as my foot touched American ground I found out my English was actually worse than horrible.
I had to switch planes twice to get to my destination. First one went smooth, the other one not so great. The airline sold more tickets than number of seats available – someone had to stay, and for some reason (which I think was my extremely poor English) they picked me. I was just a scared 16 year old girl who didn’t know a single person on the continent, and had no clue how to argue in English (although I think I told the lady behind the desk that I hated her-if that counts). So I had to wait 4 hours for the next flight. They told me it was because the plane was too heavy (yeah, right) and apparently my 90 pounds would have caused a crash.
The host family talked to me a lot but we had a really hard time understanding each other. I didn’t even know what the word “mad” means and my pronunciation was beyond horrible. I soon started school, where everyone asked a lot of questions that I had trouble answering due to my poor English. Some of them still make me laugh, like “can you get arrested for going to church in your country?”.
Since I rarely had any homework, after school besides talking to people I watched a lot of Disney Channel and Spongebob and read things like teen cosmo, as they didn’t use too sophisticated language. I was always making notes and highlighting things. After about 6 weeks I understood almost everything people were saying to me, still had some trouble talking, but it was getting better each day. I tried to talk as much as possible. Surprisingly, I learned a lot from other exchange students as they generally used greater word and tense variety than native speakers. By Christmas, which was about 4 months after my arrival in the US I was not only speaking fluently, but also thinking in English. School took care of the written English too, I had a very good English teacher and to this day I remember some of the tips she gave me.
All of a sudden I found myself making a lot of mistakes and pauses when speaking Polish on the phone. It went back to normal within a few days after returning home, but then English started getting worse again, especially the accent. I guess you can’t have it all. It will vanish away from your head if not practiced. After a long break it feels almost like learning how to speak all over again.
My point is – if you want to learn a language the fastest and most effective way to do it is to visit the country that speaks it, a language school or course just won’t do it.

Comments on: How I learned a language

By: Izabela